Brokenness

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Welcome to The Masculine Journey. It is really good to see you guys. I mean, I can say that honestly because David's not here. That's just for you, David.

You're welcome. No, we're missing David and Jim and Grant tonight. But on today's show, we're going to be talking about the topic of brokenness. It doesn't seem like the most uplifting topic, but it's something that we all face multiple times throughout our life. And if you haven't, you're not being honest with yourself or you're living in a, I don't know, a bubble that's not real. But brokenness is something that we all face.

And the enemy likes to try to tell us that we're the only ones that deal with it, but that's not necessarily true. We're going to actually start the show talking about some scripture and some stories from the Bible about that topic of brokenness. But before, the way this kind of came up, and I'll talk more about it after the bump in when we come back from the break, I was driving down, driving back from Charleston and a song came on. It's not the radio.

It was what I was streaming, whatever. It just kind of came on. And it happened to be a song that was really instrumental to me during a very difficult time. And it happened to be on the exact same stretch of road in which I listened to that song a lot of times and how quickly it moved me to emotion, which I'll talk about that more after the break. And then just this whole topic of brokenness, that we kind of avoid talking about that unless it's with somebody very close to you. You'll share that, but most people don't just run out and share it or don't talk to the people they need to talk to about it and kind of try to do it alone.

And we're not meant to do that alone. So beginning with some scripture, before I do that, Andy, welcome back. It's great to have you back in the studio. Likewise.

Harold was really happy to see you. Yeah, he was. Yeah. Not others so much.

Not as much me, but you. Yeah, he was very poignant about pointing that out. You made my day, Harold. But going on to some stories or scripture, whoever's got a mic in front of them, you're up. So Danny, what's a scripture or a story that comes to mind on this topic of brokenness?

Well, I'll go with scripture to start with. Psalms 34, the Lord is near to those who have a broken heart and save such that have a contrite spirit. Many are the affliction of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. Right.

Just kind of a scripture of hope that no matter what you're, what you got going on, you know, the Lord will deliver you if you'll let him, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Robby? Yeah, there's about six verses in the 119 Psalm that say pretty much the same thing, which is, you know, I'm very much afflicted, quicken me. It's the issue, right? That you just feel broken as you can feel. And, you know, Jim made an, although he's not here tonight, he made an awesome point last week. We talked about what's more important, the Bible or prayer.

And the pastor responded to that. Well, should I breathe in or breathe out? Which is more important? And so, you know, for me in my brokenness, right? And to relate a story, I can remember when I first started dating my wife, I had an adopted son and they didn't get along with each other, to say the least. And it was, it was very difficult. And they both came to me within a very short period of time and said, it's either him or her, or, you know, either she goes or I go. And, you know, it was like, oh my gosh. And for me as a man, I thought, seriously, I thought, I have to choose between the two people that I love the most in this world.

How in the world can I choose and tell one of them they got to go when I love these two people more than anything in the world? And so, in spite of the fact that I was very young, very young in the faith, I employed what is now known as the five slamma jamma, cat's pajama prayer. In other words, I asked Jesus to come and tell me what to do. I don't know what else to do.

So, I just listened and I just listened and he came and he told me something that had not even closely had I ever considered. And what he said was, Robby, you don't have to choose. If one of them chooses to leave, that's their choice. But why do you think you have to choose?

You don't have to choose. And that was so clearly a piece of advice that was outside of the box of what my thinking was and took 20,000 bricks off my shoulders. I'll never forget the relief as long as I ever live of that prayer, of just hearing in my soul, you know, that still small voice saying, Robby, you don't have to choose. And those who know me know that that would be a choice I couldn't make. It would've killed me. And, you know, it all worked.

That was 40 years ago now. But it's still one of the most remarkable prayers I can ever remember praying because it had such a relief that I'll never forget. Thank you. Andy, do you have a scripture or a story you'd like to share? A little of both. So the, I guess probably first, second boot camp, I remember it was a discussion about the wound and there was scripture, you know, pointed out, we'll get into the one in Isaiah. The one that really kind of, I remember it was from Psalm 109 that I'll quote here in a minute, but the thought was, was that you have this idea of brokenness and I'm like, I know I sin and all that, you know, and I have to have Jesus as my savior, but I never, even for what I was going through at the time, I didn't consider myself broken. And I think a lot of times we don't. We think people that are broken are the ones that you find on Skid Row, someplace that really, they've lost everything. They've been an alcoholic and they have nothing left. That's the broken people. I'm just, but if you think about it, I mean, if we've had, if you've been hurt by anything in your life, which we all have, relationships, things that aren't fair in the workplace, your children, decisions that we make ourselves, all of that stuff. And there's always an enemy telling us that because of this thing, you're separated from God, you can't be close to him, all that stuff.

