The brokenness around you is never to much for the God within you.
The world teaches us to keep it together, but Jesus invites us to let it go. At the end of ourselves, we are only ever at the beginning of Him because our God is not the Redeemer of all things fixed, He is the Redeemer of all things broken. In our hands, the painful pieces task us with an impossible rebuild. Without the proper resources, we settle for Band-Aids as a quick fix rather than the root healing necessary. In His hands, the very thing broken before us, promises to soon become the healing within us.
Brokenness always leads to bigger when placed in the hands of the Master Rebuilder.
Its true, your brokenness will lead to so much more than you ever imagined, but, there is a process. Rebuilding is often a journey we must fully engage ourselves in. Nehemiah let his heart break over the condition of the broken-down walls in Jerusalem. He cried out to the Lord and accepted the invitation into the process of rebuilding. It meant leaving behind the life he knew, traveling in secret, back to his hometown and developing a plan to put God’s people on their ladders. Once the rebuild started, not only did the Israelites have to work on what was in front of them, but they had to resist the enemy all around them. With tools in one hand and weapons in the other, God’s people built and battled their way to bigger. In fifty-two days, through the leadership of Nehemiah and the Sovereignty of God, the walls were rebuilt around their holy city. It was more than they ever asked or imagined possible and it was accomplished through the broken.
We are about to start a journey. It’s a road everyone was created for, but not many are willing to travel. The journey to bigger is a hard one, it’s time-consuming, costly and refining, but it is also deeply rewarding. Bigger isn’t a definition I could give you without limiting all God has for you. Bigger is personal, it’s intimate, it’s for you and Him to discover together. For some of us the road to bigger involves great sacrifice and hard losses. Others of us might find it through outward experiences and exciting adventure. Regardless of how our roads differ, the end is the same. On the other side we know Him bigger, we’ve experienced Him bigger, we’ve found His love to be bigger, His grace to be bigger, His faithfulness to be bigger. We’ve tasted something that changes everything and we are better off because of it.
Will you join us on the journey from broken to bigger? Grab some friends (every journey is better with them!) Go pick up the Bigger book and Bible Study. Amazon is probably the easiest place. Find really fun colored pens (because if we have to cry at least our pages will be pretty!) and get ready to interact with us online or in person. Your journey out of the broken doesn’t have to be done in isolation. It actually wasn’t meant to be that way at all. We were created to travel together. God gave Adam, Eve and then invited them into a task they couldn’t do independently of one another. If you know your broken thing, great (welcome to the club!) If you don’t, no worries, you will be given plenty of opportunities to ask the Father about it.
Ephesians 3:14-20 is Paul’s prayer for the young church of Ephesus, “When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.”
What if this fall were the season you received more of God than you imagined possible? Not outwardly (though that may happen too) but inwardly. What if your roots went deep into God’s love and the fruit produced from your tree began to look completely different? Let’s not be a generation of believers who settle for the big when we can taste the bigger. Good enough will not supplement for what God has in store for those who love Him.
Life is busy an it's not always easy to get out and be a part of a local Bible study. I'm going to make this as lightweight as possible. Grab the study and book if you'd like, sign up for my blog posts (you will get an email on Thursday morning when I've posted the blog for the week,) and then jump on my Facebook author page anytime after Thursday night to see the Facebook live reflection.