God never wastes our pain. He uses everything in our lives. Good, Bad and Ugly.
Everything is allowed for His sovereign purposes. And when we are at a Breaking Point, it may be that He wants this situation to become your Blessing. A point of contact by Him.
Every person has their own personal breaking point. It depends on the trial, disappointment, or trauma. Without Christ in your heart, it is very difficult and near impossible to survive your heartache without His touch and His forgiveness and His mercy upon your life. He says in His Word that: “I am near to those with a broken heart, and I save those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalms 34:18.
Let's not stop there.
Psalms 34:19-22, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He guards all his bones; Not one of them is broken. Evil shall slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous shall be condemned. The Lord redeems the soul of His servants, and none of those who trust in Him shall be condemned.”
This does not alleviate, or make less severe, the trials or heartaches. It does however give us hope that He is with us in our sufferings, and He will make a way of escaping from our pain in His timing. That way ultimately means that He is in us to perfect us into His Image, and our pain does subside with knowing He will never leave us abandoned.
One way to know this is true is how God’s Heart is for us not against us. God wants to bless Jacob, and he wants to bless His people today. He brings us to Jabbok (the river in the Middle East and a significant biblical event where the patriarch Jacob wrestled with an angel, leading to his new name, Israel.)
It is not to crush us, but to bless us. But sometimes, the blessings come only after prayer. Deep, longsuffering prayer with tears.
Though Jacob was left with a limp from the struggle, a physical reminder of his encounter and his newfound relationship with God. This spiritual symbolism is showing in the event of Jacob’s struggle, is often interpreted as a metaphor for surrendering all of oneself to God and ultimately “prevailing with God.”
It is like a crossroad or intersection in life which makes us turn one way or the other.
I know all about turning the wrong way and ending up on a dead-end street called maximum-security prison.
Like Jacob in a way, I fought and battled with God in my mind and heart. I screamed at Him from the cemetery where Mom and Daddy were buried. I screamed at Him in 1971 while all alone, standing on my mother’s grave. I was standing in a rainstorm on October 5, 1971, when I was 15 years old. Addicted to drugs that day, my LSD mind and bloodstream full of that drug, made me curse God out loud. I screamed at Him, “This is all your fault.”
It was my broken heart that screamed into a void. That void was not a void at all. He heard me loud and clear. Yet, He still loved me.
The same thing happened when my Daddy was laid to rest next to Mom. The year was 1974, just three years after Mom was buried. I was not alone that day. My entire family was there as I was stoned on Meth and cursed out loud many times. Mainly under my breath, I cursed God with four letter words, and I hated a God I had not met yet.
Obviously, it was not God’s fault, but I blamed Him anyway because my world was turned upside down.
God will humble us. If His blessing is only available to us when we pray, then God brings us to our own personal “Jabbok” (that river of decision.) My personal humiliation was turned into humility by God. I had to climb Jacob’s ladder to find Jesus.
In Genesis 32, Jacob, while fleeing his brother Esau, stops to rest and has a dream where God speaks to him, renewing the covenant with Abraham and Isaac. God promises to give Jacob’s descendants the land, multiplying them like the dust of the earth, and bless and to bless all the families of the earth through them. Upon waking, Jacob is awestruck, calls the place “the house of God,” and anoints the stone he slept on as a sacred marker.
Jacob was fleeing because Esau wanted to kill him for deceiving him to get their father’s blessing.
That ladder in the dream, Jacob’s ladder, was a stairway set up on the earth, reaching Heaven, with angels moving up and down on it. The Lord stands above the ladder and speaks to Jacob, identifying Himself as the God of Abraham and Issac.
What a promise from God.
You and I will not “really” pray until we are at our “breaking point.” What does your breaking point look like today? Are you there yet? Do you know at all that you are breaking up inside your soul? Only you know.
I would think that no one would have to go through what I went through as a child. Heartache, abuse, drug addiction, insanity, and prison time. Sickness and disease brought on by sticking a needle in my veins until they finally collapsed, and infection oozed out from them. Hepatitis C disease. Asthma too. These disease-related results of smoking are more than just smoking cigarettes or Marijuana. Many times, the Marijuana was laced with other mind-altering drugs.
I breathed paint fumes on purpose by spraying a rag full of gold-colored acrylic paint, dropping the soaked rag into a paper sack. I put the sack tightly over my face, except for my eyes, and made sure that I breathed the fumes until I passed out. Killing brain cells that would never rejuvenate. According to science. All I could remember before passing out was the sound in my ears of what seemed like “crickets” rubbing their feet together. That sound would intensify and get louder prior to blacking out.
Not even this would become my breaking point.
Damaged in my mind and brain, I continued this behavior from the time Mom got sick, until I went to prison. Six, almost seven full years of non-stop addiction. Daily. Never missed this cycle of madness. It is a wonder I can think at all with all of the damage I did to my body and soul.
Only Jesus could heal me. And He did in time.
He was, and still is, near to the broken heart. Your broken heart is near Him too. Psalm 147: 3, “I have come to heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds.”
