This 1 Quote on Sexual Brokenness Expanded My Understanding of How God’s Grace Works

In the summer of 2021, my category for grace was given new depth.

I was investigating the subject of sexual brokenness. Like many Christians of a certain era, how grace fits into sexual brokenness was more or less obscured. In fact, how grace fits within life beyond serving as a get out of jail free card was not always obvious.

One short paragraph has guided me into a better, fuller way of living in grace:

Scripture is clear that God moves into human struggle, rather than teleporting us out of it. At the beginning of the Gospel of John, God moves so much into human struggle that he takes on our sarx — the New Testament word for the vulnerable, prone-to-sin form of flesh — and “moves into the neighborhood” (1:14, MSG). Our sexual brokenness is the geography of God’s arrival.

Jay Stringer. Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing

It is in your sin, brokenness, and failure that you will learn the most about God, not in your victories and goodness.

Grace recreates

Whether in the realm of sexual brokenness, or any other kind of brokenness, grace recreates!

God ‘moves into the neighborhood,’ so to speak, rather than moving us out of it. Following Jesus into salvation doesn’t wipe away the past (or the present); it repurposes it, redirects it, and empowers it toward true wholeness.

And that is why it is at the very points of deepest brokenness that we come to know God most fully. Those bullet-scarred wastelands are where he grows gardens of grace.