Square One: Brokenness to Wholeness

Hi everyone. How are you? It's good to see you all glad that you joined us online as well. If you're joining us online, we're excited about today. I'm excited about this on a lot of levels. This is Jeremy and Jeremy is my counselor. Here's the main reason why I'm so excited about today. He spends two days a week making me feel really uncomfortable. And so today I get to return the favor. I'm super stoked about that. So we've been going on this journey for about 10 months together, and I couldn't think of a better person to partner with me on this  topic that we're talking about today, but before we get there, I just want to throw this out to you. I know that Halloween is gonna look different this year than, than it has in the past. And so I just wanna invite you to one opportunity to think about how to spend your Halloween. Lifeline, which is a ministry that helps feed hungry people all over the world. They're in the SECOR building. They're going to have a big food pack where you can go and take your kids in costume and there will be things for the kids to do and have a costume contest for each hour that they're going to have hour slots available for that. You can go to lifeline.org/Denver, and that will take you to the sign up and give you all the details on that. And that'd be great. You can help make a difference in the world that way.

So, we're going to jump into this series. And today we're talking about our second pillar. So last week we talked about  living a spiritually disciplined life. And today what we're going to talk about is this. We want to move the broken pieces of our life to wholeness and that's actually a major piece of discipleship. That's actually a major piece of us becoming everything that Jesus wants us to be. The amazing thing about Jesus is that, you know, when he dies, he gives us salvation -- death, burial, resurrection. He gives us salvation and that's super awesome, but Jesus didn't only want to save us. He also wanted to heal us and set us free. And so, the journey of moving the broken places of our life into wholeness is really, really important for us as Christians. And it's really easy to avoid that. And then, and then we wind up really costing ourselves and everyone around us because we don't become what God's intended us to be. We're saved, but here's the thing I want to invite you to consider -- everything that we're going to talk about through this lens -- eternal life, doesn't start the day we die. Eternal life starts the day we say yes to Jesus. And so today for those of us that have said yes to Jesus, we are living into eternal life now. And so we need to be working at taking these places in our life that are broken and moving them towards wholeness. And so I want to begin this morning with Genesis 3:6. This is right after the snake comes and talks to Eve and gets her all kind of confused about what the fruit is for and how it's supposed to be used. And so this is what it says, starting in verse six, “when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes and the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” This hit me this morning. Why do they hide themselves? If they've already, if they've already covered themselves, why are they hiding themselves? That is, I think part of it is that what we do when we, when we know that we've done something wrong or we've made a mistake, or we've created a fracture on our heart or on somebody else's heart is we immediately try to disconnect from God. That's what we do. And then all of a sudden, we figure out that we can't disconnect from God, cause he's fully present everywhere all the time. And so what we do then is we disconnect with people and that's exactly what happens in this process. “The Lord, God called to the man and said to him, ‘where are you?’” Now, I always stop there. Does God need to ask that question? No, he knows where they are. He knew everything before he showed up that day. But he's asking this for them because God is trying to press to reengage. He's like reengaging connection. He's re-engaging relationship with them. And they're hiding from him. Where are you? “And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ And he said, “who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?’ The man said, ‘that woman, you gave me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate it.’”. So, this is what happens when we figure out that we can't disconnect from God, because God lovingly walks him down a path like Adam, I'm here, I'm with you, but I saw everything. I'm still with you. But, and he immediately disconnects from her, “she gave me the fruit from the tree and I ate. Then the Lord said to the woman, ‘what is this that you've done? The woman said, ‘the serpent deceived me…’ Because she did the same thing, right? She's disconnect, disconnect, disconnect. This is what happens when we have fractures in our world. This is what happens when we have brokenness in our life. We try to disconnect from God and we disconnect from people. It's just, just what happens.

And so today what I want to do is talk about brokenness to wholeness. And so, um, as we get started with this, I'd love Jeremy, if you just give us a good working definition of brokenness, and we'll talk a little bit about that and then give us a working definition of wholeness. And we'll talk about that. 


Brokenness is when a fracture, disorder or disconnect exists in the way we relate to God, to his creation, to other people, to ourselves. What happens so often as we experience brokenness around us, we experience brokenness in our self, usin is, happens to us. We also sin against other people. Um, and then we do our best to run from that sin -- avoid to hide. Typically, that leads to more fractures. We, rather than bringing it to God, to his people, our tendency is to pull back, to pull away, to disconnect. Or, even within ourselves, you know, to kind of put in the closet whatever hurt has happened to us to move forward, to move on, um, or when we've sent, try to, you know, push that away as well. And so, so often what happens is, in the very time that we need connection the most, is where we're most distanced and isolated. 

