For March 8

Sermon Notes: Restoring Brokenness

Intro: Last Sunday, we looked at Jesus’ physical healings that really targeted spiritual healing. Jesus would often compassionately heal a person’s physical problems to show his healing power to gain their trust, but He was more intent on healing their soul. The demon possessed man, for example, was first cleansed of his legion of demons that then allowed healing of his soul that found peace in Jesus.

   We heard God promise Solomon that if the people called by God’s Name, like us, would humble themselves, confess their sin and repent, He would hear them and heal their land. But if they turned away, and served other gods, they could expect troubles on their land. Solomon at first served God, but then worshipped other gods. He became a broken man as a result of his sin, and after his death, the nation went through civil war and became broken, divided into the nations of Israel and Judah.

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I. About Brokenness

A. America needs to hear and respond to that message. America is a land, a form of government, an impersonal entity. But as the people of America, we are a nation of broken, sinful individuals, in need of spiritual healing. Beyond the cause of such brokenness as a turning away from God, we might generally see the symptoms of such brokenness as those suffering from substance abuse, chronic pain, relationship problems, and financial stress. Situations that further lead to unemployment, homelessness, and violent crimes, to name just a few. One particular measure of our brokenness is our suicide rate. Lives so desperate and hopeless that ending their lives seems to be their only solution. Although 2025 statistics aren’t yet available, the 2024 suicide rate in the US was 13.7 per 100,000, almost 49,000 recorded deaths, a slight decline from the 2022 peak, but with significant increases among Black and Hispanic populations, and elevated risks for American Indian/Alaskan Native males, and rural communities. The suicide rate for men is 3.8 times higher than women. Older adults, particularly those over 85, face the highest risk.

B. These are the symptoms of brokenness. But what are the causes?  Brokenness has many different forms. I’d like to show you just five forms of brokenness to better understand the extent of brokenness. The first form is the result of our sins that humble, maybe even humiliate us. It may be painful for people to see who they’ve become, who they are, or what they’ve done. With a contrite spirit, that is, a spirit feeling remorse  affected by guilt, we can see our brokenness, especially the broken relationship we feel toward God. Peter experienced this when the rooster crowed, and he realized he had betrayed his best friend. Until he knew Jesus had forgiven him, he carried a heavy burden of guilt. Judas’ unforgiven guilt for his betrayal of Jesus led to his suicide.

C. Secondly, there’s brokenness that crushes others. Hurt people, hurt people. In mass shootings in the workplace and schools. Children killing other children, even parents, because they’re hurting. Hurt by others’ sins…abuse, bullying, neglect, often manifesting in criminal acts. We’ve all probably hurt others because of our pain, or been hurt because of someone else’s pain. Even King David was hurt deeply, as he grieves over a close friend’s betrayal in Psalm 41:9.

D. Thirdly, the world around us is broken. We’ve all experienced the shock of bad news, the devastating loss of a loved one, even personal health problems that may bring us to our knees. We feel powerless to fix life’s problems, and the powerlessness of others’ human abilities. Bad things happening to good people. Even in Scripture.

E. Fourth, is the brokenness in the human struggle to deal with life’s brokenness. Who can we turn to?. Those who know Jesus also face brokenness in their lives, but in their struggles, God takes their brokenness, reshapes them, and brings new life. Once David turned to God in his struggle in brokenness, he found new life, new hope, new beauty. In his restored relationship, God calls David a man after his own heart. King Solomon, the son born to David and his wife, Bathsheba, brought Israel to even greater glory. At least until Solomon’s brokenness cost God’s protection that led to Israel’s defeat by its enemies.

F. But the fifth brokenness is the broken Jesus for His broken people. The broken human spirit feels it has nothing to live for, only pain, isolation, guilt. The human Jesus was broken by betrayal, humiliation, scourging, and false accusations, but He died to fix our brokenness, providing hope for living, forgiveness, and release from sin’s guilt. In Gethsemane, Jesus feared the brokenness of the Cross, feeling total forsaken there, but praying about it to His Father, chose to endure His Father’s will to conquer death for our sakes. Jesus experienced our brokenness, and offers us unconditional love, forgiveness, and understanding to overcome our struggles. We may suffer such brokenness, but we don’t bear any of it alone. We can always turn to Jesus and let Him fix our brokenness.

G. Finding ourselves distant from Him, we can ask Him to restore us to relationship with Him. Another word for restore is redeem. The dictionary defines redeeming or redemption as gaining, or regaining possession of something in exchange for payment. In the Bible, redemption means to be bought back, rescued, or freed from sin’s slavery, or death, through the costly payment of the sacrifice of Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God to restore us to God's original purposes. 

H. We praised Jesus our Redeemer in our Opening Hymn, and later asserted that our Redeemer lives in our Hymn of Preparation. It’s important to understand that as our Redeemer, He didn’t just die on the Cross to pay for our sins. He was resurrected to regain His Divine nature, and lives to redeem us from our sin’s brokenness.

