Emptied Toward a Purpose

Bad Brokenness

There are some months my hormones dip so low that I don’t function properly. I feel empty and void of life and all that is good. Thankfully, this does not happen every month. On the months that it does happen, I am acutely aware of the world’s pain and my own bent toward brokenness and despair. Sometimes, I don’t feel worthy to keep on living. In her new book, The Broken Way, Ann Voskamp calls this kind of brokenness the bad brokenness. The kind that just doesn’t have any purpose.

Usually, I can recognize that my nutrition is out of wack as well as my hormones causing me to be crazy. My thoughts can rage out of control. If I can recognize what is happening, I can retrain my brain to think the thoughts of God over myself, take some vitamins, use some oils, and feel better. The thoughts spinning wildly need the Presence of God over me. Even this bad brokenness, when I give it to God, does not return void. I am talking utter emptiness somehow comes back with a type of wholeness in my health.

Emptied Toward a Purpose

In church on Sunday, we had a guest speaker. He spoke about racial reconciliation. He shared about his trials as a black man and how he’d grown numb to racism. He’d had so many horrible things happen to him as a black boy and then man he stopped feeling. But in 1993, God captured his heart back for the Gospel and racial reconciliation. He said that he recognized the way he prayed was, “God, I know you don’t like me but….” He shared that it took many years for him to return to God as Father and in knowing he was loved, truly loved by Jesus. Now his ministry is Gospel reconciliation. He ministers primarily to black youth who feel just like he did as if God does not even like them.

I may return to his story in a later post for a different purpose, but I could identify with his feeling that God does not even like him. I spent many years feeling the same thing. If I stare at my life too long, I could feel empty of purpose and value similar to the writer of Ecclesiastes. I think in my journey I am somewhere between coming out of the lie of believing God does not even like me and the sweet spot of my purpose for ministry. I know I am loved, but it is easy to return to the idea that I may not be. God is still in the middle of His work of filling me to overflowing, but even then, I can be used by Him.

The Via Dolorosa

What possessed the Savior of the world to pour Himself out like a drink offering? Why would He become empty on purpose? Why would God become nothing, empty of His importance?

When we choose to follow Christ, we choose to walk the Via Dolorosa – the Way of Suffering. Maybe we say we don’t believe in the prosperity gospel. We know enough to know that Jesus is not a get rich scheme and that our best life is not necessarily lived now, but don’t most of us believe that if we follow Jesus, we’ll have a good life? And by good life, we generally believe a life free of suffering?

Let me just say that I’ve wanted for the prosperity gospel, not for the Via Dolorosa. I don’t like suffering, especially suffering that seems void of purpose like the bad brokenness.

Jesus’s suffering was His purpose. Through the pain, you and I became whole. Maybe our suffering is part of our purpose making us whole again too.

Verses on Christ’s Emptiness

“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2: 6-11

Conclusion

If Christ was emptied, if Christ suffered, it is only natural that I may too be emptied and that I too may suffer. For a while, we may not understand the point of it, but then Jesus may come along and use it for His glory because all empty things can be vessels of His glory.

This is one of my favorite songs. Hope you enjoy!

This post is one in a 31 day series of posts called, “Broken into Beautiful.” You may read all the posts in this series by clicking the graphic below.