Hmm. That's really good. And I want to give you an illustration of what he's talking about here, that, you know, we have brokenness and we don't deal with it actually creates more brokenness in our life. Like, fracture creates more fractures. Let me show you a picture. This is a picture of pair of glasses and the glasses that we have, like think of, imagine the world view that you have is designed to give you a lens to filter the world, right? And it should bring things into focus for us. It should bring things into focus. So the idea of like having a Christian worldview is that as believers in Jesus, we have this understanding of who God is and how he created the world and those kinds of things. And that should give us a focus on how we see things. It should bring things into clarity for us. The problem is, let's look at the second photo. We get fractures on our lens. People hurt us. We hurt other people. We hurt ourselves. We misrepresent our relationship with God. And so these fractures, what they do is they start to distort our image. And so it makes it harder to see with clarity, how we're supposed to actually filter the world. So, the same input is coming in, but we're not seeing it the same way. Which is fine when we have a few fractures on our lenses. But what if , let's look at the third picture? What if it's like that? What if it's just the more fractures that we have, the more that it distorts our image, does that make sense? And the problem is that when we have fractures in our heart, fractures create more fractures. Brokenness creates more brokenness. If we don't let that thing heal. Imagine if you were a runner and you are out running and you fracture your ankle, right? If you keep running on it and you don't let it heal, what happens is you get more breaks. It starts chipping bone more, and it starts getting worse. What we have to do is, if we have fractures in her life, we have to stop, acknowledge those fractures, what they are and let them let them heal. Which I believe that it's impossible for us to heal our fractures in our own heart, by ourselves. It's impossible to heal it by ourself. We have to do it in community.

There's a couple of reasons for that. We talked about this. One is that brokenness is easier to see in other people than it is to see in ourselves. The other thing is, and if you're in a safe environment, that's actually really awesome attribute to have that we can observe one another's brokenness. But the problem is, what we do with that, with that power in somebody else's life too many times, as we misrepresent and hurt them, we use it against them and that's really, really bad. But we can't do it by ourselves. Cause we can't even see our own brokenness. Like we don't, for many people, they've been looking through a fractured lens so long, they didn't even know that's not how the world was supposed to look. And so that becomes really, really painful.

Let's, let's talk about wholeness, give us a definition of wholeness. So this is the integration of all the parts of myself with all the parts of my story in a way that doesn't contradict. It is our ability, or our willingness, to be present to all of the pieces of ourselves, all of the pieces of our story, all the of the story of the people around us. So often what ends up happening is when we take those broken places or those broken parts of our story, and we, you know, we push them to the sideline or we could try to push through them as we unknowingly, bring those forward into our current relationships, it gets passed down into our other friendships, our relationships with our spouse, our kids, coworkers, and what ends up so often happening is those places that we're afraid to go into or who feel ashamed to go into, end up perpetuating beyond where they need to go. And they so often create this anxious kind of connection with God and this anxious connection with his people. You know, when we're doing well, when we are living a good life, when our sin is managed and maintained well, when we're reading our Bible, those are the moments that it's very easy to exist in relationship with God. It's the moments where we aren't afraid of church or his community. And then when we need relationship the most, which is when we're struggling, that's where we typically isolate and experience the most disconnection and the people around us experience that same thing where sometimes we're present to them, sometimes we're pulled back. And it's very, it lacks predictability about when we're going to show up, and how we're going to show up to the people that we love the most. Which creates more brokenness or fractures. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when, when there's a lack of predictability about how I show up in our relationship, that means you can't trust me. Does that make sense? Because he never knows what he's going to get, for example. And so consequently, if I'm not dealing with my brokenness, I'm actually creating brokenness for you, which then spins out into me trusting you less. That that's kind of this cycle of brokenness. That's how it works. That I think this generally to be true. And you back me up on this, if I'm right, tell me if I'm wrong, you have permission. You've been doing it forever anyway. I think generally speaking people kind of want to be whole, is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. It's fair. You know, very few people wake up in the morning and want to perpetuate their brokenness or wants to do harm. Not many people wake up and I want to hurt my kids or I want to hurt my wife, or I want to, you know, bring down the whole atmosphere of my work and my employees. For the most part, we want goodness for ourselves. We want goodness for the people around us. We want more wholeness and it's often very elusive. 

