Leave Your Broken Past Behind: Finding Healing in Christ

We live in a broken world.

The evidence of the brokenness of this world is all around us. Just turn on your television. Tune into the news...soon your head will be swimming with stories of crimes and all kinds of atrocities being committed, illnesses, tragedies, modern-day slavery, pain, and death.

Yes...our world is broken. The brokenness surrounds us, in our cities, in our neighborhoods, in our houses, even in ourselves.

We live in a broken world because we live in a fallen world. Our brokenness stems from the fact of a severed relationship between God and man....way back in the beginning...in the garden. Sin entered the world at that point severing the perfection of the relationship between God and mankind. Sin...in the form of a choice...to desire to be as a god, to choose one's own desire and notion of what is good over obedience to God. No longer would man walk in the garden with God, the one who truly knows what it is to be good.

But God is love and God is good.

And so...from the beginning He had a plan and a purpose. He would send His one and only Son, Jesus Christ. To be born, a baby, and grow into a man to walk this earth...fully human and yet fully God. Emmanuel...God with us. He lived out his short life on this earth in perfection...in perfect relationship with the Father...sinless.

Yet he suffered as we all do...he suffered pain, persecution, abuse, bullying, and more. He was even led into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan...in ways that represent every kind of temptation that is common to man.

And yet...HE DID NOT SIN. He fought back with the very Word of God. He was and is the Word...the very bread of life.

And then He walked in the garden with His Father.

In the garden, much different than that other garden so long ago. In this garden, He would be betrayed by one close to Him. He was taken and beaten and stripped and spat upon and finally...crucified on a cruel cross. He died and was placed in a tomb.

BUT HE DID NOT REMAIN IN THE TOMB!! He arose from death to life. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to this fact. He beat death, He beat sin, He beat Satan's hold over this world. Finally... He returned to the right hand of the Father.

Leaving us...but not as orphans. We have the Holy Spirit to help us fight not only our own battles but the battles of the broken ones of this world. We have the Holy Spirit to breathe life back into our broken lives.

And even so, we can still find ourselves looking more at our brokenness than at the One who has redeemed us. We want to grow. We want to change. We want to leave behind the things that have wounded us or the patterns we know do not reflect His life in us. And sometimes, without even realizing it, we begin striving to make ourselves into the women we long to be.

But transformation doesn't begin with a better version of ourselves. It begins as we turn our eyes toward Jesus. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 3:18:

“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (NIV)

We don't have to manufacture that transformation. We need to keep coming to Him, allowing His truth to shape us and His Spirit to do His work in us.

The enemy wants us to believe that we are all still broken. That it is all helpless, that he has won. But the war has already been won by Christ...we have battles and skirmishes to fight out on this earth...but the ultimate victory is ours in Christ Jesus! Because He rose we know that we who are in Christ will also one day rise with Him.

So every morning I walk in my 'garden': my quiet place with God. Yes, "He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me that I am His own." And because of this, I can trust all of my broken pieces into His healing hands.

Oswald Chambers said it best, 

“Leave the broken, irreversible past in God’s hands and step out into the invincible future with Him.”

I ask only to be broken by the things of this world that break the heart of God. To be moved to be used by Him to bring hope and healing into others lives as He has mine.

How about you?

Are you still striving to fix your brokenness, or are you ready to leave your broken past behind...turning your eyes toward Jesus, trusting Him to transform you?

And as He does, are you willing to let Him use your life to bring His hope and healing to others?