brokenness on Orphans

Leader: How good it is to sing praises to our God! People: Great are You, Lord and mighty in power. You understand everything about each one of us. You heal the brokenhearted and bind up our wounds....

“We're all broken, all walk with a limp. Here is the truth about you and me: even when in a far-off country, wasted life, stripped bare, smeared, squandered, nothing but scar tissue and shameful, ...

The church is not a select circle of the immaculate, but a home where the outcast may come in. It is not a palace with gate attendants and challenging sentinels along the entrance-ways holding off at ...

Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.

For some people the brokenness in these foundational relationships results in material poverty, that is their not having sufficient money to provide for the basic physical needs of themselves and thei...

In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

Stop!!!  Do not read further until you have ordered and read Tim Keller’s brief yet very significant book, The Prodigal God: Rediscovering the Heart of the Christian Faith .  Hopefully you are alre...

Hope remains possible even amid our failures—whether we disappoint God, let down our families, or fall short of our own expectations—because divine compassion operates like an inexhaustible well. Each...

Preaching Commentary Stop!!!  Do not read further until you have ordered and read Tim Keller’s brief yet very significant book, The Prodigal God: Rediscovering the Heart of the Christian Faith . ...

If ever there were a true "just as I am" church, if ever there were a community where everybody could bring all their baggage and brokenness with them without neat and tidy happy endings qui...

No matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us.

Merciful God, we turn away from the pains and cries of our world. Overwhelmed by its brokenness, we ignore the call to engage and love those who are hurting. Father, forgive us, strengthen us, and hel...

Prayer of Adoration Father God … our Abba: You seek us with relentless love – coming after us in Your Son, Jesus. When we are in the pits – You draws us up and out; When we are broken – You fix u...

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high pri...

Surrender your poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers y...

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to born ...

Brokenness to redemption, where mercy and grace kiss both sides of our face. Brokenness where we are split open. Redemption where God knits us back together. Mercy when we don't get the punishment...

Leader: Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed are those who take refuge in him! People: Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! Leader: The young lions s...

Ann Voskamp, in her book The Broken Way, describes what it was like to have mental illness trivialized from the pulpit, as someone who identified with similar struggles: I was eighteen, with scars a...

Almighty God, too often we settle for brokenness in our lives. Rather than offering forgiveness, we hold onto offense. Rather than pursuing justice, we turn away . Rather than offering mercy, we c...

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.

This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore…. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent.

When Napoleon was bombing Vienna in 1805, his shells rained down across the city, striking buildings at random. One cannonball crashed into a schoolroom, shattering walls and windows. Inside, an eight...

“And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.”

He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not f...

Almighty God, too often we settle for brokenness in our lives. Rather than offering forgiveness, we hold onto offense. Rather than pursuing justice, we turn away. Rather than offering mercy, we...

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

Leader: God of life, when life is broken, All: we turn to you. Loving Christ, when hearts are broken, you come to us. Holy Spirit, this broken world needs us; flow through us to all the...