Yeah. So if that's true, if we kind of generally want wholeness, then what are some things that get in the way? I think a lot of times what gets in the way is that lens, that lens, it filters unknowingly. We bring our brokenness into relationship. We bring it into relationship with God. So one of the things that gets in the way as our view of God, the Bible says we're made in the image of God. And so oftentimes we get it in reverse and we make God in our image, or at least an image of how we've experienced other humans. So it's really common in my office where, you know, intellectually, right, when someone's talking about their faith and how it should affect their wholeness, there is a deep belief that God is good, that God loves me, that he wants good for me that he's, you know, that he's for me. But then when they relate to God, especially within their brokenness, there is this guardedness, there's this, sometimes it's perfectionism of “I need to be further along in this process. I need to be more sanctified”. God wouldn't want me. And typically those are the places that cause us to pull away or hide. And then when you, when I start getting into someone's story, I realize, or we realize together how, how much that mirrors their attachments to other people, their parents, their loved ones, you know, other people who have loved them, the best that they knew how, but also brokenly. 

Yeah. And so, for example, like dad was a tyrant, he was overbearing and controlling. And so I view God as overbearing and controlling. And he only wants me to do what he says. He doesn't care about me, or want to have relationship with me or connect. Or for example, anytime that I did something well, mom and dad took credit for it as good parenting, which means that I'm never enough unless I am producing something good and I connect that to God. Or, people around me tend to be selfish. So I view God as generally selfish. He wants me to do what he wants me to do, because he wants me to do it. And there's not any part of that that's for my good. It's all for him to feel good about his control of me or whatever. Those are examples of how our view of God can be distorted based on our experience and that plays out. Cause I really believe that what you really believe about God and what you really believe about people so influences the decisions that we make day to day. You know, if God really is good and he's a God of abundance and all those things, I don't have to fear lean times. I have the freedom to be generous, those kinds of things. Or, if God is a tyrant and a controller, then I'm constantly in fear when I don't feel like I measure up to my own expectations.

Talk about projected brokenness. Yeah. One of the other ways that I think one of the other things I think gets in the way of brokenness is our view of people. Again, we bring our own sin patterns, our own brokenness around hurts into a relationship and it is the filter that we so often perceive other people's actions. And we often expect and believe that other people see us and see the world the way we do. And so, any unfinished business, that I have, in terms of how I view myself, how I think other people view me, I bring that into relationship. And oftentimes, when I'm looking for evidence, I find it, right? If I'm looking for evidence that you're not safe, I find evidence that you're not safe. If I'm looking for evidence that you think I'm a failure, I find it. If I expect you to reject me, I look for evidence that you will and you do. So often, we bring our view of people and our own self into relationship, and that poses more harm. We operate from the assumption that everybody sees a situation, the same way I do. And then that once they see it, they process it the same way I respond. And consequently, you're going to, you're going to do what I would do. So I I'm gonna preemptively reject you. Absolutely it, yeah, that's, that's a profound one. And so how do we deal with that? So most of us, you know, very early on in our lives, we realized the world was pretty broken, whether we were aware of it or not. And we found, you know, ways to manage ways to cope, ways to exist in relationship. Much of these ways protected us or, create safety, create security, these needs that we all have, um, in a broken world where they're not consistently met. We find ways to meet those needs on our own. Sometimes it's pulling away from people. Sometimes it's moving towards them and caring for them, or, you know, finding these different strategies that makes life work for us. The problem is typically, especially if it's a compulsive way or it's kind of a learned pattern, it usually starts to break down and more brokenness happens more fragmentation, rather than more healing. Yeah. Yeah. I know for me, I grew up in a home where, I didn't believe that my feelings were safe. And so what I did with my feelings is I shoved them into a really small little ball and I pushed them way down, which worked. 
I survived, but then when they would crop up, I didn't have any coping skills for how to do them. So what I learned to do was to eat my emotions. I am so good at it. I am such a good eater that I should be paid for it. I'm a professional eater. People, people marvel at the rate at which I can eat and the volume it's magical. I learned that to learn to cope with my, because I wasn't, that was the, that was the brokenness of the world that I lived in. Right? And part of that is, you know, my parents gave me the very best version of them that they had to give. There was just some brokenness that they carried that nobody helped them see. So they got to pass that down. And that's the problem with brokenness is that when we don't take the challenge to allow the Holy Spirit through God's people and through other venues to heal our brokenness, we, we give that brokenness to other people. Which by the way, for the record, we also give healing to other people. When we allow ourselves to experience it, like the place we come from is the place that we offer to other people in connection, in relationship. And so for me, what happened was, as I got older, I didn't have, I didn't know how to process my emotions. So I just kept them, turned off allegedly. I became a, really a driving, pace setting leader. I would grind people into the ground and then just move them on. You don't care about the mission enough. And I would bring somebody else in and just use them to perpetuate whatever I thought was important, which I mean, consider the other side of that venue. It's fine if you're the one on top, but what if you're the one who's the employee? How does that feel? Right? That feels really disgusting. And for me that was something that I didn't even realize I'm doing, right. I was like, yes, I care about people. You don't care about the mission. You know, that was, I was so quick to do that because of this projected brokenness. And I had an unhealthy coping strategy. I had many unhealthy coping strategies, eating and not caring about people are two of those.

