No experience in your life is ever wasted or in vain if you give all
your cares to the Lord. Even if your fragmented life looks like an abandoned
battlefield, Jesus can reshape all the pieces of your past into something
beautiful.
After
Jesus had fed five thousand people with just a few loaves of bread and two
small fish, He told His disciples, "Gather up now the fragments (the
broken pieces that are left over), so that nothing may be lost and wasted"
(John 6:12). The disciples gathered up twelve baskets of food from the
leftovers, still much more than the small offering of loaves and fishes that
was made to Jesus in the first place.
God set me free from fear, insecurity, emotional addictions, and the
bondage of a deep-rooted sense of rejection. Then He reshaped my fragmented
life and gave me the glorious privilege of teaching His people how they can be
whole; how they can have fruitful, happy lives and ministries; and how they can
enjoy healthy, loving relationships.
I have learned to receive unconditional love from God, from Dave, and
even from myself. My husband does not do everything I want him to, the way I
want him to, when I want him to; but that is okay now,
because I have learned how to love him unconditionally too. When we were
first married, I did not know anything about unconditional love. My family had
to do everything my way, or else I assumed they did not love me.
When I suffered from a broken heart, everyone who was in a relationship
with me had to work very hard to try to keep me happy. They suffered because
they could never be real with me. They could never honestly tell me the truth
about anything. They had to tell me what I wanted to hear if they wanted any
peace at all.
If I said
to Dave, "Let's go get a cup of coffee," he could not say,
"Well, I would rather not do that," or I would pout. That was my way
of controlling things. I was broken: shattered, fractured, fragmented, and
dysfunctional. I had been violated, and I was making everyone pay for my pain,
even if they were not the ones who had caused it.
If you
have been violated through abuse, your rights as a human being were dishonored,
which can cause you to feel overwhelmed. So many victims of abuse eventually
reach the point where they say, "I can't handle this." They are not
really troubled by the problems in everyday life; they are overwhelmed by the
problems of a broken heart. Those of us who grew up in a dysfunctional home are
often so insecure that we create dysfunctional homes too.
We need inner strength to keep from being overwhelmed by outward
circumstances. We must allow God to gather up our fragmented dreams and remold
us into the image of Christ. To do that, He may have to crush the few pieces we
have left into fine clay, water us with His Word, reshape our lumpy mass of
leftovers, and put us back on His potter's wheel. But He is more than capable
of designing something miraculous from whatever we have left to give Him.
Jesus told us that in the world there would be trouble, saying, "I
have told you these things, so that in Me you may have [perfect] peace and
confidence. In the world you have tribulation and trials and distress and
frustration; but be of good cheer [take courage; be confident, certain, undaunted]!
For I have overcome the world. [I have deprived it of power to harm you and
have conquered it for you]" (John 16:33).Nobody can avoid tribulation in
this life, but those who put their faith in Jesus can be of good cheer:
"Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him
out of them all" (Psalm 34:19 kjv). But the Word does not say that God
delivers us immediately. We may have to go through a few things first.
Life always overcomes death, and light always overcomes darkness. Without
God's Word, the future may seem dark, but Jesus said that He came to deliver us
from darkness: "I have come as a Light into the world, so that whoever
believes in Me
[whoever cleaves to and trusts in
and relies on Me] may not continue to live in darkness" (John 12:46).
Instead of living in darkness and misery, we are to continue to follow Jesus
and conform wholly to His example in living (see John 12:26).
You cannot continue if you are broken, overwhelmed, or subdued. But by
now, you have received enough of God's Word through the testimonies in this
book, to know that you are no longer bound to your past, if you follow the
Lord. Jesus said, "If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and
live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples. And you will know
the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" (John 8:31-32).
Continue To Follow The Lord
God
plants dreams in people's hearts. But many people do not continue all the way
to the end in order to follow Him to the fulfillment of that dream. Many get
started and quit, get started and quit, get started and quit. They do not
continue because their broken heart overwhelms their hope. They do not have any
inner strength to carry them through to the end. Jesus will bind up your wounds
and heal your bruises. His Word is medicine for your soul (see Proverbs
4:20-22). Read the Word of God every day, even if you read only one verse each
day. I encourage you to read my daily devotional,Starting Your Day Right,and
then as you fall asleep at night, think God-inspired thoughts, such as: I am
the
righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. God loves me. He has a good plan
for my future. Then pray faith-filled prayers such as this:Lord,I believe that
You love me and that You can take up all these broken pieces of my life and
make something out of them for my good. In Romans 8:28 Your Word says,
"All things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and
for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and
purpose." I love You, Lord. I believe that You forgive me. Father, I
receive Your healing for my broken heart.
Do not go to bed at night thinking what a horrible mess you are in and
how you will never overcome it, or how nothing will ever get any better, or how
nothing will ever be any different. Take the Word as your medicine. It is
medicine for your flesh, your soul, and your spirit. Study it so that the power
of the Word and the Spirit can work together in your life.
