Psalm 51:17

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise."

In a large family it can be a challenge to manage my days with efficiency.  Balancing the management of the home, with the joy of connecting personally with each child, along with their instruction in matters of faith is no small challenge indeed.  I have to take the opportunities that spontaneously arise as well as create opportunities as often as I can.  And still there are days when I feel like I've hardly seen one of my children.  

My greatest desire is that each of my children will be known by God and will seek His face daily.  Nothing else in life carries more importance to me.  Because Jesus is everything.  God is the source of life and truth and to pursue anything over a relationship with Him is futile.  

But the pursuit of God doesn't begin with works or personal efforts to reach Him. It begins with God, and His great love for us.  He is not impressed with our works or our efforts to be holy.  What God desires is a broken and contrite heart.  This creates quite a conundrum for me as a mother, because what mother would desire that her children be broken?  

I realize this might sound crazy to some, but one thing that I pray for my children is that God will bring them to the place of being broken before Him so that they will know His love and His will for their lives.  This does not mean that I want them to suffer or experience hardship.  This means that I want them to understand how sinful sin is and how desperately they need Jesus to save them.  This doesn't happen without tears of repentance and sorrow for sin.  And it doesn't happen without the fear of The Lord.

My twelve year old son first expressed a true love for God when he was three.  One morning, with all sincerity, he spontaneously shared with me how much he loved God.  He had such a dreamy look in his eyes and his smile was one of a mixture of shyness and wonder about the whole thing.  But just recently, on one of those occasions when I realized I hadn't connected intimately with this same son in a while, I asked him if he still felt that love for God.  To my amazement and concern his answer was, "no, not so much".  It wasn't an answer made in defiance.   He was simply being honest, and I appreciate that.  I don't want to raise dishonest children who merely give answers they think will please me.  I want to know how they truly feel.

So, instead of chastising him, we began a discourse on God's holiness.  And in remembering how holy God is, the sinfulness of our hearts and actions became even more appalling.   My son, was attentive as we talked about God's standard for holiness.  

The first commandment, and the greatest commandment according to Jesus, is that we "Love The Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength".  My son had just confessed to me that his love for God had diminished.  There was no denying a failure.  And that is where we lingered because there was no need to continue going through the commandments having found that the first and most important had been broken.  From there I asked him what he thought could be done to "make it right".  

Now, don't get me wrong.  We speak about God daily in our home, we pray together, we try to honor God in daily life and be pleasing to Him.  But here was my twelve year old son, who has been raised to know God and His ways, struggling to formulate an answer about what can be done for the one who has sinned.   How to be right with God should be a concern for everyone, because the fact is, we are still being made holy, even after we've been "made perfect forever" in the eyes of God through the blood of Christ.  Until I reminded my son of the gravity and weight of this sin, in light of God's perspective on it, there was no conviction for it.  But God is grieved by sin, and we should be too.  In remembering the holiness of God together, our hearts were reminded of our great need for a remedy for our unholiness.  And though we speak of things like this often in our home, he simply couldn't answer with confidence what could or should be done, if anything, to be right with God.  So I took him to Psalm 51:17.

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise."

Now, being sorry for our sin isn't enough to save us.  It's only by God's mercy that we are saved.  But it is in our grief over our sin, that we are broken and become contrite in our spirits, which causes us to seek His forgiveness.  It is the penitent who find God's mercy in Christ Jesus.  Like the thief on the cross who had nothing to offer Jesus, all we have is our ability to ask for His mercy.  And with a broken and contrite heart we find His mercy, freely given to those who will come to God through Him. 

In that conversation, my son was again brought to the remembrance of the sinfulness of his sin and the greatness of God's mercy.   He didn't need to get saved all over again.  But he did see again the wonder of God's love through Jesus.  

In the context of God's holiness, our sin becomes exceedingly sinful.  And in the context of our exceedingly sinful hearts, God's mercy becomes exceedingly wondrous.   And His love becomes the greatest thing we treasure once again.  It is good to remember what God has done for us.