So here's the thing. So the world is broken and we know that, and we know that when we're challenged, to press into relationship, it's a scary preposition because we're going into an already broken situation already broken, personally. So what are some ways that we can deal with the world's brokenness and begin to heal our own brokenness? Just like in Genesis 3, we see a break in the order. I think one of the, the only way that healing truly happens is when we restore,  kind of the order that God intended, which is it's risky, right? And we will still experience harm, but it is learning to bring all of ourselves back into relationship with God. Bring all of ourselves are good parts or bad parts, healthy habits or sin patterns into relationship with his people in a vulnerable way and an honest way. So often we are not present and honest to significant parts of ourselves or our stories or we're not kind to those parts of ourselves and kind of those parts and other people. And so I think the more that we can acknowledge our brokenness, be kind to it, acknowledge the brokenness and other people and be kind to it, as well as inviting more and more and more God into those things, right. In Matthew 22 talks about that. All of the law can be summed up in love God, love others, love their neighbor. Right. And, you know, we so often in our brokenness actually pull away from God's love, pull away from our neighbors’ love, pull away from loving God, pull away from loving others. 

Okay. So you said so many things. I have a million questions now. We're going off script. So talk about open and vulnerable, honest and vulnerable. You use those terms and talk about what that means. Yeah. I think there's an, am I aware of the hurts that I bring? Am I aware of the ways I've been harmed in this broken world? Not as a victim, not as a woe is me, but I am, I have experienced hurt. I have experienced harm that matters. Right. You have experienced hurt, you have experienced harm that matters. So much of what we experience is that there will not be grace or kindness or empathy, or whatever buzz words you like to use. Acceptability towards the parts of me that I, that I already judged. So ultimately, you know, not every environment is actually safe to do that, but finding more and more -- creating the more and more safety in my relationship with God and my safety with other people that I can bring all of myself, honestly, vulnerably, even the parts that I worry people will criticize or judge. Yeah. And then that's, that's really good. Thank you for that.

And then the other part that I wanted to ask you about was, you talked about being honest and kind to yourself and honest and kind to other people. Help me understand that. Yeah. So often we label our own problems and we label the problems in other people. We, and typically we do that when we are fearful that we're going to be harmed by those things. So, you know, we'll do this with our spouses, with our kids, our employees, or employers, right. He's just -- fill in the blank, she's just -- fill in the blank and then, you know, they can do it back to us versus taking the time to understand how someone developed, taking that time to be gracious and kind to why that might have been an important part of their safety or their security once upon a time. Most people don't want to stay broken, like we said earlier. And so when they feel safe and kind to explore why they're broken, they heal, and the same happens for us. And that's the beauty of, of community. That's the beauty of relationship with God is he ultimately creates that safety for us and, you know, his church ought to as well. Yeah. And we, one of the reasons why we do life groups, one of the reasons why we believe in life groups is because it creates space to have some of those kinds of conversations for us, which is actually a big deal. Cause for many of us, we don't need, like, our wounds are real, they're there, but they're not like PTSD inducing level of trauma. Some of us, we have those kinds of wounds, but for a lot of us, we don't, we just need a friend. We just need somebody to believe in our good. Um, but that, you know, I think about our life group leaders and I love our life group leaders and what they do, that's front line's ministry in our world. Um, and what I know is if you're going to be like, okay, I want to be a person that people can come to. Right.? And, and, and I want to be a person that can share, but I want to, I want to have that kind of relationship with people.

