REBUILDING YOUR BROKEN WORLD
Author GORDON MACDONALD
Publisher HIGHLAND BOOKS
ISBN 1-897913-68-0
Written in 1988 and revised somewhat in 2004 this book is still available new today. The issues it deals with are profoundly serious. They were personal to this pastor and his wife and many others involved with them. His writing style is very readable and he sensitively and graciously leads his readers into the vital area of help with the rebuilding of lives broken and apparently wrecked. Here we meet God’s grace and the way His grace can triumph in those who have experienced defeat and failure following wrong choices in their Christian walk. It is an important book and is written with the realisation that there are more ‘broken world’ people in the churches than anyone cares to admit. Many things are not being faced in the regard, or excused and casually dealt with or the very opposite where such matters are handled with a hard and censorious spirit. This author likes to use plenty of illustrations, by his own admission he sees spiritual lessons in a great deal of those events and occurrences in daily life. These illustrations are used helpfully and do not detract from the systematic approach he takes to his subject, instead they serve to enhance and, in a right way ‘lighten’ weighty matters. The fact of broken worlds, and reasons why people suffer brokenness are made plain in a simple way, he does not complicate matters. Causes such as unhealthy environments and baggage from the past and becoming trapped in the spiders web of Satan’s tactics. At this point in the book he moves into spiritual principles concerning restoration but alludes a good deal to the things that he and his wife established in their lives when their life together was broken. The withdrawing into the quiet, into the presence of God, the reading, the waiting, the watching, the illumination God gave to them, the understanding that came, the repentance and sorrow. The process by which hearts became unbound and peace came. The deepened discernment of the enemies workings and then moving further into testimony of the grace of God and the ‘angels’ God gave to him and his wife and the discipline and counsel received leading, in time to the restoration into God’s service. The book is about God’s grace and how the church and its members can cooperate with the process of the imparting of that grace.
