Restoring the Broken Pieces of Our Lives (Part 2 of 2)

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Listen on your favorite podcast app. It felt to me as I continued to do this round after round, like everything was falling off of the walls in my life in this season. And as I bent down, I had such grief and yet I felt God wrapping his arm around me and saying, I know you feel like you're beyond help here, but you're not beyond me. And that moment has stuck with me.

Thank God I wasn't. We're never beyond God's grasp. When life falls apart, He is still there.

His still small voice can often be heard. Welcome to Focus on the Family with Focus President and author Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller. Elissa Morgan is our guest again today. And as we heard last time, she's using the true story of a China hutch that fell off her living room wall to illustrate what God can do when our hopes, dreams, our relationships are simply shattered. And if you missed part one of Elissa's presentation yesterday, please get in touch with us. We can send you the entire message on CD or audio download, or you can get the Focus on the Family app for your smartphone. Indeed. And you'll find those at focusonthefamily.com slash broadcast, or call us for details.

Eight hundred, the letter A in the word family. Last time, John, Elissa shared a lot of brokenness that she's experienced. And today we'll hear how God intervened in her life. Elissa Morgan is the former CEO of Mops International and has authored over 25 books. She's the host of the radio show and podcast called Discover the Word. And she's also the co-host of the God Hears Her podcast.

Here now is Elissa Morgan speaking at an American Heritage Girls Leadership Conference a few years ago on Focus on the Family. The brokenness, I want you to hear this, in your first family is not your fault. It is not up to children to keep their parents married. It is not up to children to make sure their parents don't abuse drugs or alcohol. It is not up to children to earn a living for their family. It is not up to children to make sure their parents have appropriate sexual boundaries. It is not your fault if you come from a broken family.

Yes. And there may be ways in which, honestly, there are pieces of our second family, which is broken. Okay, I told you not to raise your hand.

Don't look at me. But you know, there are things in our second family that are broken. Some of those may be part by our hand.

And if so, we need to say we're sorry. But here's what I love, love, love, love, love about God. When that hutch clattered off the walls in my home and it felt like everything was toppling before me, yes, God bent down next to me and he says, you're not alone.

You're not beyond me. I'm here because God does not sweep up the shards and walk them over to the trash. He picks up one shard and he looks at it and he knows exactly what he has in mind that that can become because God takes the pieces of our brokenness and he crafts a beautifully broken legacy that becomes our offering. Things put in his hands, our brokenness put in his hands, can actually be more effective than those things that have never broken and fallen. He can sculpt a beautifully broken legacy. And I want to hold out to you a couple of sentences.

First, I want to start with this one. This is from Isaiah 53 5. This is the healing of our brokenness.

It is not me to create a perfectly intact second family. This is Jesus's response for our brokenness. The prophet Isaiah prophesies he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him and by his wounds we're healed.

That word wounds are actually broken blood vessels, black and blue marks. By Jesus's breaking we are made whole. It's not up to you to save your family. It's up to Jesus.

It's not up to you to create and craft perfectly intact. You're going to do your best, you're going to give your most, but it's by his wounds that when we fall and we break he will heal us. God began to free me and say, Elisa, I really don't expect you or hold you accountable for every decision your child makes. I hold you responsible for being a good mother, for your choices, for what you've invested there.

They will be responsible for their choices. For example, as parents we go, that is a pothole. Stay out of the pothole. We scream about it.

We put flashing lights on it. They picked up the placard and they throw it off and so we dive and put our bodies across the pothole. Don't go near the pothole and they pick us up and throw us away and dive down into the pothole. In such a moment I go, not mine, not mine. I can't go down in the pothole and save my kid. I can go down and stay at the edge and watch and say, I'm here.

I'm here. I love you, but it is not my job to save them. By his wounds we are healed. It is Jesus who has the power to save our children, not us.

It is him. So let me hold out to you two sentences to craft a beautifully broken legacy. The first one is God loves the broken. He loves broken people. He loves broken people in families. He loves the broken.

He loves us so much that he's not going to leave us the way we are, but he's going to continually reform us into who he means for us to be through brokenness. Author Jerry Sitzer incurred an unimaginable tragedy about 20 years ago. He wrote about it in his book A Grace Disguised.

In this one moment of an automobile accident, he lost his mother, his wife, and his daughter. A Grace Disguised indeed. Twenty years later he goes back and revisits how God has made sense of this impossible reality, and he wrote a second book called A Grace Revealed, and he suggests that yesterday's grace disguised becomes today's grace revealed. He suggests that redemption is actually rooted in paradox. It's summed up in this phrase that we become who we already are in Jesus. That's what redemption is.

