Back to the Pigsty

Is brokenness desirable?

Unless you are around great numbers of mainstream evangelicals on a regular basis, you may not think so. But if you have been in such esteemed company, you’ve probably heard the enviable qualities of a broken spiritual state touted so enthusiastically over the last few years that you may have come to believe Christians ought to seek out and cultivate it.

Okay, let’s consider that.

A Biblical Promise and Eternal Gift

A 2016 article by Christian pollster George Barna talks about “the importance of being broken” and the desirability of “willingly becoming a broken vessel”. He speaks of God exposing his children to “harsh circumstances in order to break us”. He says brokenness “is a necessity”. He even calls brokenness a “biblical promise and eternal gift”.

Hoo boy, sign me up for that!

Uh, no.

But with such high praise heaped on brokenness, it’s hardly surprising many Christians talk about it as something to be earnestly sought after. Barna says many true and useful things about the Lord’s dealings with his children in the linked articles on brokenness, but in the process of doing so, he paints a picture of broken spirituality that is almost unrecognizable from the way the Holy Spirit of God actually uses the term “broken” in his word.

When God Breaks Stuff

The Bible teaches brokenness is far from desirable. The Hebrew word translated “broken” literally means maimed, crippled, wrecked and shattered. Does that sound like a technique Christians parents ought to use on their believing children? And, if not, why would we expect our Father to use it on us?

Broken cisterns are to be avoided; that’s where the waters fail. The Lord breaks his enemies, not his children. The worthless person “will be broken beyond healing”. Likewise the person who is “often reproved, but stiffens his neck”. God breaks the ships of Tarshish, assembled against Zion. He breaks the staff of the wicked that struck people in wrath. Of the nations, it says he will break them in pieces like earthen pots.

When God breaks stuff, brother, you don’t want it to be you. Breaking is his last-chance option, when every other attempt has failed.

A Bruised Reed

Now, of course God treats truly broken people gently. The Lord Jesus would not break a bruised reed or quench a faintly burning wick. God sent him to “bind up the brokenhearted”. “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” Amen to all that. Blessed are the poor in spirit. But how exactly does the truth of God’s immeasurable grace to the downcast and defeated make brokenness a desirable state (unless, of course, you are in desperate need of either being broken, or else perishing), let alone suggest that it is God who has done the breaking as part of his perfect plan for his children’s spiritual development?

What has happened is that George Barna and evangelicals generally have simply started using the word “broken” as a broad euphemism for being under God’s discipline or “having a tough time” and learning from it to depend on the Lord and abide in Christ. Some writers even talk about the baggage they have carried around from their youth undealt with as “brokenness” and a prerequisite to great things in the spiritual life.

In scripture, brokenness is not that. Brokenness is what God does to the obdurate, and they rarely recover from it. Nobody should want that.

A Solitary Exception

There’s a solitary exception to the undesirability of brokenness, and you can probably think of it. David writes, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Again, amen to that. The situation is Psalm 51, David’s prayer of repentance after committing adultery with the wife of one of his servants, having the man murdered and involving who knows how many servants in the subsequent cover-up. Thank the Lord that he will not despise a broken and contrite heart. But notice that David had to be brought to that place not because of his normal learning curve as a child of God, but because he had stopped behaving like the man he was when God chose him to be king and had begun acting like the kings of the nations; taking what he pleased from others, heedless of the cost.

To call Davidic brokenness desirable is perilously close to continuing in sin “that grace may abound”. Yes, by all means, when you have sinned and covered it up, and God sets out to break you, you should certainly accommodate. Break, and break as quickly as possible. But how much better not to have provoked his anger in the first place! No child of God should ever covet having displeased his Father, notwithstanding the restoration that may come after it. It would be as if the week after the big party celebrating his return, the prodigal son thought, “Boy, I’d sure like another fatted calf” and headed back to the pigsty to try to replicate the situation that got him his last bout of serious parental attention.

Bad idea, that.

Brokenness, Surrender and Despair

I have been broken exactly once in my life, on a Saturday night at the end of a long period of resisting God’s will for my life, fighting my own conscience, and doing still-unquantified damage to others in the process. I gave up and said, “Lord, you win. What do you want me to do next?” I have had many subsequent, lesser surrenders of will since that night in one area of Christian living or another, but the Lord has never had to come close to breaking me, and I have certainly never come close to seeking it.

Brokenness is not God’s desire for his people, let alone a regular state Christians ought to try to cultivate. You will only end up doing a bad parody of the real thing. If the Lord has to break you every week, brother or sister, you are doing something wrong. Broken is what the world wants you to be. In absolute contrast, the Lord enables his servants to stand up under impossible, unprecedented weights and burdens. Paul writes:

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”

Paul was the opposite of broken. He took a licking and kept on ticking. The whole point was not to break under the pressure, recognizing it was not the Lord but the enemy who was trying to break him, and the Lord who was bearing him up during immense difficulty.

Brokenness and Death

David took the medicine of a broken spirit as an alternative to certain death under God’s righteous judgment, or else becoming like Saul, rejected by God as king of Israel, and set aside. If you require that medicine to live, so be it. Drink away.

It just wouldn’t be my first choice of beverage.