Brokenness

This is no surprise, but every one of us was born in a dysfunctional world. We try to make sense of it. We're here because we believe that God helps us make sense of it. But on a day-to-day basis, there's a lot of things that don't make any sense to us. We don't understand why people do what they do. We don't understand why people can be so evil. We don't understand why nothing really works. In fact, if we're not careful, we get to the place where we're just in anxiety all the time because all we see is the dysfunction, which isn't the way we should be, but it can happen to us. The reason for this confusion and this dysfunction is because every human being, at the core of who we are, we're broken. And I want to really go through that concept of brokenness that we're broken. A couple weeks ago, I gave a sermon on marriage, and I didn't give, as we usually do, here's seven points to build a better marriage, right? Instead, what I did was I went through, here's all the ways that we, as broken people, create dysfunctional marriages. And it was interesting, I had a lot of conversations between Nashville and here over the last three weeks with people about, I never thought that through before. Or yes, I do that all the time, and now I realize it doesn't work. As we went through, these dysfunctions we have in marriage, and the idea of brokenness, I wanted to take beyond that. We're really not going to talk about marriage today. I want to mention just a few things about family, but I want to really expand this out into the understanding of what that means. Because the Bible talks about us being broken, and there's actually two different kinds of brokenness we'll talk about. If you do not accept your brokenness, you will just continue to sin. You will continue to never make progress. Now we all still sin. We all, none of us are complete. We're all in a state of progress. We all have our own faults and dysfunctions and everything else. But Christianity is a movement towards a place. But if we don't actually accept the depth of brokenness that is in us, we won't make that progress. We'll get stuck at some point along the way.

That's why in marriage we can help each other. We can heal each other on a certain level, but you can't fix the other person's total brokenness. We can't do that. And that's what we do with friendships. We expect everyone to fix our brokenness. It's what we do in marriage. It's what we do in our family relationships. It's what we do in our congregation. We expect everybody to fix our brokenness. And then we're disappointed when we find out they're all just as flawed as I am, right? Well everybody's just as flawed as I am. I'll find a church where everybody's not so flawed. You end up being by yourself. So we have to deal with the spiritual brokenness before we can actually deal with all other kinds of relationships. What breaks in every relationship. We have to deal first with the spiritual brokenness. I just want to give a couple examples here about family of origin. How we're all broken, by the way, at birth. Humans aren't what they're supposed to be. We weren't created. None of us woke up in Eden, right? None of us woke up in Eden. We all came into a broken place. But our families of origin can have such effects on us that we don't even recognize it. I'll just give you a couple examples.

Many times, and we can do this, not only from family of origin, just from things that happen to us, we get stuck in a constant negativity, reliving the past over and over and over and over. Everything somebody's done to us, any bad thing has happened to us, and all of us know what it's like to go through some kind of bad situation. Some situation where you are abused, misused, maybe at work, maybe, you know, we all go through that. And it's traumatic. And then, if you're not careful, it's six months from now, you're still thinking about the trauma. You never let it go. And it sits with us, and we carry it, until it begins to affect every other relationship in our lives. That's what we do. So we do that all the time. We live in the negativity of the past, and we can really do that in terms of our families. If you came from a family that you were constantly told that you are worthless, right? You're a bad person, and you're stupid. Now, I talk to people all the time that tell me that they were a child, they were told that constantly. And I ask, okay, what do you think about yourself now? And they come up with two answers, two different answers. One is, everything in my life, as soon as someone says, well, that wasn't right, or that wasn't a good idea. Or in my mind, they're saying, you're stupid, you're worthless, you're bad. So somebody can just say the simplest thing, and they take that as, you're telling me I'm stupid, worthless, and bad. And that's how they see life. Which isn't, in other words, they've twisted reality. And this is something we're going to talk about. Because we're broken. We don't really see the reality around us. We're all sort of twist reality into our own little tunnel that we live in. That's just calm human beings do that. You can't get out of that entirely. But what God wants to do is broaden that out. So they're living in their own little tunnels. Now the person who comes from that kind of background, they can go to the other extreme, and that is, well, they now either pass that on to the next generation by telling their kids they're stupid and worthless. You know, sometimes you can hear a parent talking to a child, and you know exactly what they heard as a child. Or they go to the place, I am not going to be treat my children the way my parents treated me. So they let their children do anything and everything. And now they have a different kind of brokenness. It's still broken people. They're still broken people. Now just one other example of family of origins. You can see how we talked about family last time, but we're going to talk about, we're going to broad this out, but just ties it in a little bit. If you lived in an alcoholic family or a family where there was violence, a couple of things could happen to you. One is you become absolutely need of control over everything. See, nobody can hurt me that way. Of course what you do is you destroy all relationships. We don't have the ability to control everything. We don't have the right to control everything and everybody. And so, but you try to control everything. Everything has to be your way. Everything has to work out because if it doesn't, what? You'll be in some kind of danger. And the other extreme, and I'm just talking broad terms, is that you become withdrawn and afraid all the time.