Take me. I'm not the same person I was. I'm not the same person I was when my dad called me into his study and told me they were going to get divorced. I'm not the same person I was when I helped my mom get out of bed. I'm not the same person I was when when I got married. I'm not the same person I was when I became a mom or a grandmother. I'm different. I'm different. I'm broken. The pieces of me don't go back together just the same anymore. I find my giggle when I'm chasing my grandson around the house.

You know, we're going family room to kitchen and back, back, back, laps, laps, laps, and watching the big earth movers in front of our house. I still find my giggle, and I still care so much about my neighbors and that they come to know Jesus, but I'm different, and I'll sit and look at my grandson and his new normal life of a birth dad and a mom and a married dad, a stepdad, and I watch that and I think this is his story that God is writing in his heart, and I will be a stable Paige Turner presence in his life, but I can't write that story for him. It is his story that God is allowing, and when people ask questions about faith and God and this and that and the other, I have a lot of answers, and I love to share what I've discovered from God's word, which is so precious, but there are times when my hand stays down and I realize I don't have some of the answers, and when my neighbors come and they need to be comforted, I find that rather than offer a quick platitude, sometimes I just slip my arm around them and bow my head and pray and share that pain and that desperate plea that God be present in ways I don't know how to drum him up.

Only he can do that. I'm different. I'm broken, and the pieces of me are different, and I've got to share that I'm pretty sure you're like this too. You're listening to Elisa Morgan on Focus on the Family, and we have Elisa's book on this.

It's called The Beauty of Broken. We're making that available for a gift of any amount to Focus on the Family, and we're going to include a free audio download of her entire presentation when you order that from us today. Donate and request the bundle at focusonthefamily.com slash broadcast or call for details.

Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family, 800-232-6459. Let's go ahead and return now to more from Elisa Morgan. When I was a young adult, I tried to connect with my dad, and I called him up to see if I could gather and be with him again, and we ventured across the country to meet him, and he said, I'll spend the weekend with you, and after 30 minutes or so, I excused myself. I thought he must be done with me. I hardly saw him at all. I saw him like once a year, so I thought 30 minutes, you know, 20 years, that's probably plenty for him, but as I was going back to my hotel room, I ran into his wife, and she said, Elisa, why aren't you with your dad? I said, well, I figured he was done with me. She said, no, no, no, no, no, and I gulped, and I thought, I'm not sure if I have the courage to do this, and I went back to my room where I had been reading in scripture, and I came to 1 John 4, verse 18.

This is the amplified version. Let's read it out loud. There is no fear in love. Dread does not exist, but full-grown love, complete and perfect love, turns fear out of doors and expels every trace of terror, for fear brings with it the thought of punishment, and so he or she who's afraid has not reached the full maturity of love, and I realized I was afraid. I was afraid of punishment. I was afraid he would go, done with you, you're too much, leaving you, and he was going to reject me all over again, and sitting with God with this verse, I began to understand that Jesus had already endured the punishment of rejection that I was afraid of going through. When he hung on the cross, and his heavenly father turned his back, allowing Jesus to carry the penalty of our sins, he did that, and I don't need to be afraid of it ever again, because Jesus has taken that for me. I can be free to risk, because there's actually no risk.

Does that make such great sense? There is no fear in love, because I don't need to be afraid of it anymore. I'm broken. I'm different.

I'm changed. God loves the broken. I remember trying this on, trying to understand what this would mean for me in my everyday life, and someone gave me a challenge to spend just a couple of minutes every day thinking about the fact that God loves me, okay? That was the challenge. God loves you. Sit down and think about it.

Two or three minutes every day. First day, okay, sit down. I mean, gone. You know, sit down. Be still.

Are you kidding? Go to sleep. That's about, that's what happens when those things go together. Tried it the second day, and I'm like, I need kitty litter.

Pretty sure we're out of popsicles. Wow, so distracted. Three or four days into it, though, I was so determined I was going to do this that I sat down, and I really, really focused. Okay, help me, help me think about this, God. And I heard this one sentence. I love you, Elisa.

I had never heard that before. I had heard God loves you. Jesus loves you. I'd never heard that first person, God to me. I love you, Elisa.

Have you ever heard that? I love you, Jennie. I love you, Kristin. I love you, Marge. I love you, Karen. I love you, Amanda. I love you, Debbie. I love you, James. I love you, Thomas. I love you, Brenda. I love you, Beth. I love you. That's what God says. That's how He feels about us.

I love you. God loves the broken. He loves broken people. He loves broken families, and He loves us too much to leave us the way we are, but He's reshaping and redeeming and reforming us until we already are in Jesus, and that's a process, and we get to participate with Him every day because He loves us.

I love you, He says. That's the first sentence. The second sentence is that God uses the broken. God uses the broken.