So the conversation that always comes to me is, okay, what about boundaries? Um, when do we, when is it due? Cause it sounds like on the surface, like if you read the Bible and you're really going to love people well, that you kind of just have to be a doormat and get bullied and get walked over and all that kind of stuff. And that's, that's the space that you have to live in and you just have to kind of take it for Jesus. Um, and so let's talk about boundaries and how we can understand healthy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean that sacrificial love does exist, right? That love of Jesus does exist where we sacrifice for others, for sure. And right at the same time there we are broken, fragile, human beings. And we have God's spirit in us. We have his image, we have his divinity pieces of that in us, but we also have tremendous fragility. And when we don't honor that, the good in us often gets worn down, beat down, broken down, and then we no longer have that to offer God, self, relationships. And so, you know, there is that fine line of that is, you know, it's not a black and white clear distinction all the time of when does this relationship becomes so harmful that it actually prohibits me from existing in healthy relationship with God; healthy relationship with other healthy people.  Certainly there are times where that boundary does look like, Hey, you know, this isn't a person who is desiring to grow. This isn't a person who's desiring to be healthy and safe with me. If I continue to do this, I'm going to experience such harm, such fractures that that image of God in me is going to get tarnished so quickly that I won't have it to offer other people. I think those are places where we have to start talking about where's the boundary, where's the line. I also think other places are, you know, when I'm so spread thin, or when I've given so much that really like God's offering me into rest or God's welcoming me into remembering that I am human. Right. I am not divine. Like I come with limitations. 

Yeah. I was just thinking about it as you were talking, you know, young people who are dating and they're, you know, they have an abusive boyfriend and girlfriend and they're like, but if I just loved them enough, right? And they allow themselves to continue to be abused, like, and it actually hurts. It hurts me worse to stay in that relationship. And it's not an act of love. Yeah. It doesn’t love the other person either. Right. Allowing someone to continue to harm you does not love them because it requires nothing of them and their own growth and their own development. It permits them to stay broken. It permits them to stay  broken to stay stuck with all the blessings that come with what should be wholeness. 

Yeah. Yeah. That's really good. So tell me about this. Tell me about burden shifting. Yeah. One of the common ways, especially as you talk about life groups and ministry, caring for people in general that can happen is, kind of the emotional, what would be the  indebtedness maybe, right? Like you owe this to me because you're a believer, because you're a leader, you're my life group leader. You're my spouse even, right? Like you owe me this kind of mentality. And so oftentimes, there are certain types of people who will abuse relationships under the implication that you must, or you ought to, one of the passages that Cloud and Townsend use in their book, “Boundaries”, references Galatians 6 and this small, like three verse window, it talks about bear one another's burden. And then not even two or three verses later, it says we should each carry our own burden. The bearing of the burden that the Greek in that is the same all the way up until the subject of the verb, which is different. And it's different by degree, right? So in “bear one another's burden” the implication of that, that word burden, is this heavy -- it's, I can't carry it alone. Like, something has happened that is so much, it's an insurmountable harm, right? This insurmountable harm that happens to me and community should come around me in those moments. Right. I should come around others in those moments. Then the second is, is it's an actually a military term. And the idea is it's, it's like their backpack, right? It's, it's their pack that they're supposed to carry. And what can often happen in burden shifting is someone can get used to putting on other people what belongs to them. And then, everyone, you know, owes me, or ought to, or should take this from me. Where I should actually learn how to live with what's in my pack, which is, you know, my story, my feelings, my emotions, my behaviors, those things that are mine to own. I can blame other people or I can put it on other people that they're responsible for that, which causes tremendous harm to the relationship, causes pain, resentment, frustration, a feeling of being rejected. Even if I'm not being rejected, it kind of perpetuates those fractures. 

Yeah. And that people are subtle at that. They're like masters and they don't even know. Yeah. I don't think they're even know that they're doing it, but people are so good. And if you don't, if you like put that boundary in place, don't expect it to go well, right. Like if you're like, no, no, I don't have to own your emotion. You're not even a believer. Like, I've literally had that conversation with people. Like I'm not responsible for your emotional wellbeing. You've got to work that through. I'm here with you, I'll journey with you, but I can't carry it for you. And people will be like, you don't even know Jesus. Wow. That's heavy. You know, but that happens when people want to shift their burdens. Cause we don't, I don't want to feel the pain of my burden. I want to give it to you to feel. Um, and that means, you know, here's the good news. I don't have to feel the pain of my burden, but the way to alleviate the pain of it isn't to give it to somebody else it's to walk through it and heal it. Like that's the only way that we can get past that pain. Cause the truth is if I offload it to you, I don't really, I multiply it. I don't get rid of it.

