The Way Up Is Down

Dannah Gresh: You’ve probably heard that a horse can’t be useful to it’s rider until it’s been broken. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth asks what does that mean?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Does that mean you take a 2x4 and hit it over the back and break it? No, it means breaking its will so that it will be trained, it will be submissive, it will be responsive to the direction of the rider.  

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Brokenness: The Heart God Revives, for Wednesday, February 8, 2023. I'm Dannah Gresh.

In 1995, Nancy Leigh DeMoss delivered a message on brokenness at a staff conference for CRU (then known as Campus Crusade for Christ). 

Steve Douglass, who’s now with the Lord, was in leadership at Cru. He contacted Nancy and asked if she would speak to their staff. 

Nancy: He called and said, "We need revival in our ministry. We want to see God move in a fresh way in the hearts of our staff, and we know you have a heart for this. Would you come and speak, and would you help us think and plan through how we might set apart this week in a special way for that purpose?"

Dannah: A few weeks before that event, Nancy finally settled on what topic to share about. She had been reading in and meditating on the book of Isaiah for several months prior.

Nancy: It was in that process that the Lord just impressed upon my heart from Isaiah this message of humility and brokenness and repentance. Isaiah 66:2 says, "To this man will I look even to him who is poor and of a contrite spirit and trembles at my word."

God had been doing in my own life a fresh work of repentance and brokenness on a relational issue, so there was a fresh tenderness in my own heart toward the Lord. There was a fresh brokenness and revival going on in my own life. I think it was out of that combined with what God had been saying to me out of the book of Isaiah that said this is a subject that's at the heart of the matter. This is the kind of heart God can revive, so I was led to speak then on that subject.

Dannah: The Lord used that powerful message in an extraordinary way to revive that audience and others, including myself, who heard the recording of it later.

Several from that audience:

"I remember when this little gal walks up on the stage."

"And God was just using her to soften my heart."

"We began to walk humbly with God. We began to be honest with each other."

"The fog just kind of lifted from my eyes and gave me the opportunity to be honest with myself."

"I had become clean in a way I couldn't have imagined just six months earlier."

"I didn't know where the tears were coming from. I'd never cried like that before."

"This was something special that God was doing. I've never experienced anything like this before."

"I never heard a message like that before."

"I never experienced anything like it since, but it'll never leave me. I will never forget that."

Dannah: Former Cru staff Tim Spyridon reflected back on what stood out to him.

Tim Spyridon: I think that the part of her message that God used to set off His revival that happened afterward was when she contrasted a broken, contrite heart with a prideful heart.

Recording of Nancy in 1995: Proud people have an independent, self-sufficient spirit, but broken people have a dependent spirit and recognize their need for others.

Tim: I keep that list in my Bible today and occasionally will look at it during a quiet time. It's hard to not go through that list without seeing some aspect of sin ooze up out of the surface and the Holy Spirit point His finger at you and say, "That's real. That's active in your life right now. You need to deal with that."

Dannah: Bob and Kathy Helvey were in attendance that day, and they recalled the effect Nancy’s message had on the entire room.

Kathy Helvey: People were getting up out of their seats, going across the auditorium, and hugging people, making things right with people. This went on, not for twenty minutes, but for hours.

Bob Helvey: I could tell right from the very beginning and even more so as time went on, this was something special that God was doing. I've never experienced anything like this before. I'm kind of hard-nosed about those kinds of things. So that was really helpful to me to see that this was a genuine, special act of the Holy Spirit that I had never witnessed before.

Dannah: Recently, more than twenty years later, Nancy updated that message and shared a version more specific to our day. We’ll hear it over the next three days here on Revive Our Hearts. 

So can I encourage you to set aside some time and focus on what the Lord may have to say to you about humility and brokenness before Him? Here’s Nancy.

Nancy: My husband often prays as I’m getting ready to go speak or record. He prays, “Lord, help Nancy to be the one to go first. Help her to say “yes” to You about the things she’s teaching before she’s teaching them.” He prays that God will do the work in me first. And I prayed that myself for many years, and I’m so thankful now to have someone who is praying that specifically as we come into a time like this.