He uses broken families and the broken people in this. It's hard to understand this at first, but when you look at Scripture, this is not a new concept. In Exodus, chapter 32, we see two broken stone tablets used to cause the Israelites to repent of their disobedience. In Psalm 51, God uses a broken heart to return to the broken God uses a broken heart to return King David to himself after his sin. In Mark, chapter 2, God uses a broken roof for four friends to lower a cripple into the presence of Jesus that Jesus might heal him.

In Matthew, chapter 14, He uses broken loaves to feed 5,000 people, which with women and children is more like 15,000 people. In Luke, chapter 5, He uses broken nets to help the disciples understand that they're not called a fish for fish, but they're called a fish for people, and that by God's power, they will bring people into the kingdom of God. In Mark, chapter 14, He uses a broken flask when Mary of Bethany annoys Jesus, showing Him that a relationship with Jesus results in a response that were changed because of Him. We act out of our faith.

He uses a broken ship in Acts 27 to 28 to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to a people on an island, a remote island of Malta, who would never have heard of Him if Paul had not been shipwrecked there. God uses the broken until He uses a broken body to carry our sin. He's pierced for our transgressions.

By His wounds, we are healed. It's hard at first to understand this because the truth is that what we've been told and what we believe it is when we're broken, that's actually grounds for disqualification. I'm sorry. You have messed up, and so you don't get to serve anymore here. You need to sit out there, you know, with your scarlet letter, whichever letter it happens to be, you sit out there. You don't get to be in here.

This is for the perfect. And so we slap on these masquerades of, I'm perfect, I'm perfect, when no one is, right? And we elevate and relegate various sins and human conditions based on our particular understanding in this century. And the reality is, I just want to suggest that our brokenness, when placed into God's hands, by His wounds, we are healed. Our brokenness doesn't have to disqualify us.

Our brokenness can actually further qualify us for service. My niece, Laura, who lives in this area, was in a horrible automobile accident 18 months ago. She lost the ability to talk, to walk, to do just about anything that any of us count on. Before this, Laura was a cellist. She was a speech pathologist. She was a marathon runner. Laura has had to learn to walk and to talk.

Isn't that ironic? She can walk and she can talk. She looks a little different, but she's there and she's making her way back. And it's hard for her right now to hold on to this, but because Laura has had to learn to talk again as an adult, don't you just know God is going to be using her rehab to help rehab others? And that's what He does in us. He uses our redemption, rehabilitation, reformation, to enable us to call others into theirs.

And there may be moments you can't even comprehend. Can God use a teen pregnancy in your home? Yes, He can. Can God use an incarceration in your home? Yes, He can. Can God use a divorce? I know He has. Can He use when you've fallen and fall down and it's no fault of your own and when you fall and fall down because you did make a wrong choice? Yes, He can.

Because if we say He can't, we say He's not. God, by His wounds, we are healed. Paul writes that we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God because He doesn't sweep us up and throw us away.

He restores, He redeems, He reforms. In Japan, there is an art called kintsumi. When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, and it's said that in those places where gold has been filled in, those places are actually stronger than before they were broken. I was in an antique store in London and I came across these plates. They looked so much like the plate that was on the cover of my book, they grabbed my attention. There were a stack of six of them. If you can look at that, you'll see there's a crack running through it.

I was mesmerized. I thought, how are they holding together? And I turned them over and this is what I saw. The plates had been stapled on the back. What? I took them up to the proprietor and I said, what is this?

And she said, oh these are from the Victorian age and this was an ancient technique of how we would repair pottery. I thought to myself, and then I said out loud, why would you bother? Why would you bother? Why wouldn't you just throw it away?

She said, oh really? In Victorian age, if you have a choice to eat off of a board or a repaired china plate, what would you do? Isn't that what God does with us? He doesn't throw us away. He doesn't replace us with boards, but he takes the body of his Son and he staples it to a cross to redeem us because there is beauty in the broken.

I come from a broken family and despite my very best efforts, I still come from come from a broken family. My husband and I are still in full-time ministry. We still bow our heads over our our meals and we say a blessing.

We still kind of mess up and judge people and think we've got it all together and tell our kids what they should close our mouths. Today I've been married 35 years. Yes, that dear stable soul has stayed.

He's amazing. My grown kids are paving their own paths. They love Jesus. Sometimes they go to church. They pray in text messages.

