Nothing Will Be Wasted
NO EXPERIENCE IN your life is ever wasted or in vain if you give all your cares to the Lord. Even if your fragmented life looks like an abandoned battlefield, Jesus can reshape all the pieces of your past into something beautiful.
After Jesus had fed five thousand people with just a few loaves of bread and two small fish, He told His disciples, “Gather up now the fragments (the broken pieces that are left over), so that nothing may be lost and wasted” (John 6:12). The disciples gathered up twelve baskets of food from the leftovers, still much more than the small offering of loaves and fishes that was made to Jesus in the first place.
God set me free from fear, insecurity, emotional addictions, and the bondage of a deep-rooted sense of rejection. Then He reshaped my fragmented life and gave me the glorious privilege of teaching His people how they can be whole; how they can have fruitful, happy lives and ministries; and how they can enjoy healthy, loving relationships.
I have learned to receive unconditional love from God, from Dave, and even from myself. My husband does not do everything I want him to, the way I want him to, when I want him to; but that is okay now, because I have learned how to love him unconditionally too.
When we were first married, I did not know anything about unconditional love. My family had to do everything my way, or else I assumed they did not love me.
When I suffered from a broken heart, everyone who was in a relationship with me had to work very hard to try to keep me happy. They suffered because they could never be real with me. They could never honestly tell me the truth about anything. They had to tell me what I wanted to hear if they wanted any peace at all.
If I said to Dave, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee,” he could not say, “Well, I would rather not do that,” or I would pout. That was my way of controlling things. I was broken: shattered, fractured, fragmented, and dysfunctional. I had been violated, and I was making everyone pay for my pain, even if they were not the ones who had caused it.
If you have been violated through abuse, your rights as a human being were dishonored, which can cause you to feel overwhelmed. So many victims of abuse eventually reach the point where they say, “I can’t handle this.” They are not really troubled by the problems in everyday life; they are overwhelmed by the problems of a broken heart. Those of us who grew up in a dysfunctional home are often so insecure that we create dysfunctional homes too.
We need inner strength to keep from being overwhelmed by outward circumstances. We must allow God to gather up our fragmented dreams and remold us into the image of Christ. To do that, He may have to crush the few pieces we have left into fine clay, water us with His Word, reshape our lumpy mass of leftovers, and put us back on His potter’s wheel. But He is more than capable of designing something miraculous from whatever we have left to give Him.
Jesus told us that in the world there would be trouble, saying, “I have told you these things, so that in Me you may have [perfect] peace and confidence. In the world you have tribulation and trials and distress and frustration; but be of good cheer [take courage; be confident, certain, undaunted]! For I have overcome the world. [I have deprived it of power to harm you and have conquered it for you]” (John 16:33).
Nobody can avoid tribulation in this life, but those who put their faith in Jesus can be of good cheer: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all” (Psalm 34:19 KJV). But the Word does not say that God delivers us immediately. We may have to go through a few things first.
Life always overcomes death, and light always overcomes darkness. Without God’s Word, the future may seem dark, but Jesus said that He came to deliver us from darkness: “I have come as a Light into the world, so that whoever believes in Me [whoever cleaves to and trusts in and relies on Me] may not continue to live in darkness” (John 12:46). Instead of living in darkness and misery, we are to continue to follow Jesus and conform wholly to His example in living (see John 12:26).
You cannot continue if you are broken, overwhelmed, or subdued. But by now, you have received enough of God’s Word through the testimonies in this book, to know that you are no longer bound to your past, if you follow the Lord. Jesus said, “If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples. And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).
CONTINUE TO FOLLOW THE LORD
God plants dreams in people’s hearts. But many people do not continue all the way to the end in order to follow Him to the fulfillment of that dream. Many get started and quit, get started and quit, get started and quit. They do not continue because their broken heart overwhelms their hope. They do not have any inner strength to carry them through to the end.
Jesus will bind up your wounds and heal your bruises. His Word is medicine for your soul (see Proverbs 4:20-22). Read the Word of God every day, even if you read only one verse each day. I encourage you to read my daily devotional, Starting Your Day Right, and then as you fall asleep at night, think God-inspired thoughts, such as: I am the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. God loves me. He has a good plan for my future. Then pray faith-filled prayers such as this:
Lord, I believe that You love me and that You can take up all these broken pieces of my life and make something out of them for my good. In Romans 8:28 Your Word says, “All things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and purpose.” I love You, Lord. I believe that You forgive me. Father, I receive Your healing for my broken heart.
Do not go to bed at night thinking what a horrible mess you are in and how you will never overcome it, or how nothing will ever get any better, or how nothing will ever be any different. Take the Word as your medicine. It is medicine for your flesh, your soul, and your spirit. Study it so that the power of the Word and the Spirit can work together in your life.
When you read a verse in the Bible that you want to appropriate for yourself, add it to your prayers. For example, Psalm 30:11-12 can become part of your bedtime praises; along with the psalmist you can worship God by praying: You have turned my mourning into dancing for me; You have put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness, to the end that my tongue and my heart and everything glorious within me may sing praise to You and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever.