As I was seeking the Lord about what I should speak on this weekend, actually I normally speak on the opening night, Robert said to me a few weeks ago, “I think you need to speak on the subject of brokenness.”

He had heard a message that I’d given on brokenness many years ago, and he said,

I think that’s the message you need to give, and I think you need to do it on Friday morning before you have the concert of prayer, before you have the Cry Out! time.

Well, I had not thought for a moment about doing this message. It’s been many years since I’ve shared it. It’s a message that’s very dear to my heart. I’ve written a book on this subject. But it just wasn’t on my mind. But I listened, and I thought, I think God is leading through Robert’s counsel.

Our team talked. We prayed together. And we agreed that before we pray for others, we need to let God do this work of humility and brokenness in our own hearts so we can pray effectively tonight and in the days ahead.

So over these next moments, I want to talk about the principle of brokenness, what it means, what it is, what it isn’t, and then illustrate it in God’s Word with a number of people that show us what it is to be broken, or not to be broken. Then I want to talk about the fruit of brokenness, and then invite us to take a step of brokenness, however God is speaking.

Now, I know what’s in my notes. I know what I’m planning to say, and I’m praying that the Lord will direct me as I speak, but what I don’t know is how the Holy Spirit will apply what I’m about say to your heart, to your situation.

One of the things I pray going into conferences like this, I’ve been praying it over this past week or so, is, “Lord, would You create circumstances in women’s lives who are coming to this conference that will make them realize how much they need You? Will You make us desperate for You by circumstances that You create in our week?”

How many of you would say, now that you’re here that, God answered that prayer in your life this week? Now, don’t blame me, but God loves us enough that He knows that if we walk into a place like this, and we’re fine, and we think we have no need, why are we going to cry out to Him? You don’t call an ambulance unless you have a need. When you call and say, “9-1-1; it’s desperate. Somebody’s had a heart attack here, or somebody’s fallen down and is injured,” the ambulance comes racing to the scene of need.

I envision God’s grace as being a little bit like that ambulance. You might call it a grace ambulance that comes racing to the scene of our need. When we call out for it, we say, “Lord, I need You.” I think there are hardly sweeter words that God could hear us say.

I think there are hardly sweeter words that God could hear us say than, “Lord, I need You.”

So God creates circumstances. You thought it was your two-year-old who was the problem. You say, “I wouldn’t have been so reactionary; I wouldn’t have been so angry if my two-year-old hadn’t painted the living room furniture with butter.” But God knew you were an angry woman, and He used that little two-year-old and those circumstances to squeeze you, and what was inside of you came out.

You thought, I’m this sweet, loving, gracious, kind, godly, Proverbs 31 mother until my two-year-old filled the dryer with water. And then you realized, I’m crazy. I am an angry woman.

God created circumstances to make you realize you didn’t just need the gospel when you got saved fifteen or twenty, or in my case, fifty-four years ago. I need the gospel today. You need the gospel today. Those circumstances help us realize how much we need God.

By the way, did you bring your hanky with you? Because you might be needing it. If not for tears (we ought to sell water-proof mascara at these events) . . . Tears are a good thing. Maybe it’s just some surrender that’s needed through this morning.

You have that handy. I don’t want to just see white hankies—I want to see them—but God wants to see hearts that are saying, “Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord,” to whatever He says.

Need is something that makes us eligible. Acknowledgment of need makes us eligible to receive the grace of God.

Let me read to you a few verse from the Old Testament that speaks to us about this matter of brokenness.

Isaiah 57, verse15:

For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: [God says] "I dwell in the high and holy place, [that’s God’s address, infinitely above us, but God says, ‘I have another address.' I dwell] also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.”

