"...If we are to come into this right relationship with Him, the first thing we must learn is that our wills must be broken to His will. To be broken is the beginning of revival. It is painful, it is humiliating, but it is the only way. It is being "Not I but Christ," Gal. 2:20 and a "C" is a bent "I"....
...It is so often self who tries to live the Christian life (the mere fact that we use the word "try" indicates that it is self who is often doing Christian work. It is always self who gets irritable and envious and resentful and critical and worried It is self who is hard and unyielding in its attitudes to others. It is self who is shy and self conscious and reserved. No wonder we need breaking. As long as self is in control, God can do little with us, for the fruit of the Spirit (enumerated in Gal. 5) with which God longs to fill us is the complete antithesis of the hard unbroken spirit within us and presupposes that self has been crucified. Being broken is both God's work and ours. He brings His pressure to bear, but we have to make the choice. If we are really open to conviction as we seek fellowship with God, God will show us the expressions of this proud, hard self that cause Him pain Then it is we can stiffen our necks and refuse to repent, or we can bow the head and says, "Yes, Lord." Brokenness in daily experience is simply the response of humility to the conviction of God. And inasmuch as this conviction is continuous, we shall need to be broken continually. And this can be very costly, when we see all the yielding of rights and selfish interests that this will involve, and the confessions and restitutions that may be sometimes necessary.
For this reason, we are not likely to be broken except at the cross of Jesus. The willingness of Jesus to be broken for us is the all-compelling motive in our being broken too. We see Him, who is in the form of God, counting not equality with God a prize to be grasped at and hung on to, but letting it go for us and taking upon Him the form of a Servant-God's Servant, man's Servant. We see Him willing to have no rights of His own, willing to let men revile Him and not revile again, willing to let men tread on Him and not retaliate or defend Himself.
Above all we see Him broken as He meekly goes to Calvary to become men's scapegoat by bearing their sins in His own body on the Tree."
-from 'The Calvary Road' by Roy Hession (The whole book is excellent)
I've known Jesus for 35 years, been filled with His Holy Spirit and yet I don't see where this process of brokenness ever stops, unless we let the Lord stop working in our lives.
Much love in Christ Alone,
Sister Leslie
