When God Breaks Us for His Glory

“When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and crushes him.”

— Alan Redpath

I quiver with fear and trembling that I believe is from God, even as I broach this topic.  It’s a topic with which I can presently speak.  God has reason to break me for His glory this season… get that.  I don’t write these words for my glory… I write them because I still rely too much on the things of this world and on my flesh.  We all tend to do the same thing.

Here is a prophetic poem, fashioned in the present, but with a wish for future’s present:

Till God stripped me bare of all I had but Him,
Every vanity of my flesh He sought to vanquish,
His purpose, in Him, was to make me cling,
So in clinging to the world I’d languish.

Grieving in anxious despair,
Within abject poverty of soul,
I could not know how much I now care,
For me to be without I know is God’s goal.

Having no other support, no, nothing at all,
Only then was He prepared to fill,
My hands with His glorious call,
Equipped finally to do His will.

Life’s living purpose is in simply one thing,
To make us to depend on the Lord,
And only when with emptied hands can we bring,
A readiness to be restored.

Another take:

When God stripped me bare of all I had but Him,
Every vanity of my flesh, every sorry and sordid sin,
It was in that very place of bitter and dour anguish,
That He granted me cause again to cower there and languish.

Pathetic in my lack of resolve to courageously bear,
I did not see in that horrid place the blessing of God’s care,
But the Potter of my mineral was there to care alright,
I am the clay and I do not have God’s sight.

So, as I lay there, barren of hope to try,
There as I lay, even as I began to cry,
His Spirit came before me, in the silence of the still:
“I will give you My favour if you just ascend My hill.”

Now every time I make my cause to lament,
I just remind myself from Whom I’m verily sent,
It is this chalice of suffering that makes me again to agree,
I exist in all my being to confess Him and then to bend the knee.

There are three kinds of people within the community of God: 1) those who are quick learners, who wisely heed warnings, and they prosper — they’re fleetingly broken; 2) those who are slow learners, who learn the hard way, but they do inevitably learn — these are broken much; and, 3) those who resist learning, refuse to be crushed, and end up remaining unbroken.  And there are phases of all three kinds of these people within each one of us.  It’s to positions two and three that I confess I’m radically conversant.

God transforms us in the crucible of crushing.  He does what’s impossible by dealing with our impossibility.

The more we let God deal with our stubborn, impossible parts, the more He will make transformation possible by His grace.

Let’s not be discouraged by our impossibility.  It is as it is.  To see our impossibility is to encapsulate the chance to let it go.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.