Sometimes people won't even leave their house. They won't even leave their house. They're withdrawn and afraid all the time. Because of the way they were treated. Now, what's interesting is if you have children and you model the behavior of control or model the behavior of being afraid all the time, they're either going to adapt to that or they're going to reject it. Either case, you're now a house full of dysfunctional, broken people.

We have passed on this brokenness since Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden. So, it's not like it started with you, it didn't start with your parents, it didn't start with your grandparents. We've been doing this ever since that happened. We've been passing on this brokenness. So, it's important to grasp a few things here. One is that our spiritual, emotional, mental brokenness shapes the way we think. Now, this is really important. It shapes our thoughts. Anybody tell me what your thoughts shape? Anybody? What? Actions? There's a step in between. Thoughts before you get to actions. Behavior is the next step. There's a step between the two.

It's your emotions. Emotions happen. Well, you're wired to have emotions. I've talked about this before. We can't stop all emotions. Part of your brain drives emotions. And part of your brain is used for thoughts. Most of the time, our emotions control our thoughts when it should be the opposite. We have to use our thoughts to control our emotions. That then produces the motivation for actions. Why we do what we do. If it's emotional, we usually don't know why we do what we do. I do this because, you know, I punched my kid because my dad punched me and his dad punched him. You see what I mean? And it's just an emotional reaction. It's not even...you try to logically think through it, well, he deserved it. You know, little boys have to be punched or they don't grow up into good men. That's so illogical. It's, you know, try to reason through that. But you don't reason through it. You just do it because it's what happens emotionally. See, the behaviors then are a result of your thoughts and your emotions. We're going to talk a lot about thoughts today. Okay. What do we do with our brokenness? And the problem is, most of the time, we're trying to deny we're actually broken. Sometimes we repent and we're baptized and we understand some of our brokenness. And then God begins to heal us. But it is a lifelong process of dealing with our brokenness.

So that's what I'm going to talk about now is how do we deal with and understand and accept that internally we are broken and without God, it can't be healed. Oh, we can do little things or we try to do it with a hundred different ways. Alcohol, we try to fix our brokenness. Gambling, we try to fix our brokenness. Any kind of addiction, I mean, we can be addicted to video games because we're trying to fix our brokenness.

We can become hyper Pharisees. I'm righteous and good at everything and nobody else is. That's just a fake attempt to fix your brokenness. That's all it is. I'm going to pretend I'm perfect. That's just the ultimate living with a lie.

Right? So how do we deal with this? Let's go to Luke 4. And you know, I don't think there's a person in this room that isn't aware of your brokenness at one level or another. And we can muddle through that.

I've seen people do that. You know, they become millionaires. They just work constantly, muddle through it, and they're not broken. Then they die. They were still broken. Being driven to do what they did was part of the brokenness. Because it was a spiritual issue that wasn't being dealt with. Luke 4. This is very fascinating because this is Jesus' first sort of, not really a sermon, but he's speaking in a synagogue.

Okay? It's the first one that's recorded. Verse 16 says, so he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. When he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written.

Now this is a very, very positive passage in Isaiah. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, the good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

That's pretty positive. And then he said, he closed the book, gave it to the attendant, and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on him, and this is what he says, today the Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. What he says is, and they know this is a Messiahic prophecy, he's basically saying, this prophecy is fulfilled today when I got up and read it. This is the beginning of it. And this is why I'm here. He now describes what his full, complete purpose is.

We know he's going to die for the sins of humanity. I mean, Isaiah 53 says that. We know all these things about the Messiah, but he takes this one passage and he says, this is what I'm starting to do now. And one of it is, I'm here to heal the broken people, which is everybody. It's funny how we tend to think we're the only broken person.

But it's everybody. I'm going to read this. He's quoting Isaiah. So I'm going to read this in the Jewish Publication Society translation. So this gives you a little bit more of a direct Hebrew translation of this. He said, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me as a herald of joy to the humble. And this is starting to tell us something here.