That's a broken thing. And that realization at bootcamp to really realize that I was in the qualification stage for Isaiah 61 and Psalm 109 and all those that say that I were actually broken and that I wasn't limited to a certain amount of people, but let me get through to the scripture real quick. I'm going to read this backwards. I just saw this today, but the scripture that we always quote, or that's quoted in bootcamp is for I am poor and needy. My heart is wounded within me, but I look above it because it kind of what sets that scripture up.

So I'm reading it. Secondly, but you, Oh God, the Lord, deal kindly with me for the sake of your name. Deliver me by the goodness of your loving devotion. And that is the epitome of what I've experienced in my brokenness that God has come in and done verse 21 in my life.

Psalm 109, 21. So when you said backwards, I thought you would say me with broken. It sounded like you. I thought he was going to pull the Hebrew card. Like Robby.

Right to left. So what about you there, Rodney? You got a scripture or something that. Well, Robby's questions on kingdom pursuits are actually getting really easy. Cause actually there's been a couple of times I've actually been able to answer them, but what actually, you know, it's exactly right. Yeah.

I know I want to call on some gay, just answer bubble gum. Yeah, it's exactly right. But your, your, your question was, okay. I knew where you wanted to go with the, um, um, uh, darn it. I can't think of the, the, the guard, the, you know, I'm trying to, I, but the, where I wanted to go was the Canaanite woman because that's where he had compassion on her. And when she was like, he wouldn't talk to her at first and then it was to draw her out. And so she kind of begs for him to heal or, you know, daughter and hell Lord help me. And then the, uh, disciples are saying, get her away from us.

She's yelling and screaming at us. And then basically he says, you know, that I'm here just for the, the Jews. And why would I throw the bread to dogs? You know, the children's bread to dogs.

And she's like, even the dogs eat the crumbs from the master's table. And he was just like, Oh, your faith is wonderful. That's the kind of compassion is where I've been. There's a, there's a, that little phrase I desire compassion and not a sacrifice has been deep in my heart for about the last two months where I got through that. And I was like reading that over and it's like, that's a consistent message that he's trying to get through to the Pharisees and everybody else, you know? And it's like, in that story, I just, I get a lot of that there. It's like, he's showing them where he's really compassionate by an example with someone.

And that's kind of where I went with the scripture part of it, because that's where I feel that he has been with me. Cause I'm just a dog, you know, I don't deserve anything from him. And it's just, you look at your old brokenness and it's, yeah, I'm just normal. I I've always wanted to kind of kill myself and have all these reasons for, you know, suicide and always planning it out the next way I do it. Cause, Oh, this happened. Oh, why don't you just kill yourself?

Cause you're not worth anything. And it's like, no, Jesus says we're so much more than that. Yeah. Which we'll get to more about that probably later. Harold, what about you?

Well, in case you think that you're not a candidate for brokenness, let me throw somebody in front of you. The apostle Paul, Paul wrote the majority of the new Testament. He started out killing and imprisoning Christians. Thought he was doing God's will. God showed him what his will really was.

So guess what? Paul then turns around 180 degrees and is as strong for Christianity as he was against it. But in first Timothy chapter one and verse 15, this saying is trustworthy and deserves full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

And I am the worst of them. I think Paul went to his grave feeling a certain amount of brokenness over what he had done against cross. Yeah.

I don't know how you would, you would not Wayne. Uh, I know we got a little bit of time before break. What do you have for us? Yeah. Like, I don't think you can walk with, with Christ really without being taken to a place of brokenness where you really see the depths of your own stuff, right? Not even just the depths of your own stuff, but the depths, the reality that without him, we can't make it like even in a second Corinthians, um, in second Corinthians one, starting at verse eight, you know, we didn't, I don't want you to be ignorant brethren of our trouble, which came to us in Asia that we were burdened beyond measure above strength so that we despaired even of life.

Yes. We had the sentence of death in ourselves that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead, he takes us to a place of brokenness that we depend on him. And that's, that's the ultimate place where he's trying to get us to.

Absolutely. When we come back, we're going to do a little bit more of this and then, uh, we'll get a clip in probably, but, uh, in the meantime, a great place to take your brokenness, obviously to God, but also to a boot camp or to entrenchment both coming up, go to masculine journey.org to register for either one of those September ended November for me describing boot camp. When I heard the stories from the stage that the other men had, and then during my prayer time, I'm getting a download from God on where my life is and how I have wounds and I have a place in his story to know how I heard from God is one of those things he really does communicate with us register today at masculine journey.org. What has boot camp meant to me?

