We’ve all heard that saying – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Fair enough. But sometimes that’s a cop out. Sometimes we use that to dodge the fact that something is broken in our lives. That there’s something that does need fixing.

There’s an old saying and I’m going to do it in Australian colloquial kind of way that goes like this. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It’s kind of a double edged sword that one, sometimes it’s absolutely true. People want to tinker with things that are working really well just because, well they want to tinker and they end up breaking them.

It might be a sales process in a business that’s working so well and someone tinkers with it and all of a sudden the sales start falling. Or a child’s toy or a bike or a car, some of us just like to fix things and in the end we end up breaking them.

But on the other side the ‘if ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality can be an excuse for not dealing with issues that really do need to be dealt with.

Let’s say there’s a great relationship, a great friendship that you’ve had and it’s kind of gone off the boil. Your wife or your husband sees it happening and says to you, “honey, you need to do something about that” and your answer because you don’t want to deal with the difficult issue, hey you may not even want to acknowledge that there’s anything wrong at all.

Your answer is, “well if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” We’ve all done that at some point haven’t we? In fact we can take it to ridiculous lengths.

I was due to take a short plane flight from Sydney to Canberra a few years back, it’s kind of like a half hour flight so they use a small but sturdy propeller plane called a DASH – 8. Well it was Monday morning and Sydney airport was very busy as it’s prone to be at that time.

We boarded the plane, taxied out and there we waited for forty five minutes. As a result of the long wait with the propellers spinning round it turns out that something overheated and a warning light came on in the cockpit. So after all that delay the pilot came on and said, “ladies and gentlemen I’m terribly sorry but we’re going to have to go back to the terminal and have some maintenance engineers look at the plane. It’s probably going to take at least an hour.”

Well none of us were impressed, we all had meetings to go to and we were looking at all up a delay of at least two hours, I mean it’s only a three hour drive. What can you do? The joys of air travel but the guy sitting next to me he went ballistic. He called the steward, he abused her, he went nuts. “You know if we hadn’t been sitting here all that time this would never have happened. It’s only a warning light, it’s probably a false alarm. We should take off, I have an important meeting to go to, I could have driven there faster than this.” And on he went.

At which point the steward, I have to give her credit for the way she handled it, with no emotion on her face, looked him in the eye and asked him plainly, “So sir, are you really suggesting we put the plane up in the air, and at that point we discover that you’re wrong, that there really is a fault. Is that what you’re suggesting sir?”

She was very calm, very matter of fact at which point this belligerent guy next to me was totally silenced. It was pretty obvious wasn’t it? It probably was a false alarm but did you want to be at twenty thousand feet doing three hundred and fifty miles an hour when you discover that you were wrong? No not me, not anyone else really, not even this guy who really hadn’t thought through the consequences of his emotive argument until it was put to him plain and simple.

Like I said at the top of the program we’re absolute masters of self delusion and more often than not we can look at our lives in the same way as my fellow passenger looked at that warning light. And in life, as in aviation, when we ignore the warning signs we do so at our peril. Correct?

Keep ignoring the warning signs and eventually you’re going to crash. It’s a pretty good way of looking at life. Sometimes in life something’s broken, it doesn’t matter how hard we argue against it, when it’s broken it’s broken and when it’s broken it needs to be, well, fixed right?

It could be a wrong attitude that we have towards ourselves. Either puffed up with pride or completely wrung out by a lack of self esteem. Either of those two could end up completely ruining our lives. Have you ever tried to help someone deal with either of those problems? Pride or low self esteem? It’s almost impossible because they don’t want to hear. They’d rather deceive themselves and live with the consequences than be honest with themselves, admit their fault and deal with it in order to get rid of the consequences and live a better life – masters of self deception. But let me ask you; is that really any way to live your life? Well is it? Here’s how Jesus put it, Matthew chapter 6 beginning at verse 22.

The eye is the lamp of the body so if your eye is healthy your whole body will be full of light but if your eye is unhealthy your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness how great is your darkness?

The eye of course is the metaphor for how we see things and if the way we see things is unhealthy then we have a distorted view of the world and our lives will be full of darkness. And if we kid ourselves, if we delude ourselves into thinking that the darkness that we’re living in is really light, remember my friend on the plane, that’s exactly what he was doing, then boy what a pitch black darkness you’re going to be living in.

Listen to me, if it’s broken we need to fix it otherwise it’s going to ruin our lives. An attitude, a behaviour, a distorted way of seeing situations because something is broken inside us.

God often brings people along who’ll give us the advice. He often makes things happen to help us wake up to the truth but we don’t want to listen and why don’t we want to listen? Why is it that we just want to hang on to this rubbish that’s going to ruin our lives? Why is it that we don’t open up and look at a better alternative? I’ll tell you.

Because instead of taking constructive criticism on board, well most of us don’t handle criticism all that well do we? And so we don’t listen, we keep doing or feeling or thinking or saying the thing that’s ruining our lives and we live life with the consequences. But is that really any way to live the rest of your life? Is it? Listen to me; if it’s broken you need to fix it.

Immediately after that passage about light and darkness, true and false perceptions and consequences of the alternatives Jesus spoke about what is probably the single most sensitive subject of all – money. He was laying the ground work for giving His people some really tough advice with that whole healthy/unhealthy eye light/darkness thing and this is what He said:

No one can serve two masters. For a slave will either hate the one or love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve God and wealth.

Just think that one verse through, that one thing that Jesus said right there in the context of your life and I’m guessing that if you’re one of the majority that little one thing is going to make you squirm. It’s going to make you uncomfortable because if you choose God over wealth then He’s going to ask you to make some real sacrifices.

Sacrifices in the long term that will bring a huge benefit but as with all sacrifices in the short term it’s going to cost you but if wealth has a grip on your life, if it’s all about money, how much you have and how much you’re seen to be having, well my friend that’s surely going to be ruining your life as it ruined mine for many, many years in the past.

Jesus tackles issues in our lives head on, He doesn’t mince words, He’s direct, He’s in your face because He loves you. So when you hear Him speak to you about something that’s broken do something about it will you? For Gods sake and yours. If it’s broken you really need to fix it and Jesus is the one with the power to help you do just that. Really.