Being freed of brokenness

In our attempts to 

1. Make life work best 

2. Get what we ¹need or want

 

3. Protect ourselves -- e.g. self-defense mechanisms... 

We develop unsound patterns of behavior from the ²earliest stages of life. These patterns become embedded into our personality and character early on - i.e. how we relate to life and others - in such a deep and subtle way, we are not fully ²conscious of them and how broken we and these patterns are i.e. we have unconsciously developed deeply imbedded patterns of brokenness by which we operate.

Only over time, as we come to see and trust in the fullness of God's infinite love for us, are we able to acknowledge, turn from and no longer allow these broken patterns to hold us back and cripple us with shame and self-condemnation but ultimately be freed from them.

However, seeing them is only the first step to overcoming them. But a vital step. We can not rise above and overcome a destructive behavior pattern or character flaw if we first don't know it exists.

These tendencies are also so embedded they never completely go away. They become a fixed part of our personality.

Once we are ³aware of these patterns and begin to be freed from them by God's love, we can easily ⁴slip back into these default tendencies, if we do not remain diligent and alert (guard our hearts) in our trust in God and His infinite love for us.

But neither do these tendencies have to control and dominate us. As we come to know and trust in God's infinite love, God becomes the dominant force/driver in our life/conduct instead of these deeply embedded and broken patterns. Though the tendencies and our inclination to them remain, we are increasingly freed from our brokenness and empowered to rise above and overcome it through our constantly growing trust in God's unrelenting love. It is our trust in His love that enables us to overcome these tendencies. As our trust grows, so does our ability to break free. God's love, instead of our broken attempts of self-love and self-deliverance, becomes the primary influence/force/drive behind our behavior.

As we learn to trust his infinite love we find it superior to our finite self-loving (expressed in and through our embedded tendencies and broken patterns of living and relating to the world and others) and we become more and more freed from these attempts to secure life for and by ourselves.

Awareness of these areas of brokenness and God's ceaseless super-abounding love in spite of them is key to being free.

Ironically even though these tendencies are always with us, ³lurking just underneath the potentially more powerful influence of God's love, they are not a bad thing but good. Once we are aware of these tendencies, these patterns of brokenness require us to more diligently and constantly look to God to remind ourselves of his love to continually overcome and rise above them. Where we are weakest (in natural resources to live as we are called and designed i.e. for the glory of God) we must be strongest in God's power/love to do so. 

To say it another way, our points of brokenness/greatest weakness also become the points at which we must depend on God most to overcome them, which is a good thing, not bad.

"...where sin increased, grace abounded all the more," Rom 5:20b

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¹think of an infant crying when they are hungry, tired, or need a dry diaper. The crying itself is not wrong (no more than praying is). It is how we let others know our needs before we can speak. How we use the crying i.e. why we cry (and later use our words or actions) is the issue. Do these become a means to simply convey our needs or an attempt to control our world in an unhealthy way i.e. to manipulate and control others to meet our needs?

At our earliest stages, we learn patterns of behavior to get/take what we need. God is not part of the equation in this development (unless our parents lovingly, constantly, and patiently point us to God as the ultimate source of all we need and they as the initial, primary means by which God meets those needs) i.e. we come into the world naturally inclined (even determined) to make life work the best we can without God. 

²There is even a field of study called Affectology that purports that we develop patterns of how to respond to our world prenatally. These responses develop and become embedded in us emotionally, not verbally, since we develop verbal skills months or years after we are born. These embedded patterns of responding are called preverbal scripts.  i.e. emotional, nonverbal (vs verbal) messages that embed within us emotionally (vs rationally) in response to negative emotional or physical input from the world outside of us (which is why parents are encouraged by some to give positive input - sing to them, play music to them, talk to them etc - to the child developing inside. The emotional state of the mom and her environment is also being conveyed to her child within. Mom being in a state of peace, contentment, fear or worry communicate to the child emotionally). Once these scripts are set in place, we replay in our hearts lies about who we are and how we can best meet our need for love i.e that we are not image-bearers of God designed to find in Him all we need, but we are our own gods who must (and will) find life independent of God the best way we know-how. Incredibly, this field of study shows that even in the womb, we are bent away from God. 

Only constant reminders of God's love and promised care coupled with trust in these can overcome these messages (lies) and the resulting broken and embedded patterns of distrust.

³Being challenged beyond our “natural” abilities to cope, surfaces these broken patterns revealing them and their inadequacy to aid us in handling challenges.

I have natural in quotations because these broken patterns are coping mechanisms we have developed by using our natural abilities along with any external resources to help us cope.

These challenges can be as extreme pain and suffering beyond our natural ability to endure or obedience (exertion) beyond our natural ability to carry it out.

⁴As our confidence in God's love exceeds our dependence on our broken patterns of relating, God's love becomes the new driving force in our life and behavior. When our confidence in God's love drops below - is less influential than our dependence on these default behavior patterns to make life work without God, we fall back into those tendencies and patterns.

Over time, as our faith matures, our confidence in God's love becomes more consistent so that we are less inclined to fall back into our broken default patterns. But those patterns are always there. What changes is our confidence in God's love...it increases, i.e. The primary force that drives our behavior is no longer dependent on the old broken, default patterns but instead on God's love.