He has sent me to bring joy to humble people, to bind up the wounded of heart. I am here to bind up and heal the broken people, to proclaim release to the captives and liberation to the imprisoned. He says, I'm here to heal the broken people. If you're not broken, you don't need me, is what Jesus says.

You know what's amazing? These people knew the Scripture. These people anticipated the Messiah coming. In fact, there was a whole movement in Judaism in the first century. They thought, many of them thought Jesus was coming in their lifetime. It was a big movement. It was a big movement.

They listened to this and argued with Him. Surely, you can't mean we're broken.

We're the super righteous here. We're the least broken people on the face of the earth. That isn't the exact words, but... In verse 28, so all those in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, rose up and thrust Him out of the city, led Him to the brow of a hill which their city was built, that they might throw Him down over the cliff. Then passing through the midst of them, He went His way. What is the response of human beings to, you are broken? I'm going to kill the messenger.

I am not broken. I'm the only sane person I know. All right? Everybody else might be broken, not me.

Jesus told them, I'm here to fix that. I'm here to fix that. But you first have to accept that you're broken. And this is what's so difficult for us. We have to be honest about it. And it doesn't how long, it doesn't matter how long you've been converted, or if you're thinking about baptism, God's working with you. It doesn't matter how long God's been working with you. It doesn't matter how long you've had God's Holy Spirit. None of us are totally healed yet. That means none of us are totally converted yet. And that brokenness still has to be looked at.

And you think, well wow, that's a negative thing. Notice Jesus didn't put it in a negative light. I'm here to heal the broken. And they wanted to kill him. Because that would mean they were broken. I'm not saying they thought through all that, because they didn't. It was an emotional reaction. They didn't think through it. The problem is we have accepted our brokenness as our identity. We've all done that to a certain degree. We all have an excuse for the way we do things. I know I have a temper, but you know, if you had to work with the complete idiots I have to work with, you'd punch them in the nose too, okay?

We find a way that is our identity. This is just who I am. And the truth is, it is who we are. We are broken. So we defend our self-centeredness. We defend our need to control others. We defend our hatreds. And we take and we live with our hurts and we become obsessed with our hurts and our abuses and our disappointments until everything that's ever happened to us and every disappointment we'd ever had and every person that's mistreated us becomes our identity. I am the mistreated person. I am the person full of disappointment. I am the person who nothing in life has worked out. And that's how we see ourselves. That's our identity. And every one of us has had terrible things happen in our lives and injustices happen. And we get sick when we don't know why. We get hurt when we don't know why. We suffer when we don't know why.

And we struggle with all that because you live in a broken world. And we struggle with it. Why does God do this? Why does God allow that? We ask that all the time. And we don't always have an answer, do we? See, in our identity as we think we're not that broken, well, God gives us an answer for everything. I know the answer. And the truth is, deep inside, we know there's a lot of things we don't have answers to. That's what it is to be a broken human being interacting with the incredibleness of God.

And we have to come to the place where we're at comfort with not knowing what all the answers are. So we try to force our self-image into our relationships. And just, you know, 80 of us here, if we all try to enforce our self-broken self-image on each other, we just have 80 more dysfunctional people than we had before we met each other. So what we do is, once again, we'll respond with behaviors that are not what they're supposed to be. Many times we'll respond with sinful behavior.

So here's the concept that I really want to go through today that's so difficult. You want to be healed from your brokenness. You know Jesus Christ came not only to die for us, to be resurrected. The Holy Spirit is given to us. God, the Almighty God, we go before His throne anytime we want to. There's this interaction, there's a relationship. You're here keeping the Sabbath as part of your relationship with God. And these are all positive things. But why is it that sometimes we're still so broken? And that won't totally change until we're changed into spirit. We're going to be dealing with this, what it is to be human, with a human nature. We're going to be dealing with that the rest of our lives.

Here's a really hard thing. To experience God's healing from our brokenness, we have to experience another level of brokenness. Wait a minute. He's telling me to be healed from being broken, I have to be broken more? What kind of man? No, no, no. We have to understand it's a different kind of brokenness. And Isaiah 61 actually mentions it. We'll see what it is. Let's go to Psalm 51. Course we know here's David's great psalm. I'm going to read all of it, of repentance. Psalm 51.

