Broken or Bitter

One day recently, I was in my office at church when a ministry friend stopped by at the door to chat.

As we talked through the joys and pains of ministry, she reminisced about a particularly tough time in her husband’s pastorate. After decades of faithful service to a congregation, some power brokers within their church found some petty issue and accused him of wrongdoing. Those powerbrokers always count on the pastor’s “shepherding heart” for their church. They know he’ll give up defending his reputation rather than let a controversy destroy the church.

Out of fear a controversy might harm his congregation, he tendered his resignation and slipped quickly out of town. Pastors like my friend’s husband suffer in silence, with God and family as their only support systems.

Maybe you’ve experienced the death of a loved one, or a life-changing diagnosis. Perhaps it’s a prodigal child, or the loss of your employment. All these and more are tools used simultaneously by both Satan and God. One means to use that tool to destroy you, the other to refine you. If you respond with bitterness and anger, Satan’s work will be done in you. But if you surrender and humble yourself, God remolds you into something more useful than you ever were before.

Being broken is in turn one of the kindest and most brutal things God can do to us.

The key to experiencing the liberating victory of brokenness is how you respond to those painful circumstances God allows into your life. With every wound, God has something he wants you to learn, but Satan wants to teach you a completely different lesson. It’s up to you which of those two teachers you learn from.

‘The same sun which melts wax hardens clay. And the same Gospel which melts some persons to repentance hardens others in their sins” – Spurgeon

One of those lessons came for me just a few years ago…

WAKE UP CALL

On Father’s Day evening in 2019, I arrived to join my family at the home of my in laws in East Tennessee. While there, we learned that my sister-in-law’s husband Claude had been hit by a drunk driver in New Orleans and killed. The next morning, I was suddenly awakened by screams coming from upstairs. Claude’s three young sons had just been told their father was gone. It’s a sound I hope to never hear again.

My sister-in-law Twila had decided she was going to move the family back to East Tennessee to be close to her mother. She needed some “back up” and support raising her three sons who were all quickly entering adolescence. The question kept running through my brain, “If I’m not going to be there to stand in for Claude, who will?”

So almost a month to the day from when Claude died, I stood before my congregation and announced I’d be resigning as their senior pastor. We’d sell our house and move to Knoxville, where I would do my very best to help. Hopefully, I’d find a church where I could minister. I promised my church I’d be around for the next month to properly say goodbye to them and prepare them for a leadership transition.

That’s when something else happened that I never saw coming. The staff member I’d left in charge decided he should be the pastor, although he had no training in the Bible. He also decided he needed me out of the way before I could advise the leadership how to proceed. He got together with some power brokers and told me not to come back to serve out the remainder of the month as I had announced…or else there’d be trouble.

So I did just what my pastor friend had done earlier – to not disrupt the church in controversy, I quietly limped out of town. No one was there to say goodbye. We were alone.

What do you do when disaster comes upon you, but your church family is not there to help? I’ll tell you what you do…unless you trust God and surrender it to Him, you become bitter and shut yourself off from people. That was the temptation I dealt with over the next several months as our family relocated to Knoxville and I sat useless in a huge church, not using any of my gifts. It was a tough season where I wondered whether the smartest thing was to get out of “the ministry”.

For all the folks claiming to have been wounded by a church, you don’t really understand how bad that hurt can be until you talk to a pastor.

When people get rid of their pastor, they have zero empathy. It’s as if they don’t think we’re human, and they completely forget how it affects our families. When you’re burning at the stake, they are roasting hot dogs while your family is bailing water. Often that’s because the power brokers don’t even let the church know what happened to you, as was the case in our situation.

As bad as that all sounds, let me tell you what I learned from walking with God through that painful season of loss and betrayal…

Don’t assume that doing the right thing leads ultimately to success. There are times you will follow God’s leadership straight into a train wreck. We want a happy ending, so we think that by doing something noble, God will congratulate us by putting us back on top. But God never promised you won’t get burned by your trials. Always remember the testimony of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego as they faced the fiery furnace:

“If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” – Daniel 3:17-18

Sometimes we believe the lie that following Jesus will lead to earthly success and justice. No matter how often Jesus told them about His death, those disciples were determined He’d be crowned King of Israel in their lifetimes. But God’s goals and His idea of “success” are far different from ours. While we keep looking for a crown, Jesus keeps leading us to a Cross.

