The Blessedness of Rock Bottom Brokenness

I wondered for years what gave Christians their power,

I wondered every day until God brought me to the hour,

Until life’s circumstances came upon me so,

To be broken and washed up, how was I ever to know?

But on that fateful day, when life turned sick,

How was I to know this would finally do the trick?

To be turned inside out and humbled without hope,

To reach for God, alone, and for the first time to cope.

So there you have it,

Ponder and sit,

If you want more life,

Don’t begrudge strife.

***

It’s a calamitous message, alright. The making of us is the breaking of us.

If we seek life in this mortal body of ours we will not begrudge the matter of going back to the beginning, and allowing God to take us there where we are stripped of every semblance of self-protection, vanquished of every pebble of pride, and alleviated of every nuance of narcissism. This is to become God’s holy son (little ‘s’ son or daughter).

Being a child of God – a man or woman of God – is the highest office of life. If we will be prepared to give up every material thing, and every other thing that hinders our course to God – but the protection of love and our earthly responsibility – God will show us the way up to the hinterland of life, which is life eternal; a flourishing abundance.

We cannot take what we cannot hold. God is preparing for us a holy possession that has no contrast in comparison to anything else. It is wholly magnificent and tremendously influential. It is buoyed with grace. And the strangest of qualifications is that we cannot receive it unless we are broken. We may have been broken. That isn’t good enough. We need to maintain our brokenness; our dependence upon God alone.

If we rely, even an iota, on our strength in pride or self-protection or narcissism, we cannot come into the presence of God, and so we may only utilise our human power. And we won’t even know what we are missing out on.

God has so much more to give us, and the depths of his spiritual gifts cannot ever be plumbed. These are unfathomable, such as it is with his merciful grace.

We must go back to the start if we are to journey aright with the Lord. This is why, with ironies abounding, we have the greatest of hope when life takes us to rock bottom.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.