A Broken Spirit

*We will be confronted with suffering, pain grief and trouble.
*We must be prepared.
**We prepare by spending time with God.
***Our brokenness allows God to work.

Psalm 51:16–17 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

What is David the psalmist telling us there?
Surely he’s telling us that first and foremost God is not interested in externals.
*Sacrifice and offerings are not necessarily things that God does not want, but they are things that He does not want first and foremost.
*And if that’s all there is in our lives – the external practices of religion – then God takes no pleasure in them.

*God looks below the surface
*God looks to the heart
*God looks to the motives
*God looks to the attitude.
*And it says that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: “A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
Those are strange words to our ears today.

What does it mean that God desires a broken spirit?
*Does He want to crush us?
*Does He want to beat us down?
*Does He want to humiliate us?

No, I’m sure that’s not it.

What is a broken spirit?
I think it’s a spirit that has come totally to the end of itself.

*All independence, all self-will and all self-righteousness have been purged out. (A Bankrupt Spirit)

We’ve come to the place where we have no hope but in God; we’ve come to the end of our own resources.

We have no claims upon God, we simply turn to Him for His mercy and His faithfulness, not trusting our own merits, but clinging only to God.

God can create a pure heart in anyone!

Therefore repent and ask God to make you a new creature and live for him and him alone…

Isaiah 42:16 I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, and not forsake them.   AMEN