Recently I heard the following statement, “We have to voluntarily face the things we are afraid of and avoid”. This, the speaker said, is the path to growth and wholeness. This statement, though said in a non-Christian context, rang true to me. It is totally in line with our teaching of how God can help us in the healing process. It fits with what we know of the God of the Bible. This idea is worth unpacking more, as doing so helps us in growing as a disciple of Christ and in finding healing for our wounds.
God tells us to confess our sins to each other, in order to find healing (James 5:16). Self-exposure runs contrary to our fallen nature and does not come easy for anyone. When we have sinned, our typical knee-jerk reaction is to hide it. We don’t like that feeling of guilt. Facing the reality of our moral failures before God is difficult. If we add to this the perhaps humiliating idea of telling another person, our pride rebels. When we confess our sins, it ruins the façade that we’re really good people! So confession of our sin is something we tend to fear and avoid. Yet, it is the pathway to healing.
I will never forget praying with an old saint (then an octogenarian) who confessed to me sins committed in her teenage years. She carried that burden for many decades. She had become a godly, beautifully holy, forgiven woman, yet carried feelings of guilt and shame for all those years. God set her free the moment she confessed her sins to another Christian. It was a day for rejoicing as well as a sobering lesson: she could have had this freedom decades ago.
Confessing our sins is not an easy thing to do. But, when we find kind, trustworthy, non-judgemental Christians we can confess our sins to, we should definitely do so. Facing reality will set us free.
Nobody in their right mind enjoys pain, so we try and avoid it. If a part of our body is hurt, for example if we have sprained our ankle, we make very sure everyone else stays far away from it. “Don’t come near me, I don’t want to be hurt more!” It makes total sense. So, when we are hurting emotionally or psychologically, we also want to create a safe zone around that pain. We don’t want anyone to get near. Not others, not ourselves, not even God. So we bury and hide the pain. We prefer to try and forget it, we might pretend it never happened and we certainly want to avoid talking about it.
The pathway to healing lies in voluntarily facing these pains. That is usually difficult. Sometimes, it even seems unimaginable. We may have been so badly hurt that our entire survival strategy has been based on never thinking about the pain again. We bury it as deeply as we can. Unfortunately, this means that the unseen wound festers, affecting us from deep on the inside. We find the pain has not truly gone away; it just means that healing balm can no longer reach our wounds.
Jesus died both for our sins, as well as our pains (Isaiah 53). He promises to forgive our sins, but our part in this is that we bring it to Him. So it is with our wounds. He can and does heal, but the choice to bring our pains to Him is ours. To do so we will have to be honest and real with God. We’ll need to tell Him that yes, in fact it did hurt. And that we need comfort and help in dealing with this pain. Instead of avoiding the pain, we invite God to come to the place in us that is hurting. To ‘bring our pain to Jesus’ actually means no longer avoiding the issues, but laying them bare before the Lord.
Much of the prayer ministry we do, and the healing we witness, is just this: daring to face our pain, together with Jesus. It is amazing what He can do. In fact, there is no pain so great that His love cannot heal. Facing the pain we have spent years avoiding in no small task. It is good to have kind people alongside us. They can help us trust in God and encourage us to invite Him into the dark and scary recesses of our soul, so He can bring His hope and healing.
Part of the healing ministry of Jesus is dealing with oppression and unhelpful influence from demonic powers. Jesus and His disciples cast demons out of people and so should we. But the enemy, who benefits from keeping us ensnared in his ways, objects. He tries to scare us away. He seeks to intimidate us. He tells us he is stronger and that we don’t have the power to be free. Whichever way the enemy tries to establish the upper hand, Jesus is stronger, so much stronger! He has the power and the will to set us free. Don’t let the enemy of your soul deceive you, intimidate you, or bully you into accepting spiritual imprisonment. Jesus is all-powerful and in His Name we can disarm the powers of darkness and receive true spiritual freedom.
All of us, to some extent, show a different version of ourselves to the outside world from who we truly are inside. We like to be liked, we want to fit in, and there are simply things about ourselves we don’t think are very likeable. Maybe you have deep anger issues and you don’t want anyone to see. Maybe you are full of fears and anxieties and want to put on a brave face. Or perhaps you simply don’t really like who you are as a person, so you have invented a false persona, and are now living behind a mask, or a variety of masks depending up on the situation you are in. You may be liked by those around you but you fear that one day they’ll find out who you truly are, and won’t like you anymore. So, we hide the truth about ourselves. More poignantly- we hide our true selves. We present a false version of ourselves to others. To some extent, we can be guilty of doing this to God. We try to impress Him with a beautifully varnished exterior, while a different reality lies beneath those walls in our hearts.
If we live like this, peace will be difficult to come by. Relationships will be shallow. God’s love may feel very far away. We cannot be truly known as long as we hide our true selves. Facing the things we dislike about ourselves, or perhaps even despise and hate, can be among the most difficult things we will ever be called to do.
Psalm 139 (NIV) contains some incredible lines. Listen to this:
1 You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
God knows everything there is to know about us. There is no hiding from Him! We can’t run to a place God cannot see, and we cannot cover things up so that He forgets.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
………………….
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
It might be scary to think that nothing escapes Divine scrutiny. But there is some very, very good news. God doesn’t only completely know us. He also totally loves us. He accepts us, just as we are. The person who knows us the best, is He who loves us the most. It might feel like a scary thought to be known completely, to have our insides exposed, and that in front of an Almighty God. But it is actually the best news yet! He knows you, and He loves you.
In the atmosphere of His complete, perfect, unwavering love, He invites us to voluntarily face the things about ourselves we have been hiding from. Instead of avoiding reality about ourselves (at least how we perceive it, which might not be entirely accurate) He wants to help us face our deepest fears head on, in light of His total acceptance and unconditional love for our person.
Our salvation lies in the fact that Jesus voluntarily died on the cross for us. The cross was an awful instrument of torture and execution. Instinctively, we want to look away from the pain and suffering it brings. But what did Jesus tell His followers? “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matt 16:24-25). The cross brings death. Death to self, death to sin. But in voluntarily taking up our own cross, we receive true life.
The Bible urges us to look to the man upon the cross. His sufferings were awful, and we might want to turn away from the reality of His pain- brought on by the reality of our sins. Yet it’s in fixing our gaze on the cross that we find our healing. In understanding Jesus’ work on the cross, and in identifying with Him and following Him in the way of the cross, we face our deepest fears. Doing so gives us hope, healing and life eternal.
God’s clear and expressed desire is for us to be saved, healed, restored and forgiven. To acknowledge and face our deepest fears, sins and pain will never be easy. But we have the amazing comfort of knowing that when we do so, God Himself is close to us. He comes alongside with every step we take towards the wholeness and healing Jesus won for us on the cross.
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