When you read a verse in the Bible that you want to appropriate for
yourself, add it to your prayers. For example, Psalm 30:11-12 can become part
of your bedtime praises; along with the psalmist you can worship God by
praying:You have turned my mourning into dancing for me; You have put off my
sackcloth and girded me with gladness, to the end that my tongue and my heart
and everything glorious within me may sing praise to You and not be silent. O
Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever. God is eager to pour out His
Spirit into your life. Just pray,Lord, move in my life. Do whatever You
Your Pain Will Not Be Wasted
As a child I was never able to be carefree, never able to live without
worries, never able just to wake up and play. I always felt sorry for myself
because it seemed that my childhood and teenage years were just wasted. And
then I was in a bad marriage for five years, and I felt that was a waste. As an
adult, I felt that I had spent so many years just wasting my life. But God
gathered up those wasted years and made my mess become my message.
He found
value in every sad situation I lived through. You may be wondering,How could
God ever make anything good out of this mess that I have created? God has ways
that we know nothing about. He is using all of my wasted years to reach the
thousands upon thousands of people who say to me, "I listen to you every
day."
Sometimes
I marvel at what they are listening to. They hear me tell about what a mess I
used to be and how God made me whole again, and that message is giving them
hope and faith that He will do the same for them. He is getting value out of my
brokenness by using it to heal other peoples' brokenness.
Maybe you feel that you have wasted your life until now, but spending
your time thinking about it does
not move you to a new place. If you trust God, He can do something
glorious in whatever time you have left, even if it is only a short while. God
can do something so glorious in the time that you have remaining that
everything you went through will have been worth it just to see God take it and
do what He can do in you. It is impossible for me to be doing what I am doing
today When God called me into ministry, to say I was a mess does not even
accurately describe it. But I loved God, and I did not want to continue being
the way I was. I just did not know how to change the way I was and be different
and better. It took years for God to get me where He needed me to be, but I
believe that He is doing a quicker work of righteousness in these last days.
God Will Do What Seems Impossible
Even if it takes decades, it is better to be on your way up than on your
way down. Pray,Okay God, here. Take my broken life and gather up the fragments
so that nothing in it will be wasted. Do not remain broken; make a decision to
trust your past and your future to the Lord.
You may feel the way Martha felt when her brother Lazarus died. She said
to Jesus, "Master, if You had been here, my brother would not have
died" (John 11:21). Jesus could have arrived on the scene sooner, but the
Bible says that He purposely waited until Lazarus was dead and laid in the
grave. He waited until the situation was so impossible that if anything
We need to understand that when God does not move in our circumstances,
or when He does not move as quickly as we would like for Him to move, He may be
waiting on purpose. Just when we think there is no way out of our mess, God
will prove to us how strong and wonderful He is on our behalf (See 2 Chronicles
16:9).I had been trying to serve God for years. Why did He wait so long to
touch me with the power of the Holy Ghost? Why didn't He do it two years
before? Four years before? I think He was just waiting until it would take a
miracle to prove that He was working in my life. The fact that God could use my
life for ministry is a miracle in itself.
If Jesus
had put His twelve chosen disciples through personality tests, the results
would have indicated that they did not have the qualities needed to make a good
ministry team. The analysts would have advised Jesus to continue His search for
men who were more suited for the work He was going to require of them. Their
reports would have read, "Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits
of temper, and Thomas is full of doubt," and one by one, each disciple
would have been similarly disqualified.
It is interesting to note that before Jesus chose these twelve men (see
Luke 6:12-16), He prayed all night! I wonder how long He prayed before He chose
you and me to do what we are called to do. Jesus knows
all about each one of us, yet He picked us anyway. Why? He wants to heal
the brokenhearted. He wants to gather up the fragments and show His power. And
the weaker the people He chooses, the greater His power is visible through
them.
When I
first started serving God, I spent half of every week crying in self-pity. In
spite of that fact, I was still anointed to teach Bible studies; I could preach
then just as well as I can right now. But God kept me trapped in my living room
with twenty-five people for years before He began to lead me into the worldwide
ministry I have today.
I learned that God would not release me for public ministry until I had
let Him do a work in my most private life. But during all that time of
faithfulness to little things, I was progressing little by little, from glory
to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18 kjv).The great thing about God is that He does not
just see where we are, He also sees where we are going. And He treats us with
the end in mind throughout the whole trip. He loves us with an unconditional
love from the beginning of our relationship. We may try to get His love every
way imaginable, but all we need to do is receive it.
Sometimes we try so hard to get into the presence
of God, but the truth is that it is impossible to get away from Him. He is in
constant pursuit of us.
In Psalm 139:7-10 the psalmist
wrote of God:
If I ascend up into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol
(the place of the dead), behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning or dwell in the uttermost parts of
the sea,
Even there shall Your hand lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.
In verse 16 of this passage, the psalmist says that
all the days of our lives "were written before ever they took shape, when
as yet there was none of them."
And in verses 17 and 18, he says that God thinks about us all the time:
"How precious and weighty also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is
the sum of them! If I could count them, they would be more in number than the
sand."
Do not determine your self-worth by how others have treated you. Receive
your worth and value from who you are in Christ.
You may
sometimes feel that the Lord is not near, but that is why knowing the Word is
so important. The prophet Isaiah brought a complaint before the Lord, reporting
that His people were saying:"The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has
forgotten me."
[And the Lord answered] "Can
a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the
son of her womb? Yes, they may forget, yet I will not forget you.
Behold, I
have indelibly imprinted (tattooed a picture of) you on the palm of each of My
hands" (Isaiah 49:14-16).
Parents did not originate the idea of keeping pictures of their children
handy-God carries a picture of His children everywhere He goes. The next time
you question your self-worth, remember that God has your picture tattooed on
the palms of His hands.
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