BROKENNESS, part 2

I want to offer another excerpt from The Way of the Cross:

How can we be broken? This is both God’s work and ours. God shows us that we need to be broken, but we must choose. We must be willing for God to show us the truth about ourselves. Unless we do this, we cannot have fellowship with him. We must be ready to listen to what God says to us. If we are ready to do this, he will show us the things which come from our proud, hard self.

When he does this we can do one of two things. We can become proud and refuse to repent, or we can humbly bow our heads and say, ‘Yes, Lord.’ The man who knows, day by day, the meaning of brokenness is the man who humbly agrees to what God shows him about himself.

We must be daily broken before God. This may cost us a great deal. We shall have to give up all our rights. We shall no longer live to please self. Sometimes we may have to give back something we have wrongly taken from others.

There is only one place we can be broken. That place is the cross of the Lord Jesus. He was willing to be broken for us. When we realize this we must be willing to be broken for him.

This is not something which happens only once in our lives. There will be the first time when God shows us these things and we die to self. But from then on we must always be dying to self. Only in this way can the Lord Jesus always be showing his life through us. The choice will be made hundreds of times a day.

SCRIPTURE READING: 1 Peter 2 (with particular focus on vs. 11-25)