He has come to realization. God had done amazing things in his life. He killed Goliath. God did it, but he used David to do it. He made him king over Israel. David had everything. He was wealthy. He had a nation he ruled over. He had everything a man could want, and yet he still sinned, did a terrible sin. A series of sins. And then hid and pretended he didn't do it. Now that's broken. Oh yeah, I know I committed adultery, and I know she's pregnant, and I know I had her husband killed, but I'll just pretend nothing happened. That's brokenness. You see, David's brokenness, right? He was broken, or he wouldn't have done all those sins. Now he's really broken, to the point where God finally confronts him, and he realizes, I could lose everything, including God's spirit here. And so he writes this. What I want you to notice here is there's a certain joy in what he's talking about, and then he talks about a different kind of brokenness. This is a broken man. This is an absolute broken man. His son died because of his sins.

Verse 7 says, Purge me with hyssop, so I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. In other words, he understood God's level of forgiveness. God could forgive him. Make me hear joy and gladness. There is no happiness left at him. There's no joy left at him. He didn't enjoy anything in life. That the bones you have broken may rejoice. It's interesting, he didn't have any broken bones, literally. He said, I'm a broken man here, God. Hide your face from my sins and blot out my iniquities. Create me a clean heart, O God. I renew a steadfast spirit within me. Give me my sanity back. Give me my ability to face life back. Do not cast me away from your presence. Do not take your Holy Spirit from me. And that was his greatest fear, that God would take his Holy Spirit. He'd no longer be in the presence of God. He already knew what happened when God did that with Saul, right? Saul went insane. He knew where he was going to go. He knew where the brokenness would take him. The sin he had committed, the hiding from the sin, had led him to this point. Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Help me to find against ability and happiness. Help me to find joy again, but it has to come in you. This is where we have to go in this process. We can't expect everybody else to fix us. Now we can help each other. But there is a point in this brokenness. Only God, through his presence, can heal. It's why Jesus said, I've come to do this. And David understood it. He says, restore me the joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit. Let's get down to verse 17. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Now, he says, I'm a broken man. Fix all the bones that are broken in me. There's no bones broken in him. The point he's saying, I'm a broken man. Now he says, God wants a broken spirit. These are the two kinds of brokenness. One is the brokenness that comes because of our corrupted human nature. And the other, and the sins we commit, the other brokenness is, well, what we read in Isaiah 61. It's a humility before God. It's an absolute understanding that without God we can't be healed. Without God we can't be forgiven. Without God we can't get over our own brokenness. Without God we stay the same. Oh, we might read some nice book on psychology and make a few behavioral changes that help us a little bit. I'm not saying that can happen. You may have a friend that helps work you through some of your problems. But the core issue can only be dealt with between you and God.

There's no other way to deal with it. Now he will bring people into your lives. He'll bring situations into your lives to help you heal. I mean, he'll do all kinds of things to help this happen. Nathan was sent by God to David to basically say, you're so broken, son, you're about to become nothing. And so Nathan went and told him that and drew him to God. So God uses each other. He uses our friends, our husbands, our wives, other family members, other members of the congregation to help us on this journey. But the ultimate brokenness can only come from, or fixing of that, can only come from God. And it doesn't happen in a second. It's what this life is all about.

You go ask God tonight, help me with my brokenness. You won't wake up tomorrow, not broken. But you'll wake up tomorrow with God maybe doing something in your life tomorrow that takes you one little step further to this healing that has to take place. This changing that has to take place. The sacrifice of God or a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart. These, oh God, you will not despise. But notice there is a huge difference between the brokenness that comes because of our corrupted human nature and our sin, and our arrogance, and our pride, and our physicalness, right? We are physical, so we have all kinds of problems. Have you ever tried to solve a problem? Some of you may have. By eating all the time? Doesn't work. Try to solve a problem with alcohol? Doesn't work. Try to solve a problem with just watching television constantly? Doesn't work. Food's not wrong. Alcohol isn't necessarily wrong. Watching some TV, or you know, some streaming device. Isn't this something wrong? Eight hours a day is wrong because you're covering for something, right? You're trying to fix something.

This is an understanding of I am broken and God heal my broken bones. Heal the brokenness that's inside of me. Only you can do that. And it's a humility before God, where you don't, there's no pretense. You just bring to God who you are. You might as well anyways. He knows it all. I mean, we can't hide anything from Him. We go and we lay it out, and we look at the Scriptures then to guide our thoughts. We change feelings by changing thoughts. You have to consciously say, I won't think that way. And you go to Scripture, or you know, my wife and I, once in a while, will say to each other, boy, you've just been really negative lately. Maybe just back off and we'll try to talk about something positive. Just, as one of us will get in this negative mood, right?

