The reason why so many evangelicals today have turned to “seeking the sinner,” to “watering down the Gospel,” and even to “lowering the bar” to enter the faith as low as possible is because they find the actual message that must be preached is too offensive. Most people would say we need to preach repentance and yes, we absolutely must preach repentance, but people will not repent Biblically until they are broken. Brokenness and repentance are attached at the hip. You need one before you can get the other, and often by hitting the topic of one, if done correctly, you will get the other.
Growing up, I was extremely averse to the notion of being broken over my sin. I decided that I would rather be moldable and let God work my sin out gradually and more gently. The heart of seeking to be Christ-like and to follow Christ is still there, but I am coming more and more to the realization that we will not break through unless God breaks us. The two most powerful sermons on this topic I have heard are Voddie Baucham’s “Brokenness” and David Wilkerson’s “A Call to Anguish.”
Brokenness over our sin and brokenness over the sins of others and this world are what drives us to action. Look at any good movie or book. There is always a point where the protagonist is faced with a choice to go on the journey or not. The protagonist will nearly always refuse it until something triggers him and drives him to action. Usually, it is a personal tragedy or loss that strips the protagonist of his ties to the common lifestyle and drives him to the journey. And the reason why this works so well in stories is because this is the Gospel. The Gospel calls us to be broken over our sin, to have our ties to that sin to be broken, and then to be driven by that separation onto the journey with the Lord.
So, what is brokenness? Brokenness is the coming to the end of your rope. Brokenness is the coming to the realization that you truly have nothing left. It is the moment of complete, total, and utter defeat that has no visual or realistic chance of making a comeback. Brokenness is coming to understand and realize one’s fate and to come to the point of acceptance. Brokenness is the full realization that any hope you have must come from an outside source and that you are truly dead without that hope.
Brokenness has a sister description: conviction. Here I am not talking about a such strongly held belief that nothing can sway you but rather that deep guilt and realization of how evil and wicked one is and the weight of what that means hits them full force. When Nathan confronted David regarding Bathsheba and Uriah, David was convicted, and he was broken. He understood the total severity of his sin. So did the woman caught in adultery who was thrown to Jesus’ feet to be condemned. So was the crowd during Peter’s sermon at Pentecost. So was the Philippian jailer. In each of these cases, and there are many others, the weight of the sin pressed so heavily on them that their only option was to turn to the Lord and plead for His mercy.
We need to preach brokenness again. We need to preach sin again. We need to preach the holiness, righteousness, and justice of God again. I heard someone say that we can’t do “standard preaching” anymore because 70% of the youth are leaving the church. I replied that hardly anyone is even preaching at all anymore. Because of watering things down to be sinner/seeker friendly and to get as many in the door as possible, there is no preaching going on. There are TED talks. There are motivational speeches. There are feel-good messages. I’ve sat in some churches where this takes place, and I’ve sat in secular motivational speaker audiences before as well. The ONLY difference between the two is that one slaps God’s name on it and promises that God will deal with the problem. What did I get out of them? Absolutely nothing because there is no power in any of them.
The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation. Preaching is the God-chosen method by which that message is proclaimed. And yes, the world does reject it. So what? They are chasing after the motivational talks and are not getting anything from them either. But when a preacher gives a sermon that has the power to convict, that has the power to pierce that heart of stone so that it may shatter that hardness and reveal the beating heart of flesh on the inside, that is when the world gets turned upside down. But too many people don’t want to preach the Gospel correctly because chances are very high that they have their own sins that they don’t want to let go of. People do not want to hear messages that preach brokenness because they know they would be the one broken. They love their sin and want to stay in it, but they also want the free gift of eternity at no cost to self. They don’t want to rock the boat; they know that when the Gospel hits full force, nothing is the same and it’s like a bomb blew up. But every time the Gospel has done this, the aftermath has always been good.
But brokenness is not the end. As Baucham put it, repentance is the exit off a highway towards sin and Hell and brokenness is the off-ramp. Brokenness is just a short, small step in a much bigger process. It is brokenness that brings us to the feet of Christ; once we are broken, then we can get back up and live as Christ would have us live. Brokenness is the first step in the proper response to the Gospel, and repentance (a lifestyle of turning from sin) is the next. Repentance is not a one-time thing, nor is it something you do when you go forward down the aisle at church, say a prayer, and you are saved. Repentance is a fruit of God, a word needing to be done by man, and a gift from God. We’ll talk about that next week.
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