So, something that you say, the know where you err. Tell me about that. Yeah. I think one of the important things in relationship is to know myself, to know my patterns, to know my tendencies. Know where I err, right? So there are plenty of people who their err is to move towards relationship recklessly, whether it's a healthy relationship or not. There are others who at the first exit ramp of pain,  abandon and I cut off relationship because you've hurt me too much or too many people have hurt me. And so I think knowing where I err, relationally, helps me. You know, if I almost always do this, I'm probably not erring over here too often. Right. And so if, if my tendency is to make space in a relationship at a fault, I don't really necessarily need to be too fearful of being relationally selfish. You know, although other people might call me that in that kind of emotional dance of trying to offload their backpack. If I am someone who, man, I know I've got a lot of trauma and I've got a lot of pain relationally, there's a lot of fractures. It is common to protect yourself. And so at the first sign of woundedness or potential woundedness, you know, my strategy is always to exit. It helps me know, okay. You know, should I leave this relationship? Maybe not, maybe actually I need to be willing to risk getting hurt because to exist in relationship with God now to exist in relationship with God's people there are going to be moments of pain that we experienced either abandonment or rejection. Especially from people, but even from God, we can experience that as rejection from him, with broken lenses. Yeah. Even though it isn't, it isn't rejection from him, but we just experienced, we see that that way. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's so good.

So good. You know, I hope, I hope that as you, as we look at this space of brokenness to wholeness, like I want you to know every single one of us is broken somewhere. You have more or less fractures in your life and there's any number of factors in that. Some of that is just simply the way that I perceive everything, but God's heart for us, Jesus said, you know, when he came to die, he said, I came that you might have life and have that to its fullest. Like, God's heart for you is to have a whole life as we live into eternity. That's  what his desire is for us. And I think for too many of us, we're just, like I said yes to Jesus and I'm just going to hunker down and hold on and embrace the world. And the crazy thing is he says, I came that you would have the fullest life possible. And so what I want you to do, and that is, I want you to go and engage relationships with really broken people that don't know they're broken. And you're like, that's ridiculous. Right. That's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. It is. I guess why would we be to do that? I think some of it is that is how we're wired. We will move towards the relationship people. And that is where hopefulness is, right? The truth is, even if we're broken, we experience, we will experience these glimpses often of, Oh, that felt right, relationally. Like, Oh, I'm, you know, I need that belonging, that connection. And if we don't do the work, oftentimes it's very fleeting. But there is a way in which we're wired, where we are intended to be in relationship with God and we're intended to be in relationship with people. And without it, we experience more and more harm, more and more isolation. And so, it is counterintuitive when we so fear being hurt by people, to move towards them. But if we don't, we necessitate more woundedness, more hurt because we cannot live apart from other people.

So, I have some implications for the sermon today as we kind of transition into communion time, because what a great thing to take communion on the back end of this conversation. But here's the first implication. The first implication is this, the world is a broken place. It just is it's broken. And I think God's heart is to partner with you and I to restore what sin broke. And in doing that, the first place that we have to start is in restoring what's broken in ourselves as we're helping other people. Not, it's not get myself figured out first and then engage. It's the journey of mutual growth together and your growth inspires growth in me and vice versa. Like we all grow healthier faster when we do it together. What I know to be true is when I try to help somebody, when I try to disciple somebody by myself, you know, and I try to help them grow up in Christ, whatever, they start to look a lot more like me. When we do it in community and connect it to groups, you know, to a life group, then they start to look a whole lot more like Jesus, because the perspective of who God is in that person's life is way more well rounded. So it's really important that we know that.

The second implication is this Jesus came not only to save us, but also to heal us and to set us free. And he's asking us to live into this reality of eternal life today in a more full, more whole perspective.