Psalm 34, another place where David writes. And what I find here about David in writing this, it's almost like, it's almost like he's making a list. I don't think Hebrew thought made long lists like we do in English. That's why everybody loves, oh, that's a three-point sermon, or a seven-point sermon. Because that's the way we think. I'm not sure in Hebrew they thought like, point number one. I just don't think that's how they thought. It was a different way of analyzing. But here, he almost makes a list. He says in verse 11, Come, you children, listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord. So he says, come, children, and I will sit down with you and teach you how to have a relationship with God. Who is the man who desires life and loves many days that he may see good? Okay, so you want to have a good life? Keep your tongue from evil, your lips from speaking deceit. Depart from evil, do good, seek peace, and pursue it. Okay, that's an interesting set of thoughts there.

There's a lot of places in Psalms and Proverbs where you can find thoughts. This is what you think about. If Paul talks about it, John talks, James does it. It's all through the Scripture. Here's how you think. Because it's the only way to get control of the just the myriad of emotions that flow through us all the time. And you can't stop feeling emotions because you're designed to feel them. So you can't do it. You can, though, work through how to sort through those emotions. Which ones to react on, which ones don't. What creates your behaviors? And in doing so, you learn some emotional control. You know, this is what we talk about, emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence isn't about not having emotions. It's knowing what to do with them. That's what emotional intelligence is. It's knowing what to do with them. He says, the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are open to their cry. God doesn't listen to me. Are you trying to be right with God first? No, righteous means to be right with God. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth. The righteous cry out and the Lord hears and delivers them out of their troubles. The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart and save such as have a contrite spirit. He's not saying, stay beat up and broken all the time. Be depressed. That's not what he's saying. He's saying, when you have the right kind of brokenness before God, which is, I can't do this without you. I need the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. I need your spirit. I want to change. I need to be all this stuff in me that does this dysfunction in me has to be changed. And God says, good, I can work with you. That's what it means by broken before God. It's a recognition of who you are. It's a recognition of your need for God. It's a recognition that we can do all this. We can keep the Sabbath. We can pay our tithes. We can go to the Feast of Tabernacles and have wonderful time and love each other and yet still not be dealing with all the brokenness that's in us. Because we all go home where nobody sees us, right? We're not dealing with it.

There's a lot easier sermons to give than this, I tell you. I put this one off for a while.

But here's something encouraging. Let's go to Jeremiah 18. There's something about it's in this verse that I never knew until just recently. I never thought about it until recently. And I've been thinking about some of the issues we've been talking about in the last couple of sermons and how complicated they are and yet how simple they are. But Jeremiah 18, the word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, arise and go down to the potter's house and I will cause you to hear my words. So Jeremiah says, I went down to the potter's house and there he was, making something at the wheel. So you can visualize this. You know, potter's got a potter's wheel and he's making a pot, okay, or some kind of vessel. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hands of the potter. So he made it again into another vessel as it seemed good to the potter to make. And then he goes on and says to Israel, remember, you are the clay and I am the potter. So the point he's making here is don't forget, even if you're marred, even if you are broken, even if you're cracked, I can fix this. I can do this. And here's what I didn't know. You can take a pot that's dried in, you know, complete pot that's hardened. You know, my wife likes to have clay pots outside filled with flowers. But I noticed this winter, we bought some from clay in, I think it was Mexico, doesn't stand up to cold very much. We're watching them fall apart. It's just the clay and what they use there. So, but she loves those pots. You can take a pot, if you're a potter, you can take one of those hard pots and it's got cracks and it's got flaws and what do we do with them? We just throw them away. But a skilled potter can take that pot and they can take a little hammer and they can break it into pieces. I actually watched someone do this. I thought they can't really do this, but they're good. They broke in pieces. Then they crushed it down into, like, you know, almost like a dust. And then they poured water in it a little bit at a time and they started kneading it. It was a long, hard process. But over a period of time, with the right temperature, the right amount of water, the right breaking, the right crushing, the right process, you know what they had? It was a brand new clump of clay. And now they can build a brand new pot.