And then Psalm 34, verse 18 says something similar:

The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart. And saves such as have a contrite spirit. (NKJV)

Psalm 51, verse 16, David says after he sinned this great sin of adultery with Bathsheba:

"[Lord,] You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering." [How much could I give in the offering? What could I do for You? How many hoops could I jump through? How many verses could I memorize? How much could I beat myself up with guilt? That’s not what You want. That’s not what You are looking for.] "The sacrifices of God [the sacrifices He’s looking for] are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise." (vv. 16–17 NASB)

Isaiah 66, verse 2:  “This is the one,” God says, “to whom I will look.” As the eyes of the Lord go to and fro throughout the whole earth this day, what kind of person is He looking for? Will He stop and look at you at your seat? Who’s He looking for? God says,

“This is the one to whom I will look [today]: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.”

So, what kind of heart does God revive? What kind of heart does God look to? The heart God revives, as we see in those verses and many others, is the broken, humble, contrite heart.

Now, our emphasis in this era is on everything but that. We want to be whole. We want to be full. We want to feel good. When we think about revivals, we often think of revival as a time of great joy and blessing and fullness and celebration. And it will be all of that and more, in its time, but we want a painless Pentecost. We want all the fullness of God’s Spirit. We want to be this great, godly, free and full and fruitful woman without getting to the cross. But God’s Word teaches us that the way up is down. The way to wholeness is through brokenness.

We want to be this great, godly, free and full and fruitful woman without getting to the cross. But God’s Word teaches us that the way up is down.

One revivalist, a man who was greatly used of God in revival in the 1970s in Borneo, said, “Revivals do not begin happily with everyone having a good time. They start with a broken and a contrite heart.”

You and I cannot meet God in revival until we first meet Him in brokenness—humility and brokenness.

James chapter 4 says it this way: “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.” The problem is, God is holy, and we’re not, so we can’t get anywhere near a holy God as we are. So how are we supposed to draw near to God? How can He draw near to us? Well, he goes on to say:

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. (vv. 8–9)

Now, can I just say that there are very few modern therapists who will give you that counsel. They’re trying to make us have good self-image, feel good about ourselves. But James says, “Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.”

Nobody walks into a Christian bookstore today or goes online to Amazon or Christianbooks.com and says, “Can you find me a book on how to be gloomy, how to be sad, how to be mourning, how to be wretched?” But God’s way is first down and then up. “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”

This is God’s way. It’s totally counter of what is natural to us. I think a lot of people are afraid of this whole idea of brokenness. When somebody suggested that I write a book on brokenness, I talked with our publisher about that, and I thought, They must not have a marketing department because that is not exactly a popular topic today.

But I think sometimes we’re afraid of it because we have some misconceptions about what brokenness is.

First of all—what it’s not: Our idea of brokenness sometimes is not the right one. For example, we may think of brokenness as always being sad or gloomy or introspective, downcast, never smiling, never laughing, always going on this witch hunt to try to find something else that’s wrong in my life. Now, there may be moments of sadness, moments of gloom, moments of looking inward, but that in itself not necessarily brokenness.

Some think of it as a false humility, always putting yourself down. For some, the idea of brokenness conjures up an image of crying lots of tears, having a deeply emotional experience. You can shed buckets full of tears in a prayer room or at an altar or in a deeply emotional experience without having a moment of brokenness. And you can have brokenness sometimes without necessarily shedding a tear.

Some equate brokenness with having been deeply hurt by tragic life circumstances. “Back in ’95 this happened to me. I was in this accident, or was somebody unloved, and this happened, and I was broken.” Well, you may have been, but maybe you weren’t. Sometimes those deeply hurtful experiences can make us more hard and less broken, more resistant.

You see, brokenness is not a feeling, though it certainly involves our feelings. But it’s not first and foremost a feeling. Rather, it is a choice. It is an act of our will before a holy God.

Brokenness is not just a one-time crisis experience, although there may be points of brokenness when God deals with us in a specific way and there is a moment of brokenness. But more than that, brokenness is an ongoing, continual lifestyle.