He saw my “crushed” spirit. My self-inflicted wounds. Yet even though I cursed His name back then, He had a plan to climb that ladder down to meet me. I was not looking for Him when I met Him. I was not on His ladder. The ladder I was climbing was going nowhere.
He met me. He knew me. He wanted me to know Him, fully. I do understand now. It cost me some pain. Too much at times, but I know this: “He is a God who shows up.”
We finally learn to pray diligently when God allows the “stripping” of those things that do not please Him. It is called sin. Our strength must be stripped, too. All our resources, connections to other people, and schemes must be eliminated to know He is there for us.
He will humble us, if we surrender to Him fully.
When we get to that breaking point, and when we learn to truly pray with sincerity of heart, He pours His blessings upon us. They come in various ways.
One is having your right mind. I needed a new brain and mind after all those years of addiction. He healed my mind and heart. I have a great memory now at 69 years old. Blessings come in another way. We woke up in the morning. No preconceived ideas or needs. No desires need to be fulfilled. We just wake up with Jesus on our mind.
What He did on HIS CROSS for us. That is enough. Yes, we have needs, but I am simply saying that it is not about what He does for us in regard to blessings. It is more about how we can grow closer to Him without trying to be blessed.
We are His children, and He desires to be there for us daily. It is His nature to love and bless our lives.
The man or woman who meets with God may have a limp in their walk like Jacob did. There may be pain, a handicap, a weakness in your life that reminds you of your need for God. It is not a shame, for the man or woman of God to walk with a hinderance.
God did not bring Jacob to the Breaking Point to harm him. God desired to bless Jacob.
Jesus Christ may be leading you to your own breaking point, so that it will ultimately become your Blessing Point.
Like an earthquake getting ready to erupt. Fault lines are happening prior to the big shift in the underground plates of rock.
Marriages feel the fault lines that are shaking prior to divorce. People can feel socially disconnected, because they’re not meeting up with those; they call friends, like they used to.
They have no desire to meet even their relatives living overseas because flights are very controlled right now. Not to mention their fear of flying.
Some believers in Jesus struggle mentally and emotionally too. Remember, Covid?
These trials back then and the current ones you are going through seem to take the air out of the room of your hearts.
Rightly so, but is that your breaking point?
Like Jacob, maybe we are smart enough to cut our losses. Jacob decided to split his camp into two camps. He decided to split it into two parts, so that if Esau comes against one, at least the other survives. And now he begins to pray, hoping to find the humility needed to understand God and His plan for him.
You and I cannot split our lives into two parts hoping if one part fails, there is a default life to lean back upon. Life does not work this way. We are not computers or cookie-cutter Christians. We must be who we are. In Christ preferably.
Not who we were, going back to the defaults we used to cope with during our bad years. Sin years.
Your prayers today that are “anchored” in the promises of God, like Jacob prayed is what works. Humble hearts. No pride. No hidden amorous. Those strong feelings of love, especially romantic love, can be our downfall. Just fall in love with Jesus and let Him bring the desires of your heart to pass. You can choose to do it your way. Like me, if my way worked back in my early years, I would not have ended up in prison.
Do not let your personal “prison” you live in, be a life sentence. Get paroled and pardoned now, by letting that humble spirit Jacob finally had, be your barometer to reaching the Lord and His will for your life.
Our sacrifice of Praise to Jesus is a good starting place in finding our “breaking point.”
We are not “Humpty-Dumpty” sitting on a wall. This whimsical, egg-shaped character with arms and legs, often wearing a hat and sometimes a cane, is not who we should act like.
We do not have to be shot off the wall and broken into pieces, waiting for someone to put us back together again.
We are not part of the “London Bridge” that is falling down, nor a “rock-a-bye-baby in a treetop. “Who put that baby atop that tree anyway?”
Are we going around a Mulberry Bush? Wash your face and brush your hair. That helps bring good hygiene, but not humility.
What about the “three blind mice.” They got their tails cut off by a farmer’s wife with a carving knife. They shouldn't have ran after that woman to begin with.
Life is not a nursery rhyme.
If “now I lay me down to sleep, the Lord I pray my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake, I pray my soul the Lord to keep?” If that is your stance on the breaking point, then let me correct that thinking for you.
You do not need to worry about who keeps your soul if you love Jesus and He lives in your heart.
God is not trying to break you. He is trying to mend you and your own brokenness.
He is a God of Restoration and a God who rebuilds a life. Your life. No matter what your condition is right now. He will take you to His Potter’s Wheel, and mold you into His Vessel of Honor. Let him. Embrace His wheel.
Not the “wheel on the bus that goes round and round.”
If the “people on the bus go up and down too, then perhaps they should have buckled up.”
Buckle up with Jesus. Your breaking point is your turning point in time. Embrace it. It is never too late to be built again. He is the Master Builder. He has all the right tools to build your house. When He is done building, you can live in it forever.
With Him.
Copyright © 2025 by Joe Wilkins