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II Jeremiah 18:1-10; Acts 9:1-16

A. We gain a picture of God’s redemption in our OT lesson from Jeremiah. Israel had fallen into deep sin again. God sent Jeremiah to a potter’s house to receive His message to Israel. The potter had put a lump of clay on his spinning potter’s wheel, shaping a pot to his desires. But the pot became damaged during his shaping it. So the potter re-formed it until it met his standards. God’s message was pretty clear: Israel had not measured up to God’s standards, becoming damaged. So God asks, “Can I not do with you, Israel, like the potter does?” The potter could destroy the damaged piece, and start over...or reshape the existing piece to restore it as the planned piece. God had decided to reshape Israel instead of destroying it, if Israel repented of its sinful ways. He allowed the Babylonians to utterly defeat Israel, badly damaging the Jerusalem wall and the Temple and taking a large part of the population into a 70 year exile, where the now humbled, repentant Israel’s attitude toward God was reshaped before Israel could be finally restored.

D. In our Lesson from Acts, we see Paul persecuting Christians, seeing them as heretical, enemies of the Jewish faith. As a Pharisee, Paul was well educated on the Law and its practices, corrupted as they had become. By ancestry, education, status, and lifestyle, Paul was proud, zealous, and ambitious. A Jew’s Jew, but not by God’s standards. He needed to be broken in order for God to restore him to His purposes. God began to reshape him on that road to Damascus, blinding him with His bright light, calling him by name, with Jesus Himself asking Paul why he was persecuting Him. Jesus then told him to go into Damascus where he would be told what to do. After three days of not eating or drinking, and still blind, Jesus sends the Christian disciple Ananias to lay hands on him to restore his sight. Ananias was terrified by Saul’s reputation, but God told him He had chosen Paul to proclaim His name to the Gentiles and the people of Israel. But Paul would be shown how much he would have to suffer for the sake of Jesus’ Name.

E. Ananias lays hands on Paul, which restored his sight, and he was filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit would later take him to the desert for three years to teach him all he would need to fulfill God’s chosen ministry. The apostle Paul has to be one of the most physically broken witnesses for Christ in all of Scripture. Beaten by mobs, stoned, left for dead, jailed, locked in stocks, bitten by a viper, shipwrecked. Yet, in His letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells us them that in spite of all this, they could not break his spirit, saying, “we have this treasure in jars of clay (their human bodies) to show that their all-surpassing power was from God.

Paul says they were hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. In Jesus’ care, Paul’s spirit would never be broken. Jesus had healed Paul from his former brokenness – his rebelliousness against Him - and reshaped him to be the greatest evangelist of the New Testament.

F. Life happens, and we’re bound to face problems, hardships, pain, betrayals. We can’t always control our brokenness. We seek friendship with the world and thus become an enemy of God. In his epistle, James writes in 4:3, “We don’t receive, because we ask with wrong motives, and spend what we have on our own pleasures.”  We become broken. We may not understand why bad things seem to happen to good people. Or, like Paul, we may not realize why God is breaking us. Maybe it’s because, like Israel, we haven’t been listening to God, and have gone our own way. That way may lead to bad paths we, nor Jesus, wants for us. But because He loves us so deeply, went through all He suffered for us, He provides ways to restore us to His purposes. He’s always working through our brokenness to redeem us, to restore us to Himself again. So, as James writes a few verses later in 4:7, we should “[S]ubmit ourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you” If we humble ourselves before the Lord, He will lift us up from our brokenness. But we must never submit to our brokenness. We don’t have to face our brokenness alone. We don’t have to be defeated by our brokenness. Because the Potter is at His wheel, ready to remake us from damaged to treasures.

G. Author Mindy Briggs tells how she intended to apply the lesson of Jeremiah observing the Potter as a teaching example, but instead found direct application to her own life. She took the clay pot of a potted plant, intending to break it, and put it back together for a new purpose. It was just a plain, clay pot, but she felt sad to have to break it in order to remake it for a new life. Sad that gentle taps weren’t enough, she had to truly break it. In the process, some pieces crumbled to dust, disappearing into the ground. How sad God must be to break us before He can remake us.

  Her first repair efforts failed. The pot rejected super glue, being too porous for the glue to hold the pieces together, just as we often reject God’s initial attempts to fix our brokenness. She found that Elmer’s glue worked, but each time she glued a piece, she needed patience to hold the pieces together, keeping the right pressure, and not let go until the glue dried, before trying another piece. God is patient when He repairs us, keeping the right pressure, never letting go, taking time to let our wounds heal, affording us comfort, before proceeding. But we must be patient while God is repairing us, letting Him work on us.

  But yet, the pot’s shape had changed. It would never be the same. There were cracks, and holes where tiny pieces had been lost. But, as the final pieces started to come together, she felt a wonder and a joy at the new shape that began to appear, as perhaps God does as He sees us as His work take shape, as we respond to His touch. The simple clay pot had to be broken before it could be changed to its new purpose, and it would never be the same. But there was excitement seeing the brokenness healed, and joy in seeing it in its new purpose, just as God must know when He heals our brokenness and gives us new life for His purposes.

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Conclusion: David was a man after God’s own heart, the king whose throne, his legal heir, God’s own Son, would occupy forever. But God had to break David before David could be healed and put back together as God wanted Him. What can Jesus do with our brokenness?  Amen