“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭51:17‬ ‭KJV‬‬

The only way to pay for your sin I.e. to have your sin record cleared is to sacrifice. Since the wages of sin is death, someone or something’s must die in your stead in order to save your life.

Animals were sacrificed to God to pay for sins. So it was easy for a rich man to keep on sinning with the mindset that he will just kill some animals later to pay for everything.

I am reminded of how many times we dismiss the nudging of the Holy Spirit and go ahead and sin with the mindset that we will just ask for forgiveness later. We feel rich in terms of being alive and being able to talk.

Today, there is only one sacrifice we can offer God to get our sins forgiven….to escape the Death that is the wages of sin: A broken spirit and a contrite heart.

What is a broken spirit? A spirit that is broken. What is a spirit and how do you break one? My spirit is the invisible me that lives inside my body. It is the real me that will remain forever after my body dies.

So how can I break my spirit i.e. myself? To be broken means to be damaged. It means to be nonfunctional…to be not useful. It’s means I should be trashed. That I am broken means I can be handled anyhow. It means both my owner and other people are free to despise me and trash me.

When something is broken, it is useless and should be discarded…Unless the owner decides to pick up the broken pieces and fasten them back together one after the other.

When I am broken, I am at the mercy of my maker/owner, Jesus.

Applying this practically, when I have sinned, I should come to God confessing my uselessness, wretchedness, deserving to be thrashed and done with/cast away from His presence, that I am in danger as the devil can come in to cause chaos in my life. Just confessing my foolishness and really feeling all this in my heart genuinely.

It takes understanding the seriousness of my little sin, that unless God has mercy on me now, the devil can take my life (because he now has access) and I would literally end up in Hell.

In reality, we don’t always feel this sorry for every sin. We feel more sorry for the big sins and less sorry for the small sins. So in order to get to this level of brokenness, we have to first note down the sin(s) we committed, then go back to the Word… the 10 commandments, Jesus 2 summary commandments, maybe Bible stories…and just check what the consequence is for that little sin.

Maybe then, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we will weep before God, broken and be accepted and forgiven by God. Then God will put us back together, piece by piece.