That's a really tough thing to articulate. It's so deep inside me. It's ingrained in every part of me understanding woundedness. That's where God really caught me at my first boot camp and also helping me step into healing and restoration from those wounds. It's kind of cool. It's like an onion. He keeps peeling back layers and it's, it's exciting and sometimes frustrating to go there with him, but I enjoy the process and the way God leads me to freedom register today at masculine journey.org.

Welcome back to masculine journey. That is from life house. It's a song called broken. Not a Christian group, a proclaimed Christian group, but all their songs tend to have very Christian lyrics and they are many of the people in the group are Christian.

They just, whatever reason don't want to be considered a Christian band, but they still sing about it. That particular song, as I said, at the top of the show was going through a very, very, very, very, very rocky period in my marriage. And at the same time, I was having to drive from where, you know, I live now about an hour and a half south and a stretch would not really anything, no cell signal. You couldn't talk to anybody on the phone.

I had to go down a couple of times a week to check on some jobs down there and writing and quiet can be very brutal, especially when you're going through a really broken place. And so this song had been out before that, but I'd heard it. It hit me. And I can't tell you the times that I listened to it because it continues on when I have 30 seconds for the bump, but it continues on with, so I'm holding on, right? I'm just holding on. And that's all I could do a lot of days is stick to the part of the verse, the chorus that you heard in the pain, there is healing having hope that, okay, this isn't going to be wasted, that there's going to be something good that comes from it and from it. And then in your name, there is meaning.

So God, I need to find that meaning in your name. Father, I need you to help me in this because I can barely, barely hold on. And listening to that this last week, driving back on that same stretch of road, I find myself in just in tears, completely in tears, not sad like I was when I heard it before, but realizing how God came after my heart, how God came after me and the holding on to Him was so worth it. During that time, honestly, there were a couple guys here, Robby and Al, when I was going through the most difficult part of it, and they were lifelines. They helped me through that. And so God brought people in my life to help me, not a whole host of people, but the right people and enough people to help me get through it. And he was there when I couldn't really feel his presence. Because I just felt so broken, as you talked about, Andy, I felt so far away. You know, it was just the place that I felt I was in, the lowest of the lowest. And so it's a pretty cool thing about music or movie clips or things like that, they can take you back to a place. I won't share something else happened this weekend, but it was pretty cool, but it can take you right back to that place and that memory point. And if you let it, God can do a lot of healing in that.

You know, even when I listened to it today, I was listening to some of the clips and it came on, I got emotional. I thought it went on here, which I'm glad I didn't. But I just find myself saying, thank you, God. Thank you, Father.

Thank you for helping me hold on. You know, when I didn't think it was possible. So back to what we were talking about before we left, we were doing some scripture and I'm going to use one from Isaiah 61. And to set this up, Jesus goes into the desert where he's tempted, you know, for 40 days, he comes out of it. And as you read through what happens next, he goes to the temple and he pulls the scripture of Isaiah and he reads this text aloud. This is where he announces what he's here for, you know, his mission, his ministry. It's also chronicled in Luke 4. So you can go back and look at that where it says, you know, Jesus pulled from the scroll of Isaiah, but what he reads to the people there is the spirit of the sovereign Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.

And it goes on with a lot of other cool stuff, but to bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. Isn't that what brokenness is? Yeah.

Check, check, check. Exactly. You know, and that's where Jesus says, this is why I came. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. I came to reconcile you to the father. That's where the healing occurs, right?

That's where that happens. And yeah, I came for your salvation, but in his own words, this is what his mission was. Because in the midst of binding up the brokenhearted, you can't do that as Wayne said, absence of God, right? To really, really do it.

Robby. And as you pointed out years ago, when you were teaching on this passage, I've never forgotten it is that word broken there is shards, like a broken piece of glass that is actually missing pieces. Yeah.

Right. And quite often, as, you know, horrible things happen in our families, those pieces go missing. And so binding up a broken heart means that there's big pieces of your heart that are literally missing. And you don't know what to deal with that. But what an amazing thing that he actually can do.

But, you know, you make such a valid point that you really do have to go into the pain and, you know, be willing to go to him and, you know, kind of shut your door of your closet and be there in with him and actually offer it up to him and have that discussion. And that ain't so easy to do. No, it's really not.

