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Psalm 119:64b, 66a ("Teach me"), 17b

2. The contrite Spirit makes the believer teachable.

Thomas Brooks said, "God's house of correction is His school of instruction."

Stephen Chamock said, "We often learn more of God under the rod that strikes us, than under the staff that comforts us."

Hebrews 12:10 promises us that god "chastens us for our own profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness."

Psalm 119:66b, 80a

3. The Broken Spirit gives the believer "good judgment" or good discernment regarding sin and the issues of life.

The Broken Spirit is wise because it does not have to defend itself. The Broken Spirit is free to make good decisions because it is no longer married to subjectivity. The breaking process frees the spirit to look at life objectively-through the eyes of God.

Psalm 119:72, 103

4. The Contrite Spirit establishes right priorities and orders or organizes the life of a believer correctly.

John Bunyan wrote the immortal Pilgrim's Progress. Remember that previously we saw that a person with a broken spirit feels like a pilgrim. Well, John Bunyan was a tinker whose broken spirit longed for the celestial city. Bunyan, like Abraham, "looked for a city which hath foundations whose builder and maker is God." Hebrews 11:10.

The earthly, or terrestrial, could not satisfy the priorities of the thirsty Bunyan. He once asked, "Do not even such things as are most bitter to the flesh, tend to awaken Christians…to a sight of the emptiness of this world, and the fadingness of the best it yields?"

Bunyan's broken or contrite spirit rightly established eternal priorities for him. Like the Psalmist, Bunyan could say, "The law of [God's] mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver."

The Broken Spirit is finally able to make wise comparisons between the good, the better and the best and between the short-term and the long-term.

He has been weaned and no longer puts his roots down too deeply on earth of pins his expectations on temporal things or relationships. His priorities rise out of a value system which is based upon what is eternally better and what is eternally sweeter.

The Broken Spirit is able to say what an emaciated cancer patient in South Carolina whispered just a few weeks before he passed away. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Matthew 6:19-21

Show me a man's priorities, and I will tell you whether or not the spirit of self and the world has ever been broken in that man!

The Broken Spirit rightly orders a man's priorities.

Psalm 119:105

5. The Contrite Spirit sheds a previously unseen light upon the meaning of life.

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