Wednesday, April 19, 2023
And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who
for their sake died and was raised.2 Corinthians 5:15
The Only Way Out
Yesterday we talked about how God had provided a perfect plan for us, but sin keeps us from living in that perfect plan. We are broken in our sin, and often we choose to live in that brokenness rather than living the abundant life God offers. We can become blinded in our brokenness and actually believe it is better than what He offers.
When we sin, we are separating ourselves from life and intimacy with God. We get comfortable in our sin, not realizing at first the condition of our souls. When we realize where we are, instead of going to the One that can fix it, we try to fix it ourselves or try to escape it. We run from it. We numb ourselves to it. We end up breaking ourselves more when we run from one thing to another trying to fix what is wrong. We try to fix what is wrong by running to more of what broke us in the first place, but we will never find the right things in the wrong places. We recognize the brokenness and end up reinforcingthe brokenness.
Broken people cannot escape brokenness on our own. We are broken so why would we think that we can help ourselves? We begin to realize that there is no way out and we are stuck. Feeling stuck leads to despair and hopelessness. So, what do we do? We go find more brokenness. We numb out again on whatever it is that makes us feel good for just a little while, until we feel bad again. It is a vicious cycle.
Isn’t it time to stop? This treadmill of despair will carve out a deep cavity in your soul and create an insatiable longing. We make so many problems for ourselves that, even it we do quit trying to escape by creating more brokenness, we are so broken at that point that it feels completely hopeless to think that we can ever recover from the mess we made. We may have found peace in our souls. We may have found Jesus and realized that He is the only One that can fix our brokenness, but our lives lay in a shambles all around us. What then?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I know Who is the answer. Many of us have been there - ran our lives into the dirt because we were running from our brokenness and trying to find anything to stop the pain. But broken people cannot escape brokenness on our own. The only thing/One that can fix our brokenness is Jesus.
The Gospel is this - God’s love for us was so great He did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves and entered into our brokenness to provide the only way out → through Jesus.
You may not be running from your own brokenness. You may be running from someone else’s brokenness that is hurting you. What happens is that you end up hurting yourself in the process of looking to all the wrong things to ease your pain. Now you have your own brokenness to deal with as well. God’s love fixes that brokenness too. He can heal the pain in your heart and walk with you through the mess you have made.
God provided the only way out of our brokenness that works, and that is through Jesus. Until we learn to run to Him instead of running to all the wrong things to escape our brokenness, we will never be able to escape it. He is our strong tower. He is our safe place. He is the cleft in the rock. He is our hiding place. In Him we can find healing for our brokenness and redemption from our sins. In Him, we become a new creation. It doesn’t mean that all our brokenness disappears. Sometimes it takes a long time to clean that mess up. But it does mean that we stop the cycle of brokenness in our lives.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 2 Corinthians 5:17
