HIS BREAKING HAND

Why does God allow pain? Why does He sometimes break our hearts or bring about wounding? Why do we sometimes feel as if heaven has been walled off and the doors to His courts have been shut? Sometimes though, pain is just the natural fruit of a broken world. Yet sometimes that pain is the fruit that comes from His hand as a way of perfecting and molding our rebellious hearts into the likeness of Himself.

The Maker of All Good Things, the One who is perfection incarnate chooses broken things over the whole. Often, He uses these things to set rough splinters deep within us which pries, irritates and brings discomfort. He crushes both spiritual bone and self-righteousness so that we might look past ourselves and come to Him in repentance and with a humble heart.

In His way of breaking He also quashes our plans and then redirects them, guiding us beyond our own lateral view of what is good into a wholly different and unexpected thing altogether. His best. More importantly His best is not meant for you alone, but in that better way He transforms it into a river which flows and blesses all those around you. And sometimes though, because this world is broken He allows the breaking of our bone and our flesh so that His strength might be perfected within us. That we would accept our weaknesses and learn to stand strong within His vast wholeness. He breaks our hearts so that we might be acquainted with His suffering which in turn teaches us how to love and minister to the suffering of others. He lays His weight into crushing our dreams so that we might know loss and disappointment and embrace the reality of the gospel and the fulfillment it brings to our hungry souls.

He brings to us grief so that we would not grow comfortable in this world but that we would grow a heart- rending longing for that far off kingdom where we are known and fulfilled. His breaking hand brings about disappointment over you so that you might learn that this life can never bring satisfaction. He brings grief to overtake and to rip you away from all the hollow promises and the empty allure the world says you must have. His breaking hand presses and crushes not out of spite, nor retribution but out of the fullness of His love. So that you would no longer hold tightly to a world that will one day burn away but rather He wants you to live freely and unentangled by the things that unbelieving men and even those of faith fight, obsess, and worry over. We have become like Lot, knowing that we are set apart but like him, we have grown all too comfortable within our own private Sodoms. As C.S. Lewis wrote, we are “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” We must remember that we are sojourners in this place, passing through to a better world. We grasp so tightly that all slips through like clutching sand.

The author A.W. Tozer once wrote,

“It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.”

Pain and suffering are constants in this world and they are the things that He allows to mold our hearts and to break our independence, waging war against the pride and the control we fight to hold onto. But through pain and its breaking influence we can become intimately acquainted with Him. To know His measureless strength and blessings which are always born through the threshing vats of life. These things can create a renewed and pure spirit, full of focus and heart and allegiance. And those who are remade, their hearts become engulfed in His fire with empathy and mercy for others and a gentle hand which brings hope to those walking through their own breaking. But it can only be so if He is truly Lord over our lives. Not only in name but in trust that He will use the things meant to harm us for our good, and He uses it for His glory and the strengthening and renewal of not only ourselves but all those around us.

Remember that the time is short and that your own breaking although painful and seemingly fruitless has purpose. Should you allow Him to work, you will one day soon come through that fire refined and as pure as the purest gold. Be mindful that you are being developed and remade into purer things meant not only for your own good, but for the good of others. You are the hands and the voice He uses to heal and to speak through. Through your breaking and remaking He can bring hope to the hopeless and peace to the restless. And remember that the breaking you endure now is also preparation for your coming work in that good and new kingdom. A kingdom active and ever growing and more substantial and real then this place that we for a brief time call home. But in truth, this isn’t your real home. You are a foreigner here, an alien in a foreign land. Go now and show hope and mercy just as He has shown you when you yourself were an alien in His own country.

Show others and let loose of that grip on the things which divide you and the things that say you must be about. Those are the things the hopeless and the short sighted cling to. Do not fight but allow Him to break and burn and rip and tear down yourself to the very last bit. He breaks and crushes so that He might revive and make something far better and lasting out of you. But above all else remember this. He is good and like a caring father, He seeks the best for you. Even when it is painful. He makes all things new.

“Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So, we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” - 2 Cor 4:16-18