One of God’s goals within the brokenness we experience in trials is to strip you of any idols. Sometimes we made idols out of our abilities and talents. We become proud and addicted to our self-sufficiency. But God wants to get you to a place where you truly understand that “without me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

To overcome this addiction, God will sometimes lead us straight into a dead end. Like Joseph in the Old Testament, through no fault of your own, you will find yourself in a prison. And there’s nothing you can do in your own strength that will get you out. You are helpless. That’s where I found myself in Knoxville. Every attempt I made at finding a church to pastor failed miserably. And somehow, that was exactly what God wanted!

The moment you’re willing to embrace your dependance on God and even rest in it, that’s when He can finally begin to work through you. But first, you will spend a lot of time alone, in a prison, while people around you look on and exclaim, “Wow, he must have really done something awful to get himself in that mess!” That’s what I imagined people in my former church were saying about me.

When you are wounded, the effrontery of being treated poorly by others makes you defensive at first. This is a defense you set up around your pride, much the way a king is defended on a chessboard. You do this in an attempt to make yourself stronger. But spiritually, it makes you insulated, distant, and less usable to God’s Spirit.

Brokenness comes when God begins breaking through those reinforcements, and breaking down that insulation you’ve built to protect your idols. His ultimate goal is to knock down the idol you’ve built to your self and replace it with Himself on the throne of your life. He pulls away every prop that is holding us up, until all that’s left to lean on is Him.

Here’s what Roy Hession says about brokenness in his classic, The Calvary Road:

“The Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups… Self-pity in trials or difficulties, …sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defense when we are hurt or injured by others… all spring from self and all are sin and make our cups unclean.”

That “sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defense” are natural to us, but are still our “last gasp” trying to protect ourselves. God instead wants us vulnerable, transparent, and tender. When spiritually broken people are attacked, instead of defending themselves they rely on God to defend them and no longer retaliate. Instead you take your defenses down and let God do whatever he wishes. If it is God‘s will for you to be taken down, you’ll be taken down. You leave revenge to God but you also leave your defense to Him as well.

I feel badly about the trend in our culture of people trying to exact some payback from their abusers. Their open wounds are clearly visible on social media, with unending Tweets reminding everyone of how they were mistreated. While all criminal abuse should be exposed and prosecuted, there are a million smaller offenses that aren’t illegal but still devastating. While I sympathize with the victims, I grieve also because I know retribution will never bring them peace. Freedom is only found ultimately in brokenness and forgiveness. 

One of the great things about being hurt so often is that forgiveness becomes more common place and easy for you. The more you experience the joy of forgiveness, the more pointless holding on to offenses seems. Eventually, even you get tired of propping up your idol of “self” and expecting others to bow to it. 

With time, you desire none of the poison of unforgiveness to remain in your life. As quickly as possible, you rid yourself of it just as the body rids itself of waste. You give up on all crusades of retribution and turn your horse toward Calvary. Though the cross is an instrument of your death, you embrace it. You thank God for the relief you feel at not having to prop up the flimsy altar of your ego and reputation any longer.

This is why I can look back on this season of grief now and see God’s benevolent hand at work in it all. It doesn’t make the things that were done right. The drunk driver who killed Claude was held accountable by the law, though forgiven by our family. The wounds we experienced while leaving our church were unnecessary, though we forgave those as well. I only wish God’s blessings upon them, because I’m in need of undeserved blessings too.

My season of struggling and wandering alone reminded me that my worth was never in my preaching or my music. My value has always been simply in the fact that I belong to Him. That is a value no church can ever take from me, and no criticism can diminish. Take my job, my friends, my talents – I’m valuable simply because I’m His.

This is the blessing of brokenness: that your wounds are the instruments to make you whole and healed. It is a curious paradox. But like most paradoxes, the deeper the irony, the deeper the truth.

Before you can ever operate in “resurrection power”, you must embrace the very instrument of your execution – you must cooperate with the crucifixion of your flesh.

That’s where I found myself, sitting useless in a sanctuary of a Knoxville megachurch. It turns out God didn’t move me to Knoxville to be a father-figure to my nephews. God had led me to a place that had no use for all the abilities. All He told me was to sit, to wait, and to trust. In the end, I realized I wasn’t there to do anything. I was there to take a master class in surrendering.

Like Joseph, every pit I was thrown into was a step on my way to brokenness. Every humiliation meant the death of another idol. And with every time I felt like I was dying, God was actually resurrecting me empowered by His strength now. 

Perhaps instead of asking people “when were you born”, maybe we should start asking them “when were you broken”? Because I’ve learned brokenness is when God really starts using you.

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Click here to read the first BROKEN post

• If you’re still having trouble forgiving, this post might help… IN THE PRESENCE OF MY ENEMIES