Implication number three is that God gave us the church as a space to help us heal our own brokenness. Like part of why we need a church family is because this is a space where we can come and find healing for the fractures on our lens. Now, that being said, I know that for some of us were like, no, you don't understand my, my brokenness is bad. It's bad. I don't , this isn’t like go to a life group and offload it. This is a big deal. We have this incredible counseling center here that is actually really, really good. Southeast Christian counseling center is, they're amazing. Jeremy works there and I can tell you from firsthand experience there, they are incredible. And I love it because, for me as a pastor, I don't have very many spaces in my life that are where I can just talk about me. And this isn't anybody else's fault. Like I don't, I don't get to have a lot of relationships where I can come in and go, Hey, I need you to shut up and not care about you, right now. And just listen to me and hear me. I, I pay him to say, you don't get to talk about you. It's awesome. Jeremy does it so well to hold space for me to be able to go, you know what, I have, this needs to be about me right now, this topic, this conversation, this space, this timeframe, it needs to be about me. And, the great thing about it is, you know, they're, they're a hundred percent present when you're there and in that space. And then he doesn't have to carry it home with him because it's not his stuff. But it's, it's rare to have that space because in most spaces you want reciprocity, right? You want a give and take in that relationship. In the counseling center, there's times where we need to go and deal with stuff that are heavier than that. You know? And so, I love that God gives us the church as a space to heal our own brokenness. And as a church, we want to provide that space. So we have life groups or for lots of, you know, 90% of our hurts, we can process there, but there are those other spaces where we got to go in and deal with it and actually deal with it in a more clinical way. And we have that opportunity to do that as well.

But the fourth implication is this, God also gave us the church so that we can be people who help others heal well. This isn't just about us coming in and finding our own healing. It is that, but it's also about us helping others in their own healing journey. And I know that for a lot of us were like, no, no, I got to get some stuff figured out yet before I start investing in anybody else. No, you don't. Again, when we do this together, it's far more powerful and we all grow towards wholeness faster when we do it together, because we know we're not alone. You're brokenness and my brokenness aren't the same brokenness, necessarily. Maybe we have some parallels, but they aren't the same brokenness, but we can both work on those together exponentially when we're willing to do it in both directions. It's not just a one-way street.

And I love transitioning into communion on that note. We take communion every week here. We celebrate the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, where Jesus gives his life as an opportunity to set us free from all the things that the world does to us. And I think that a lot of times, especially in our culture, that values production, and it doesn't value wholeness. Our culture doesn't value wholeness, it values production. So who cares if you're broken, as long as you can keep making the widget, whatever the widget is. I think this is a moment where Jesus steps into the world and he goes, no, no, no. I actually care about every fiber of who you are. And so I would like to just wrestle with this. As we prepare our hearts for communion, where are you avoiding yourself? Where are you avoiding that fracture on your own heart that you don't want to take a look at? And where are you allowing yourselves to be maybe distorted or manipulated by some other relationship that God wants you to speak life into, but it needs to be life that is actually life. Where are we not functioning in relationship correctly? And what would God want us to do about that? Let's think about that for a few minutes. 

On the night, Jesus was betrayed he took bread and he broke it and he said, this is my body, which is given for you so whenever you eat this bread, do it in remembrance of me. And then after the dinner, he took a cup and he said, this cup, this is a new covenant, my blood which is shed for you. So whenever you drink this cup, do it in remembrance of me.

Let's pray, Lord. I thank you for the invitation of freedom. Thank you for the promise of wholeness for those that pursue you and as we pursue you, we pursue coming to terms with the fractures that have been given to us, fractures that we've done to ourselves fractures that we've imposed on other people, or do you want to set us free from all of them? And I'm still thankful for that. Thank you for your grace. As we come to terms with how often we get off the path and Lord, I just want to ask for insight, as we begin to wrestle with where our brokenness lies and how we can live in community in a way that brings about that restoration for all of us. Thank you, Jesus. In your name. Amen.

If you need to pray with somebody. I just want to remind you again, there's people up here in front to pray with you, and they'd love to do that. If you want to talk to somebody about what it means to have a relationship with Jesus, they can talk with about that as well. And I hope that we are encouraged today, challenged to step into our brokenness and deal with it. Cause here's the deal. If we don't, we, we give that to other people and God wants more for us. Like my, I carry some of that stuff that my family gave to me. And, and unfortunately, so do my kids, like maybe it's time for us to say, you know what, before, before another person gets another fracture on their lens, I'm going to stand in and say, I'm going to do what it takes to heal that, so that nobody else gets hurt so that we invite more and more and more people into wholeness. Like the brokenness stops here. May you have the courage to live in that reality from here forward because that's God's heart for you. Thanks for coming. Have a great week.