BLESSED BROKEN GIVENSýnishorn

The Brokenness of Sin

Odds are, in your garage or in a basement storage room, there are piles of tools or furniture or lawn equipment that was once sparkly and new, but is now rusted or scratched, missing parts and knobs and handles. It’s on your list to fix, but you never get to it. Eventually, it’s just time to get rid of it. That’s usually what happens to broken things. We purge them from our lives. 

The question is, “What does Jesus do with our brokenness?”

We use the word “broken” in several ways. Today, let’s reflect on the kind of brokenness that comes from our own failure. When we come up short, when we miss the mark, when we fail what is required of us in a given situation or relationship, we come face to face with our brokenness. 

The occasion for today’s text is Passover, the feast which commemorates God’s rescue of Israel from Egypt and God’s judgment of evil. God delivered His people by providing a covering of blood over their sins. It’s the perfect passage to talk about what Jesus does with our own brokenness. Jesus, the Lamb of God, took our sin upon Himself. His body, like bread, became broken for us. 

Now, we can be forgiven. Now, when you place the brokenness of your sin in Jesus’s hands, it becomes a brokenness that leads to openness to God’s grace. 

There’s an old Japanese art of mending broken pottery called, Kintsugi, which means “golden joinery.” It’s the art of joining broken pieces of pottery with a liquid resin that resembles gold. The result is a bowl or vase that is more beautiful, more aesthetically complex, and more valuable than the original piece.

That sounds like grace. Grace is the gold that holds the broken pieces together. Grace that takes what is broken and puts it back together in such a way that it is more beautiful and more valuable than it was before.

Where is the brokenness in your life? Let your brokenness open you up to the grace of God. When grace comes rushing in, it does not leave us broken in our sin. It heals and restores and cleanses and forgives. It makes us new in a way that is more beautiful than we could have imagined.

Place your broken life in Jesus’s hands.