How to Survive a Broken Heart

A broken heart is painful; not only emotionally, but also physically. But God has a remedy for mending broken hearts. He wants you to not only survive, but thrive. Will you let the Great Physician work His wonders on you? There’s no better time to figure out how to survive a broken heart.

God knows your heart

God knows the secrets of your heart. He knows the pain that brokenness can bring. Read His words in Psalm 38.

“I am bent over and greatly bowed down, I go mourning all day long.  For my loins are filled with burning; and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am benumbed and badly crushed; I groan because of the agitation of my heart.”

God is sharing in this ancient text what medical researchers are just beginning to understand. Up to 87% of physical illnesses begin with broken emotions.  This brokenness causes God to ache with empathy for us.

In Matthew 13, He says, “For the hearts of these people are hardened and their ears cannot hear, and they have closed their eyes so their eyes cannot see, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to Me and let Me heal them.”

More than anything, God wants to heal our brokenness. He knows that the healing begins with our hearts.

How our hearts get broken

Try this. Close your eyes and point to yourself.  Now open them. Did you point to your head, where your brain is, or did you point to your heart?  Try this with several other people. Invariably you will see that no one points to the brain, foot or face.

When you point to the real you, you point to your heart.

When a fetus forms, the heart begins beating before the brain is even formed. Scientists don’t know how this can occur, and they have made a fancy word to describe it. But the fact is, the heart represents the real you.

[Tweet “When we have a broken heart, everything hurts.”]

Hurts build up in us when other people fail to meet our expectations. We wrongly assume that our families or spouses are there to meet our emotional needs, and we put these people before God in our lives.

Every time we get hurt by someone, it is as if a candle is lit and the wax starts dripping down. The wax hardens each time the candle is blown out, or the situation passes.  But the wax is still there. The next time we are hurt, the candle is lit again, and the wax drips down.  Over and over again, this process builds up a hard shell around our hearts. In the Matthew verse, the word for “hardened” is also translated “waxed gross”.

Eventually our heart is so encased in this hard waxy shell that all feeling stops. We are incapable of feeling any emotions at all. This is a broken heart.

Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was. He replied that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the greatest commandment throughout the entire Bible.

God wants a loving relationship with us, not a cold, rule-bound religion. When we fail to love God this way, and instead we love people this way, we will inevitably be hurt and hardened.

Jesus is the band-aid

God knew that man didn’t know how to love Him, so He sent Jesus to teach us what He meant.  Jesus was not only God but also man; a complete, whole, perfect man. Jesus is the exact representation of the nature of God.

Jesus is God with skin on.

Each of us is created in “God’s image”. Like a wrap-around mirror in a dressing room where you can look at all views of yourself, each of us is like one of those views of Jesus; a tiny slice of Him. Each of us has some special gifts that are like Jesus, but no one is completely like the whole picture of Jesus.

For instance, some of us have the gift of empathy, some have the gift of leadership, some have the gift of organization, some have the gift of serving, etc. Jesus has all these gifts and more. He created us in His image so each of us could relate to Him.

Jesus lived life just like us on earth, He was in relationships with all kinds of people, and He experienced all kinds of emotions, just like we do. He experienced joy, sadness, pain, hunger, sleeplessness, rejection. He suffered a lot of physical pain; beatings, a crown of thorns, being nailed to the cross.  He endured emotional pain of betrayal, ridicule, and unfair trials.

Jesus refused to take a drug that would deaden His pain. He never complained about His physical pain. But He did make one comment on the cross that expressed His greatest emotional pain. He cried out “Abba, Father, why have You forsaken Me?”

God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have an eternal relationship, unlike anything we can imagine. Since eternity they have been One.  But during those hours on the cross, when the sin of the world was on Jesus, God the Father had to turn His back on His only Son.

At the time of Jesus’s greatest need, He was left alone, abandoned by the most important person in His life. God had to abandon Jesus on the cross because of our sin that was placed on Jesus.  There was no other way to pay the penalty for sin. Sin builds a wall between the sinner and God, God can have no relationship with sin.  In this case, for this time, Jesus owned the sin of the world.

After  Jesus was resurrected, He was united with His Father, and sits at His right hand in Heaven.

How to survive a broken heart

Our sin of not loving God means that we have no relationship with Him. It takes two to make a relationship. But Jesus paid the price for that sin on the cross, which cost Him everything.

Now He wants to offer us peace with God. The price was paid already, all God asks us to do is to receive the gift of peace.  There are no magic words to use, no formula. Just talk to God in your own words. Thank Him for this gift.  Tell God you want to make Him Number One in your life. And mean it. That’s all.

If you have questions about what I’ve written here, you can download my free resource, No Greater Love. 

A healthy new heart

The first blessing of a healthy heart is that God will remove the old heart completely, wax and all.  Spiritually speaking, the Great Physician can take a heart encased in hard layers of cold wax and make the heart new again.

God puts it this way in Ezekiel 36:26 (NLT) “ And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.”

Doesn’t that sound wonderful? I know this to be true, because He did this for me.  What an amazing thing it is to feel good. To feel joyful.  To feel love.

Only those who have lost this ability to feel would appreciate what it means to feel again.

Heavenly.

A healthy new you

Other blessings stem from this one. In this most important relationship, the blessings start with the heart; the real you.

You share in the divine power of God. This is the power that God used to raise Jesus from the dead.

You share in the divine nature of God. This means the Holy Spirit comes to live inside of you, bringing with Him the perfect, complete, whole personality or nature, of God.

Jesus is now the One who will meet your emotional needs. Remember that we are created in His image?  That means that Jesus knows you like the back of His hand. He knows what it feels like to be in your skin. He knows how to meet your emotional needs, every second of every day. And He is able to do that.

Because He is God.

Every need you have will be met, even the most pressing of all human needs: the need to have someone there for you. Have you ever felt abandoned?  Jesus knows the pain of abandonment. And Jesus promises in the Bible that He will never leave you, never forsake you.  Ever.

A healthy new peace

I can’t omit one of the best blessings of all, peace. Jesus says that He will give us peace, His peace.  Not superficial peace, but real, deep, spiritual peace. This peace will reach into every relationship you have, even the one that broke your heart in the first place.

I’m running out of space here, but I want you to notice one thing. These blessings (only the tip of the iceberg) are blessings for here and now, on earth, during this life. There are a whole host of blessings waiting for you in Heaven.  But Jesus wants us to know that this relationship is real, it’s for right now, it’s not just a figment of someone’s imagination.

It is tangible and organic and physical and real.

It’s no wonder God describes the blessings in this way –  “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

It is impossible to describe the blessings, they just have to be experienced.

My wish for you is that you will experience the real peace of having a healthy, healed heart.

…because U count, deb