Almost Broken

2 Corinthians 4:8-10

“We are pressured in every way but not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair; we are persecuted but not abandoned, we are struck down but not destroyed. We always carry the death of Jesus in our body so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in out body.”

                What do we do when our idols start to crumble around us? What do we do when we have put our hope in the future in some politician or beloved Pastor? What do we do when the place we have called home for so long changes its mind on morality, and then it doesn’t look so much like home anymore? What do we do when, personally, our world around us seems to be caving in?

                In the passage above is written to the Corinthians. And just a little back drop information on them, they were a church that Paul had planted at a major port city. This city was full of sin and when Paul first got there and started preaching he was not warmly welcomed. It took time for Paul to see God work through the people in Corinth, and even after he saw people coming to Christ he still had to write back to what some people call the most sinful church in the New Testament. They had people who were getting drunk at the Lords Supper. They had one guy in the church who was sleeping with his step mom! These were no angels by any sense of the word.

                But what do we do when we find ourselves in one of these situations mentioned above where we feel perplexed, or persecuted, or stuck down? What has caused us to get to this point? Well sometime we can put a whole lot of stock and confidence in human beings who are eventually going to let us down. We do this with Pastors, Sunday school teachers, politicians, even family members that we think highly of. They end up doing something immoral and it breaks our heart because we thought that this person was perfect in our eyes. Or sometime we can do this even with ourselves. We build certain settings or goals that we have to do in order to be “Super Christians” and we think that if we work as hard as we can we could somehow pull it off. But then the inevitable happens and we fail. We sin. We fall short of the standards that we put up for ourselves. And then where are we at? We are broken hearted. Well what could we have done to stop this? Or what should we not do that we did wrong.

                Well the first thing that we do wrong in these situation is that we put too much hope in sinful human beings who at the end of the day are just that, sinful and human. When we go and worship at the altar of other human beings, as Pastor Steve Brown says, we will always be disappointed. Because these people are people they are going to mess up and when we put them on pedestals they are eventually going to fall off and we are going to have a broken heart and soul.

                Second, we have forgot who to really look to. If you look at the end of those verse it say that “We carry the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” We supposed to look to Jesus for our full satisfaction. When your world comes crashing down around you because your hero has let you down then look to Jesus. He is the only one who has ever lived a perfect life and we celebrate that. And he died for us and we celebrate that. And he rose and is still living and we certainly celebrate that.