So I don’t want to just know: Were you broken back at True Woman ’08? I want to know: Are you living as a broken woman today? Are you walking, am I walking, in humility and brokenness?

Brokenness is not necessarily all those things. So what is brokenness? What is God’s idea of brokenness?

Well, brokenness is a lifestyle of agreeing with God about the true condition of my heart and my life, not as you think it is, but as an all-seeing, all-knowing God knows it to be.

You see, I’ve had help with hair and makeup and wardrobe. I think I look okay. You just see me up here. You see Robert and me up here. We’re holding hands. We’re smiling. I’m not saying it’s fake, but I’m saying you don’t live with me, and I don’t live with you. So what you think of me when I’m up here on this platform doesn’t really matter. Brokenness is a lifestyle of agreeing with God about what He knows, what He sees when He looks at my heart.

Brokenness is a lifestyle of unconditional, absolute surrender to Jesus as Lord. It’s a lifestyle of waving this white flag and saying, “Yes, Lord. Whatever God says, whatever His Word says, Yes, Lord.”

Think of that stallion, that horse, and we say, “That horse needs to be broken.” What do you mean by that? Does it mean you take a 2x4 and hit that horse over the back and break it? No! They’re talking about breaking its will so that it will be trained. It will be submissive. It will be responsive to the direction of the rider.

It’s a lifestyle of brokenness, of saying, “Yes, Lord.”

Brokenness is the shattering of my self-will so that the life and the spirit of Jesus may be released through me.

Brokenness is my response of humility and obedience to the conviction of God’s Spirit, the conviction of His Word. If I’m living in His Word, and if I’m walking in the light of His Word and His Spirit, then that conviction will be happening all the time, just in the course of things, and not just because I do something that I act out sin. Sometimes it’s just something I’m thinking.

It’s an attitude, and God convicts my heart: “That was pride. That was selfish. That was self-seeking. That wasn’t loving. When you spoke to your husband that way; you’re looking at that woman and acting like you’re really interested in what she’s saying, but in your heart you’re thinking, I wish she’d go away.” Now, I know you never do that, but God convicts me at times that what you’re seeing on the outside is not true of what’s on the inside. And so if I’m broken, I will continually be humbling myself and saying, “Yes, Lord,” and then obeying the promptings of God’s Holy Spirit.

You see, brokenness goes in two directions. There’s a vertical dimension, and you’ve already heard this referenced today. And there’s a horizontal dimension. There’s brokenness toward God, and there’s brokenness toward others.

One writer has likened it to our lives being a house and saying that we need to live with the roof off and the walls down. Roof off: nothing between my soul and the Savior.

• Open 
• Transparent 
• Honest before God 
• Not defending 
• Not rationalizing 
• Not excusing my sin 
• Not blaming somebody else 

Saying, “Lord it’s me. You’re right. I’m wrong.” Justifying God rather than ourselves. That’s roof off brokenness.

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been giving us a very helpful picture of brokenness and humility. She’s talked about the roof off and the walls down. She just told us about the first part of that illustration—having the roof off, with nothing between you and God. Tomorrow she’ll talk about letting the walls down and living out humility before other people.

Maybe what you heard today is making you think. Consider asking yourself, “Am I a proud or humble person?” I want to invite you to examine your heart in this way with a new booklet from Nancy titled Beauty in the Broken: How Humility Changes Everything. You’ll go deeper with some of the ideas you heard today and discover how humility makes all the difference in your relationships with others and with God. Plus, you’ll also have the opportunity to take an assessment of sorts on “Proud People vs. Broken People.” I think it’ll be an eye-opening analysis—at least it was for me. 

Request your own Beauty in the Broken booklet with your gift to Revive Our Hearts. It’s our way of thanking you when you make a donation of any amount this month. Your support is helping us bring the truth of Christ to women around the world. Visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

You know, it’s easy to get caught up in maintaining appearances and comparing ourselves to others, usually in a negative way. Tomorrow Nancy will help us see why what is in our heart is what really matters. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is helping you experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.