God is eager to pour out His Spirit into your life. Just pray, Lord, move in my life. Do whatever You want to do. Heal the people I have hurt, and heal me too.
YOUR PAIN WILL NOT BE WASTED
As a child I was never able to be carefree, never able to live without worries, never able just to wake up and play. I always felt sorry for myself because it seemed that my childhood and teenage years were just wasted. And then I was in a bad marriage for five years, and I felt that was a waste. As an adult, I felt that I had spent so many years just wasting my life. But God gathered up those wasted years and made my mess become my message.
He found value in every sad situation I lived through. You may be wondering, How could God ever make anything good out of this mess that I have created? God has ways that we know nothing about. He is using all of my wasted years to reach the thousands upon thousands of people who say to me, “I listen to you every day.”
Sometimes I marvel at what they are listening to. They hear me tell about what a mess I used to be and how God made me whole again, and that message is giving them hope and faith that He will do the same for them. He is getting value out of my brokenness by using it to heal other peoples’ brokenness.
Maybe you feel that you have wasted your life until now, but spending your time thinking about it does not move you to a new place. If you trust God, He can do something glorious in whatever time you have left, even if it is only a short while. God can do something so glorious in the time that you have remaining that everything you went through will have been worth it just to see God take it and do what He can do in you.
It is impossible for me to be doing what I am doing today. When God called me into ministry, to say I was a mess does not even accurately describe it. But I loved God, and I did not want to continue being the way I was. I just did not know how to change the way I was and be different and better. It took years for God to get me where He needed me to be, but I believe that He is doing a quicker work of righteousness in these last days.
GOD WILL DO WHAT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE
Even if it takes decades, it is better to be on your way up than on your way down. Pray, Okay God, here. Take my broken life and gather up the fragments so that nothing in it will be wasted. Do not remain broken; make a decision to trust your past and your future to the Lord.
You may feel the way Martha felt when her brother Lazarus died. She said to Jesus, “Master, if You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). Jesus could have arrived on the scene sooner, but the Bible says that He purposely waited until Lazarus was dead and laid in the grave. He waited until the situation was so impossible that if anything good came of it, everybody would know that it had to be a work of God (see John 11:1-11).
We need to understand that when God does not move in our circumstances, or when He does not move as quickly as we would like for Him to move, He may be waiting on purpose. Just when we think there is no way out of our mess, God will prove to us how strong and wonderful He is on our behalf (See 2 Chronicles 16:9).
I had been trying to serve God for years. Why did He wait so long to touch me with the power of the Holy Ghost? Why didn’t He do it two years before? Four years before? I think He was just waiting until it would take a miracle to prove that He was working in my life. The fact that God could use my life for ministry is a miracle in itself.
If Jesus had put His twelve chosen disciples through personality tests, the results would have indicated that they did not have the qualities needed to make a good ministry team. The analysts would have advised Jesus to continue His search for men who were more suited for the work He was going to require of them. Their reports would have read, “Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper, and Thomas is full of doubt,” and one by one, each disciple would have been similarly disqualified.
It is interesting to note that before Jesus chose these twelve men (see Luke 6:12-16), He prayed all night! I wonder how long He prayed before He chose you and me to do what we are called to do. Jesus knows all about each one of us, yet He picked us anyway. Why? He wants to heal the brokenhearted. He wants to gather up the fragments and show His power. And the weaker the people He chooses, the greater His power is visible through them.
When I first started serving God, I spent half of every week crying in self-pity. In spite of that fact, I was still anointed to teach Bible studies; I could preach then just as well as I can right now. But God kept me trapped in my living room with twenty-five people for years before He began to lead me into the worldwide ministry I have today.
I learned that God would not release me for public ministry until I had let Him do a work in my most private life. But during all that time of faithfulness to little things, I was progressing little by little, from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18 KJV).
The great thing about God is that He does not just see where we are, He also sees where we are going. And He treats us with the end in mind throughout the whole trip. He loves us with an unconditional love from the beginning of our relationship. We may try to get His love every way imaginable, but all we need to do is receive it.
Sometimes we try so hard to get into the presence of God, but the truth is that it is impossible to get away from Him. He is in constant pursuit of us.
In Psalm 139:7-10 the psalmist wrote of God:
Where could I go from Your Spirit? Or where could I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol (the place of the dead), behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning or dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall Your hand lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.
In verse 16 of this passage, the psalmist says that all the days of our lives “were written before ever they took shape, when as yet there was none of them.” And in verses 17 and 18, he says that God thinks about us all the time: “How precious and weighty also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I could count them, they would be more in number than the sand.”
Do not determine your self-worth by how others have treated you. Receive your worth and value from who you are in Christ.
You may sometimes feel that the Lord is not near, but that is why knowing the Word is so important. The prophet Isaiah brought a complaint before the Lord, reporting that His people were saying:
“The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me.”
[And the Lord answered] “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, they may forget, yet I will not forget you.
Behold, I have indelibly imprinted (tattooed a picture of) you on the palm of each of My hands” (Isaiah 49:14-16).
Parents did not originate the idea of keeping pictures of their children handy—God carries a picture of His children everywhere He goes. The next time you question your self-worth, remember that God has your picture tattooed on the palms of His hands.