We come to God, and it's part of what he's telling Israel there, they came to God as a really messed up pot. And God could break that down, reconstruct it, reconstitute it, and make them into something that was very good. That's what God is doing with you. This is what our lives are about. It's about God taking these dysfunctional people whose nature has been corrupted by Satan. And breaking us down, and reconstructing us. And that's why David's positive, that's why Jesus is positive, that's why they're positive in all the things they're saying. And it comes back to, do you not realize what God is capable of doing to you and with you? And you get to participate in it. In fact, we have to participate in it. You and I have to participate in the change. So it doesn't matter how marred you are, it doesn't matter how much of a pot that doesn't look like a pot, it doesn't matter how messed up your life is, it doesn't matter what your sins that you've committed in the past and the ones you're still struggling with now. The potter will do it. We just have to be pliable enough clay. In other words, we have to become broken. Not in the way we are broken, but in a different way. We're now broken in His hands for Him to do what He's going to do with us. So we're broken, but it's like there's this joy to it. There's this goodness that happens with it. There's this forgiveness that happens. There's this renewing that happens. Well, what do you mean? It's not pleasant all the time to be broken. Just remember, sometimes God's taking a little hammer and smashing you. Okay? Sometimes He's grinding you. Sometimes He's pouring water all over you. Sometimes He's just working. What He's doing is this pot won't last. I will make this pot so it will last. This human being cannot last forever. You and I cannot last forever as broken as we are. We're not. We can't. That's why there's eternal death. We can't last forever like this. We would just...if God somehow made us spirit in the state we're in, there would be a hell, because we'd create it. But God says, no, I can do this with you if you'll just come along. So yes, the Christian life can be very hard. And yes, the Christian life can have its trials, and the Christian life has all kinds of things that happen that we don't understand, and we question, and we struggle with. And at times we're devastated by. But we have to remember, there's two choices here. This brokenness and this brokenness. This brokenness leads to nothing, and this brokenness leads to the potter making us into his children. That's the difference. If you weren't a Christian, your life would be worse than it is now. But it's in this process that something remarkable is happening. But you'll never understand it. We'll never understand it until we accept how broken we really are, even if we have God's Spirit. We're not totally healed yet. We're not totally there yet. And we won't be until we're changed. But that's the process he's doing. And you know, sometimes we get to the place where God can't do this with me. How weak is your God? The only thing God can't do is fix me. No, that's a decision you make, because He can do it. He just lets us make the decision. He lets us make the decision. He can do it. He can take every one of us, and with His Spirit and His power, change us into His children. So what choice do you make there? He's not big enough to do it? Or you may have to break me some here. Break me down a little bit more. But it's a good kind of breaking. I'm going to finish this with just a passage in Ephesians, because Paul here, in a...

In the way that Paul writes, Paul brings all this into a very clear concept. Ephesians 4 verse 17. This I say therefore, and testify, ye the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles and the rest of the people, just all the nations out there, in the futility of their mind. This all comes back to what do you think? What do we process so that our emotions are processed by this? Where do our thoughts come from? Is it from God? Are we thinking of His way? Do you ever get mad at somebody, and two days later you're still mad, and then realize they don't even remember it? And you're just wasting your time. You're wasting your life being upset with somebody who's not even...don't even remember what they did. But what do we think about? See, what do we bring up? Here's what we do. We train our emotions, by the way, to find thoughts. I gave a sermon on this about five years ago. We train our emotions to find thoughts. That's the way the brain works. So the more you think about things, the more you emotionally respond to it. So all you have to do is think of somebody's name, and you have an emotional response. You don't even have to think about the incident anymore, just the name, and boom! You can't...what do you do? I'm not going to feel this way anymore. You can't do that. You have to change the thoughts. Our thoughts have to become spiritual. They have to become based in the Word of God. He says, in their futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. You don't have a blindness of heart. You've been...you're not ignorant of God. "...who being past feeling have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ..." You know, the first scripture we read here was Jesus Christ, about Jesus Christ saying, "...I've come to fix the broken people." Right? "...you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard him and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning your former conduct the old man, which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lust, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind." And that renewing happens daily, over and over again. We have to ask for that renewing, because every day you are bombarded with this dysfunctional world that is led by Satan. And every day you still have to deal with the brokenness that's in you. So you have to ask for this. You have to struggle with this. We have to be renewed every day. We're still a pot that's been broken down and being reconstructed. "...that in you put off concerning your former conduct, that the old man, which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lust, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and what that you put on the new man, which was created according to God, unto righteousness and holiness." So I didn't give you seven steps of how to fix your family, because we'll do that sometime. I'll go through a sermon on how to have better families. But we can't do anything until we do this first. We can't do anything until we turn to God first and let God do things in us. And when He does that in us, that will immediately be brought out in our relationships, in our marriages, and in our families, and in our congregation, and in how we treat everyone. So you're no more broken than anybody else. But also remember, you're being broken in a different way. And that brokenness, you will be made whole.