Tag Archives: brokenness

Restoring What’s Broken

Because of sin, every one of us are born into this world with brokenness. It takes a different form in each of us, and the longer we live, the more brokenness we can experience. Different interactions and circumstances can cause that brokenness to spread and effect more parts of our lives. It began in the Garden of Eden, but so did the cure. God promised to restore our relationship with Him by sending us His only Son. Even though that’s primarily what we think of Him restoring, He’s capable of restoring so much more than our broken relationship with Him. He wants to restore every part of your life.

Here are some Bible verses on the things God can restore.

1. I have suffered much, O Lord; restore my life again as you promised.

Psalms 119:107 NLT

2. But you, O Lord, are always my shield from danger; you give me victory and restore my courage.

Psalm 3:3 GNT

3. Restore our fortunes, Lord, as streams renew the desert.

Psalms 126:4 NLT

4. Restore joy to your loving servant once again, for all I am is yours, O God.

Psalms 86:4 TPT

5. This prayer made in faith will heal the sick; the Lord will restore them to health, and the sins they have committed will be forgiven.

James 5:15 GNT

This is a small sampling of things listed in the Bible that He restores. Ask Him to restore your broken places today.

Photo by Geetanjal Khanna on Unsplash

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Fixing Our Brokenness

My son is very interested in bells. He loves learning about them and watching them ring. When we went on vacation, he found a porcelain bell and wanted to get it. I tried to talk him into one of the metallic bells, but they weren’t as pretty. When we got home, my fears were confirmed as I unwrapped the porcelain bell. It was broken. I didn’t have the heart to tell him what had happened and I hoped he wouldn’t ask for it.

I went to the store and bought some gorilla glue. Before we left for school, I ran back into my room and glued it back together. When I got home, I went to check on it. The glue left a white streak all the way around it. When I tried to make it ring, it didn’t sound like it had. I was disappointed in my ability to try to put it back together. In my effort to fix it, I was hoping to make it as good as new, but I couldn’t.

Because of Adam and Eve’s sin, you and I are born broken. We spend a lifetime trying to compensate for our brokenness, and we do everything that we can to fix or cover up our brokenness. The problem with fixing things like brokenness is that we never return to our initial potential. We think we need to be fixed, but the truth is that we need to be healed. We need to be made whole, and only God can do that.

Isaiah 9:6 contains one of the most famous prophesies of Jesus. It says, “For a child has been born—for us! the gift of a son—for us! He’ll take over the running of the world. His names will be: Amazing Counselor, Strong God, Eternal Father, Prince of Wholeness. His ruling authority will grow, and there’ll be no limits to the wholeness he brings” (MSG). I love that God’s desire wasn’t to fix us. It was to make us whole. He knows that each of us are broken, and He sent His Son to bring the healing that we desperately need.

Photo by Ismael Sanchez from Pexels

Throwback Thursday is a feature I’m using to help build some margin into my schedule to pursue other ventures. Each Thursday I’ll be bringing you a previously written devotional that still speaks encouragement to us from God’s Word.

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Embracing Your Brokenness

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Broken And Beautiful

There are a few ways to do a puzzle. Some people open the box and pull out a couple of pieces at a time. Some people grab a handful to see if there are any matches. Then there are people like me who dump the whole box in the middle of the table. I like to see all the pieces I’m working with and begin forming the puzzle from the outside in. No matter how you start a puzzle, I think you’ll agree that it’s frustrating to get all the way to the end only to find that you’re missing a piece or two. You check the box, the floor, your chair and all around the table where you’re working. You need all the pieces if you’re going to be able to complete it. There’s just something satisfying about completing a puzzle with all the pieces.

If you’re reading this, then your life has been broken somewhere along the way. It’s part of the human condition. Our lives get shattered, we scoop up the pieces and try to move forward by putting them back together again. Sometimes our brokenness makes it hard to trust people again or even God. If only He would have intervened, then our life wouldn’t have been shattered. If only He would have answered our desperate prayers, then we would be whole still. When you’re holding the broken pieces of your life, it’s easy to look back and think that you’d be whole right now “if only (you fill in the blank).” The truth is we’re all broken to some degree and we’re holding the pieces of our life trying to put things back together the way they were. But what if you were broken so God could put the pieces back together in a more complete and beautiful way?

I love mosaic art because it’s formed from broken pieces. I believe it’s the same type of artistry God uses when we give Him the pieces of our brokenness and allow Him to put our life back together. Psalm 18:20 says, “GOD made my life complete when I placed all the pieces before him” (MSG). For God to make our life complete and whole again, He can’t have any missing pieces. You must surrender all the pieces to Him. He knows there are parts of us that we hold back from Him because of fear, but He patiently and lovingly waits for us to trust Him enough. God rewrites the story and picture of our lives when we give Him all the pieces and He makes something beautiful out of the pieces. He does His part when we do ours and surrender the pieces. He takes our brokenness and makes something beautiful out of our mess.

Photo by Giulia May on Unsplash

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Embracing Your Brokenness

We’ve all read the story of Humpty Dumpty. I’m not sure why he was up on that wall or what caused him to fall. What we do know is that when an egg has a sudden stop against the ground, it creates quite a mess. Shell gets sent in every direction and in every size. It’s an impossible task for anyone to pick up all the pieces and put them together again so we don’t try. Something that’s just as impossible is to try to fix the brokenness in our own life, but we try to do it all the time. We think that if people see the cracks in our shell or that our life is in pieces, they’ll reject us, so we try to fix our brokenness.

The truth is that we are all broken. Some of us are more broken than others. Some of us are better at hiding it. Some of us look at the mess and give up, but every one of us find some type of coping mechanism to appease either guilt we feel or the hurt left over from our brokenness. We all have that inner desire to be made whole. We’re afraid that our brokenness or way of coping with it will be exposed, so we cover it up and try to make everything look like it’s perfect. It’s impossible for you and I to heal our own brokenness and to make ourselves whole.

The good news is that God is able to pick up the pieces of your life and put them back together into a beautiful mosaic work of art. You see, your brokenness is what makes you human and in need of God. It’s what makes you approachable by others in their brokenness. In Psalm 25:21 David cried out to God regarding his own brokenness, “Use all your skill to put me together; I wait to see your finished product” (MSG). When God puts us back together, he leaves the cracks and the lines to do away with the facade that we’re perfect. Don’t try to cover them up, for through your brokenness others will find their wholeness.

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

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