“Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself. Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ. If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.” (Galatians 6:1-3 NLT)
Every person who has ever lived has been broken and in need of a Savior except the Savior Himself. There are no big “I’s” and little “You’s” in the Kingdom of God. The moment any of us begins to think more highly of ourselves than we should, that’s the moment the Lord will put us in our place and help us understand that He alone is God, and we are not.
There’s a sense in which our deepest gratitude grows out or our biggest failure. The worse we feel about ourselves, the more our sense is that God will surely never use us again after such a miserable and deplorable sin. But it actually gives God a greater opportunity to restore us to a place of usefulness. When we’re feeling good about ourselves, believing we could never sin as miserably as that other person, that’s often when Satan kicks our legs out from under us and scores his biggest win in our lives.
The truth is, we’ve ALL sinned and fallen short of God’s glorious ideal (Jesus). We’re all damaged goods, broken by our unwillingness to yield to God’s righteous plan for us. There’s none righteous, no not one! No one but Jesus alone has the right and authority to judge us, but the irony is, He’s also the only One who could have taken our deserved punishment and paid the penalty for our sin. He took OUR judgment upon Himself in order to set us free.
Hemingway wrote: “We are all broken…that’s how the light gets in.” The tragedy is we don’t know what we don’t know, and we won’t know until it’s eternally too late that there’s a cure for our brokenness. That’s why the Bible teaches that faith is so critical. We can’t know with absolute assurance that Jesus is the Savior and Redeemer of our lives except by faith. People say: “Prove that Jesus will forgive my sins and offer me hope of eternal life,” but I can’t, and neither can you.
We only see with our eye of faith. We only know with certainty because we hear His voice and sense His presence, but we can’t “prove” that except by the way we live and love. A young woman recently went to church with my wife and I. She grew up Catholic and had never in her life attended a Protestant church service. Nearly from the opening word of welcome tears began to fall down her face and she cried most of the service, sensing something she’d never sensed before.
The Spirit of God was so present I was crying too, just rejoicing in my spirit that we serve a living God! An invitation was given during our prayer time, which is unusual, it’s usually at the end, but dozens of people knelt in the front of the church to seek the Lord’s intervention for their various needs. We’re all in need, not only for salvation, but for every detail of our lives.
J. R. Miller wrote: “Christ is building His kingdom with the broken things of earth. People desire only the strong, successful, victorious, and unbroken things in life to build their kingdoms, but God is the God of the unsuccessful – the God of those who have failed. Heaven is being filled with earth’s broken lives and there is no ‘bruised reed’ (Isaiah 42:3) that Christ cannot take and restore to a glorious place of blessing and beauty. He can take a life crushed by pain or sorrow and make it a harp whose music will be total praise. He can lift earth’s saddest failure up to heaven’s glory.”
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 