They evidence their beliefs in inked symbols on their bodies. My daughter expresses her love for Jesus still as she listens to people's woes and wonders as she cuts and styles their hair and she advocates for her son at every step in the way and her husband stands by her side at this that and the other health issue and he's so gentle that he won't even kill an intruding praying mantis, but he ushers it out on a broom. My son turns the pages of his big book and he looks my husband and I in the eye and he thanks us for yet another choice, another chance, another day. Just a week and a half ago he stood in a place very like this while my husband stood before him and a beautiful woman stood next to him and he was married and my husband preached the beauty of black and white. Black and white as their symbol for their wedding was black and white stripes. Black and white stripes which really in their minds represented two lives coming together, two different lives that made something unique and different together, but as my husband preached to them, black and white also represents all of life and they so value all of life because they've been through so much of it already and he's helped and understand that we long for the white places in our marriages and in our lives, the times of blessing and we don't particularly value the dark ones, but on the color wheel white is the absence of color and black is the presence of color, magenta and yellow and blue and really when both come together we have a rich and deep and meaningful life and it's nothing to be afraid of but rather something to be embraced. We continue, our family, we're gooey in the middle. If you put a toothpick in us and pulled it out it would be kind of ew, ew, not done yet.

Push it back in, turn a little longer. I come from a broken family and I'm pretty sure that this is my story but it's yours too. But you pray with me. Father, thank you for the fact that we are called to freedom in you, that in the body of Christ which we represent here together is a place of freedom because of what Jesus has done on the cross for us, that we need not hide, we need not pretend. You call us to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, to embrace the beauty and the broken and find your beauty in our broken. We thank you for this truth. Well that old saying, time heals all wounds is true but I think Elisa Morgan would amend it to time and the love of our Lord Jesus Christ heals every wound that is given over to him. What a great message today on Focus on the Family.

Well John you hit the nail on the head. That's a great summary of Elisa's message and let me just say if this broadcast brought up some issues for you, please get in touch with us. Our friendly staff would be honored to hear your story, pray with you and even request a call back from one of our Caring Christian Counselors if that's needed. That's a free service that we can provide thanks to the donors that support the ministry. Here's one example of someone who was helped by our broadcast and the counseling team.

I'll call her Anna to protect her identity. She wrote this, I grew up in Asia and was emotionally and physically abused by my older sister. By age 12 I was seriously considering suicide or even killing my sister but thank God I never followed through on those thoughts. Several years later I moved to the United States and stumbled across the Focus on the Family broadcast.

I had never heard anything like it. That began years of healing for me. I'm now a homeschooling mother of three and am so grateful for how Focus on the Family brought God's light and healing into my life. God bless you all.

That is a wonderful heartwarming story. It really is John and that's just one example of how the Lord works through what we do here at Focus on the Family. And when I say we, I mean collectively.

You too as a supporter, someone who prays for us. The impact is amazing and we are honored to be the hands and feet of Jesus to hurting families in the U.S. and Canada and literally around the world. And it's pretty obvious that today's culture globally is resisting God's plan for the family.

We're seeing the effects of that in widespread divorce, pornography addiction, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and the list goes on. But as we heard in Alisa Morgan's story, trusting God is the answer. No matter which way the prevailing political winds blow, we can do things God's way by investing in our own families and the families around us. We are in the final days of our effort to enroll monthly sustainers to be a part of the ministry. And I hope you will join us with a monthly pledge by giving to Focus on the Family. You are helping to fund the training and support of God honoring families as a nonprofit ministry. We depend on your contributions to provide scripture based resources like the daily broadcast, podcasts, counseling efforts, all the books and resources, online resources, and so much more. Best of all, we keep our overhead low.

Ninety four percent of every dollar you donate goes right back into ministry efforts, not taking care of the overhead. So please pray about joining our team. And when you make a monthly pledge of any amount, we'll send you Alisa's great book called The Beauty of Broken that will be our way of saying thank you. And if you can't make a monthly commitment, we get it.

We can send you that book for one time gift of any amount. Just get in touch with us today. And you can reach us when you call 800 the letter A in the word family or follow the link in the episode notes and donate to the work of Focus on the Family and request The Beauty of Broken, that book by Alisa Morgan. Next time, Josh and Christy Straub share how to explain the emotions of Easter to your children. It feels like darkness is winning.

And I think that's what Saturday felt like. And I I think the realization that there is this tolerance that we all need to develop, it's almost like a muscle where we can sit in hard things. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for listening to this Focus on the Family podcast. As you can please take a moment and leave a rating in your podcast app and share about this episode with a friend. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once more help you and your family thrive in Christ. Want to grow your marriage? Then make sure to check out these two great resources from Focus on the Family. Learn how to appreciate the unique characteristics of your spouse with our free Cherish Your Spouse video series by Gary Thomas. You'll find it at focusonthefamily.com slash Cherish Your Spouse or get away from the stress of daily life and make your marriage feel new again at a Focus on the Family weekend getaway. This retreat will help you slow your pace and reconnect with one another. Learn more at focusonthefamily.com slash weekend getaway.