Heart of David Ministries
A God Who Mends What Is Broken
David G Stewart
It was 1962. I had been the Principal of Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling, India for 8 years. It was a Christian School, run by a Managing Committee representing five different Missions. The School had steadily grown during my tenure, from 128 to nearly 400 in enrolment. There was a good spirit in the School, both among the boys and girls, and with the Staff.
But for me, there was something missing. Oh, I kept up the motions all right. I took the senior classes for Bible Knowledge, as well as for Maths and some other subjects. Nearly every Sunday morning I gave a talk in the School Chapel, and led a Sunday School for the top five years of the School. But somehow the thrill and excitement had gone, I was "doing my duty," but my personal sense of the Lord's presence with me was no longer there. I knew that I was getting impatient and short with people, and sins of thought, word and deed were multiplying.
I had kept up the practice of starting the day off with a perfunctory reading of the Scripture Union portion, but not really expecting God to give me something personal out of the passage. This morning, at about 7, I started with the S.U. prayer: "O Lord, open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things out of Thy word", and read the portion for the day, Hebrews 13, but feeling empty and dead. I read down to verse 21, in the KJV, and when I read, "Now may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect…" I stopped, and gave a sardonic laugh, and said to myself, "Well, there's nothing in this for me to-day." You see, I had the picture of a really saintly guy, whose halo is starting to glow, and God stooping down to polish it a bit, and make him quite, quite perfect. But that wasn't me! I felt I was down in the pit, a failure, and far away from God. But as I sat there at my desk in my Office, God spoke to me. I have discovered that He speaks to each of us in different ways, ways that we can understand. For me it was just a question, "I wonder what is that Greek word for "make perfect"? So I got down my Greek New Testament, and looked it up. It was not teleioo, as I had expected, but a verb I did not know - katartizo. I could see how it was made up. The main part of the verb was artizo, from which we get the English word "artisan", a skilful worker with his hands, and the prefix kata in front intensified the verb. So I thought. "I wonder where else the word occurs in the N.T.? So I hunted out my "Englishman's Greek Concordance" and found that katartizo occurs 14 times. And the first was in Matthew 4:21 (and Mark 1:19): "James and John were in a boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets". This verse in Hebrews meant something totally different. It was not God making the goody-goody quite perfect, it was God sitting down with needle and thread and patiently, skilfully mending what was broken. I thought of the net of my life, broken by dragging over jagged rocks along the seabed, or strained by catching and holding fish, or just worn out by wear and tear. And God does not discard the net, but gathers it up on his lap, and takes the needle and thread for the long, long, skilful job of mending it so as to make it useful again.
It seemed so wonderful. But I said to the Lord, "O Lord, that's a beautiful picture, but it's not for me, because I feel so dead, I can't really respond to you. And it was as though God said to me, "Read it again," and I saw, "who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus." God who did that for the Shepherd, can and will do it for the sheep. "But Lord," I whispered, "I've lost relationship with you, I'm simply no longer in touch". And it was as though God said to me "Read it again," and I saw, "through the blood of the everlasting covenant." And God said in my heart, "I have brought you into a covenant relationship with me, which I will never bring to an end. I will never let you go."
I tell you, there were tears coursing down my cheeks as I sat at my desk that morning. God forgave me. God loved me. The broken net could be useful again to the Master Fisherman.
I wish I could tell you that life has been different ever since that day. But I can't. I have had to come back to my text again and again. But katartizo has become perhaps the most significant word of the New Testament to me.
I found the word again in Galatians 6:1. We who belong to the Lord are to do the same for other people as He does for us: "Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual restore (katartizo) such a person gently, remembering that you also may be tempted." How do we act when someone is caught out in a sin? Do we race to tell all our friends? Do we roundly condemn him/her? Or do we just gather up our garments and avoid them like the plague? I'm so glad God doesn't treat us like that. And I know He requires me to copy Him.
This is the work of those people God gifts to the Church, especially pastors and teachers, in Ephesians 4:12. Their task is to prepare, or to equip all God's people for the work of ministry (the word is a noun from the verb katartizo). But I think every pastor and teacher needs to recognise that the first task is to mend broken nets, to repair what is spoiled to make it useful again.
God does this work of mending what is broken in several other places: 1 Peter 5:10 (a beautiful promise of what God will do). "But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you" (NKJV). He did it when He put together the human body of Jesus (Hebrews 10:5): "Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: 'Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared for Me" (NKJV), And when He framed the Universe: "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God" (Hebrews 11:3 NKJV). And one place where I think it is almost always mistranslated, 2 Corinthians 13:11. Because Paul has spoken rather harshly to the Corinthians in chapters 10-13, commentators assume his final words are also harsh (read some of the translations), but I believe they are gentle encouraging words. Paul does not allow the sun to go down on his wrath (Ephesians 4:26). Let me give you my translation: "The last thing I would like to say to you, my brothers, is this: Never let go of your joy, let God always be mending you, restoring you, be encouraged, set your thoughts on the same thing, live constantly at peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you".
How grateful I am that God introduced me to this lovely word over forty years ago. He is so kind. He is so skilful. He loves me with a love undying. And He asks me, in my own limited way, to become like Him.