I can still vividly recall the scary shock to my system. There I was in the emergency treatment room at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center where one of my church members was on the table and the doctors were fighting time and trauma to save his life. As I watched the heart monitor the line suddenly went flat and the long beep sounded. For about one minute that seemed like an eternity every effort was made to get back the heartbeat and it seemed as though nothing was going to work. Suddenly, the beep started to alternate and the line began to jump again. I knew, more than ever, what the word “flatline” meant. For a critical moment, just before he was revived, life had come to a halt in my friend’s body.
“Flat” can carry several connotations, some good, some bad. I want the highway to be flat but I don’t want a tire on my car to be flat. We say, “Flat as a pancake” and that’s good for pancakes but not so good for any other kind of cake. To be accused of being a “flat-out liar” or to sing a flat note is not so good, either. To function below one’s ability or to give a poor performance may aptly be described as being flat. One of the most familiar misfortunes for any of us is to ever have been “flat broke”.
In the spiritual realm I suggest that being flat broke is a good thing. When we come to realize that we need to register a flatline on our own pride and experience a brokenness of our own stubborn will before God, flat broke is a condition that He can work with.
The number of times in the Old Testament that God says to His people, “I don’t want your sacrifices” is amazing in light of the fact that He gave them such an elaborate and detailed sacrificial system as a part of His law at Mt. Sinai. God expected his priests and Levites and the whole congregation to observe all of the details and rituals of the altars yet He reminds them over and over again that the ceremonies and offerings of sheep, goats, and bulls means zero if their hearts are not humiliated and repentant because of their flops and failures to measure up to his expectations. Each and every time our Lord promises restoration, renewal, or revival to His people; every passage of scripture in which He tells us what pleases Him, he relates it to a broken and penitent heart.
In Psalm 51:17 we find an upfront, outright confession to God from a man who is broken and desperate for God to put the pieces back together so that he can be useful to his Lord once again. The language of the shattered sinner pleading his weak case before a just God is all altar talk. “Purify me with hyssop”, “wash me”, “deliver me from bloodguiltiness”, “you are not pleased with burnt offering”, are words that seem to reverberate throughout the tabernacle and its altar room where the prayer was probably prayed. The true altar, however, the sacrificial site that really counts, is the heart, and that’s the heart of the matter. What God wants us to place on the altar is the combination of the mind, the emotions, and the will that influences who and what we are. “Broken and contrite” are the descriptive terms that focus clearly on the kind of heart He is looking for. He can work with that kind of man or woman. The literal Hebrew text says “He will not reject those who feel deep sorrow in their hearts.” Permit me to translate it, “He will not hold back from those who are flat broke in their spirit.”
That’s what I experienced at our recent R3 Summit. I am most deeply moved and as close as I can seem to get to the presence of God when I am in prayer among people who I am joining in the process of brokenness, crying out to God and echoing the old chorus, “Break me, mold me, fill me, use me. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.” It is only after such a refreshing visitation of the Spirit of God to our altered hearts that we can make the altar a launching pad to being used by Him to accomplish great things for Him. After his trip to the real altar the broken and restored psalmist was able then to say in verse eighteen, “Do good in Your good pleasure to Zion; build the walls of Jerusalem.” Beginning where we are, at our own Zion, in our own town, or wherever God may send us, He can do his good pleasure and do it miraculously, and do it through His own strength working in those of us who are “flat broke”.
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