Yeah, if you can imagine taking a glass pitcher, not like a baseball pitcher, pitcher and throw it up in the air as high as you can and let it land on the concrete and just those shards, as you talked about, that's the broken hearted word here. Right. That's how broken we are.

It's not just this little crack that we can put some super glue on. Right. No, it's, we're completely shattered and we've all lived it.

And we're going to talk about that in the after hours. But first, before we get to that, I'd like to ask you guys some stories about when Jesus lived that out in scripture, where did you see that? Or when God lived it out in scripture? Well, I was going to refer back to that Psalm 109. We've talked many times about David and David, I mean, you see in that story when, when Nathan, I believe it was, was looking for a king and, you know, Saul had already done his business and he, God had moved on and he, yeah, so Samuel, I'm sorry. Yeah, not Nathan, but Samuel, but he was going around to Jesse's sons and, you know, he got through them all and he was like, nope, it's not here.

Where's the other one? And then David is an afterthought and he comes up to me and says, yeah, this is the one. David had to have understood what was going on there. And there's more to his story, his family life that Robby's talked about, but essentially he was kind of the outcast of the family.

He was the run of the litter. And, you know, that was, that is a guy that can come back in Psalm 109 and talk about my heart is wounded within me. You know, he truly was wounded. And then you look at what God did with David, who he had already been doing this with in the fields. God was coming after his heart then, but what he brought him up and made him a king. Now, David had his failures and a lot of that probably came through some of his brokenness, but God came even into that and healed that brokenness after the fact. But, you know, you know, that's just to me is scripture. I mean, there's more talk about brokenness in the Psalms probably than anywhere else. If you take the totality of the Psalms, so.

Yeah, absolutely. I think most everybody's favorite to some extent is Peter, right? And, you know, he denied Christ three times. You know, betrayal is one thing, but when you're the betrayer, it's, that's tough stuff. And you have that famous discussion on the beach of, you know, Peter, do you love me? And to me, there's a beautiful example in Song of Solomon chapter five, where we actually see what was going on there was that Peter had to be de-masked.

Peter thought he was a whole lot more than he was. I'll never deny you, I'm the guy, right? So I'm the dude, right? I'm your rock, man.

You can count on me. He's a rock star, yeah. But it took that pain to get that mask off of him, and it says in the Song of Solomon, you beat me, you bruised me, you took away my cloak. Well, that's exactly what happened to Peter. He got beaten, he got bruised, but it took that in order to take away his cloak so he would know how badly he needed Peter, do you love me?

Right, Peter, do you love me? Yeah. And it's just a fantastic, unbelievable example of restoration from where pride took him. Right.

Danny, what you got? There's the story of the man by the pool of Bethesda that I always think about because Jesus went after his heart. And for a long time, I thought that question that Jesus asked him was such an odd question. Do you want to be made well? But what I've come to understand in my own life in different places is that that's the question. Because, you know, Andy was talking earlier about, you know, we don't think we're broken.

But there's some of us, and I'm probably chief of the club, who have thought for a long time that I'm probably beyond repair. And Jesus is asking, do you want to be made well? And I had a friend who grew up an atheist, and he asked me the question, he said, is Jesus asking him? Is he asking him, do you want to live a normal life, you're going to have to go to work, you're going to have to do all this stuff?

Or do you want to be weighed well? And the more I studied, I realized that's what Jesus is asking him. And that's, you know, because he has the capability of fixing anything. And to be honest, sometimes I don't know that I believe that. Yeah. For me, the story that just struck me is one of the times when he heals the leper.

Right? And when you read the scripture, he does something before he heals him, he reaches out and he touches the leper. Now, what he's healing in there is not his physical body, it's his emotional state of being. Because he's been so long, you can't get near him, you can't touch him.

He hasn't had human touch or the feel of someone else. And so Jesus knows that that's his deepest need, even more than the spots on his arms and his legs and his body. He kneels his heart healed as much as he needs his body healed.

And so he touches him and lets him know, I'm here with you, I've got you. Right? And puts that away. And then he heals his body. Right? And I think that there's times that we ask him for healing of things, and he has other things he knows we need to heal more of. Maybe the marriage isn't going to get healed, but maybe your heart will in the meantime. Right?

Or maybe something's not always going to work out the way you think, but it's going to work out in a way that you find life and find it more meaningful. We do have a bootcamp coming up November 17th through 20th. You can go to masculinejourney.org to register for that. We also have an entrenchment September 30th and October 1st, which is free at masculinejourney.org. We'll talk with you next week. Have a great week. This is the Truth Network.