SWYC 2012: Unless the Lord Builds the House

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GYC Southwest

Nicole Parker

Turning Wounds Into Scars, Part 2

Lord Jesus, we ask for you to be in our hearts, to speak to us and to teach us more about the gospel, about how you want to transform us into your image through even the difficult things that we face in our lives.

Thank you that you will never leave us, that you always have a path marked out to bring good out of bad.

Alright, We're going to talk about how God heals the broken in heart and binds up their wounds.

The first thing I want to talk about, remember we've just talked about the first principle of understanding how emotional healing works.

All of us have the basic idea of how physical healing works.

And when you come to a difficult or confusing situation on figuring out your own emotions, this is something time and again I, even as a counselor, fall back on and say, okay, what would I do in this situation?

For example, when a person's pouring out all this anger towards you, and they're telling you all the bitterness they have toward their parents, for how their parents raised them.

You can say, stop, You're criticizing your parents, and I don't want you to gossip to me.

But that may not be the most productive way for you to reflect the character of God to them.

Instead, maybe you need to reflect to them how God listens when people are hurting.

And So, you may want to listen and see it kind of like lancing that wound.

You cut it open and all this garbage is flowing out.

Now the solution to the problem is not just letting them vent, telling them everything.

You know, a lot of times that's what psychotherapy does.

People will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go week after week after week to somebody who they can pour out all the venom of everything that they hate about their parents and wow, they feel so much better.

It makes them feel better for a while, but by the next week it's all built up again.

That's like lancing a wound every week and packing in more infection.

But sometimes a person needs to know that God cares, that God understands, that God listens compassionately.

And you as a Christian can reflect that to them by listening compassionately and going, wow, that's so painful.

I can't even imagine going through something like that.

It's only when they feel really heard that they can understand Maybe God loves me too, because this person can love me even when they hear all the vile stuff that has happened to me or the vile stuff that I've done myself.

So if pain works the same way as, you know, physical healing works the same way as emotional healing, physical pain teaches us things just like emotional pain.

Physical pain forces us to face the situation.

Like physical pain forced me to deal with the wound in my foot.

Emotional pain forces us to deal with the emotional wounds that we face, the ways that our sin is reacting in ugly ways in our life, poisoning our whole emotional system and our spiritual walk with God.

So in physical situations, pain forces us to face the problem and we have to treat the wound and also prevent or heal the infection.

We also know that infections, if they are left to fester, continue the process of destruction and that healing is a process requiring the removal of infection.

Now, the same thing happens with emotional healing.

And you may Notice with physical healing, if you break your leg, it feels like forever before you can walk again, right?

It may feel like it's forever before you can actually be healed and free and happy again, but it's not.

And I want to encourage you, if you're in the midst of emotional pain that maybe you've been going through for years upon years and you just think there's no way out, the devil will tell you God himself doesn't have a remedy for your pain.

But if you keep slicing that wound open and cramming more infection-causing bacteria in there, yeah, you can be sure your pain isn't going to go away.

The cure for your sin, though, is not to keep on sinning, but to figure out how to truly give your sin to a wonderful Savior.

So healing is a process that requires both repentance and forgiveness.

I don't mean you confess to God the terrible things that your parents or anybody else did to you.

Okay, you have to tell God sometimes, not because He doesn't know, but because you don't feel that He knows.

But when you tell God those things, realize that confessing somebody else's sin to God is not going to heal your heart.

What's going to heal your heart is confessing your own sin to God.

Lord, because my brother did these things to me, Because my sister said these things to me, I have this lingering feeling that I believe that you are like this.

Help me to believe that you are who you say you are in your word instead of who I feel you are based on my experiences.

God will be with you through that process of healing.

Sometimes he'll send you to someone else who can help you as a counselor.

I hesitate to recommend that people go to counselors because there are so many different stripes and types of counseling.

It's like recommending that somebody have a lawn service come in and work on their lawn.

Well, every individual is different, right?

Every individual doctor is going to be different.

Every individual vet is going to be different and in the psychology world usually you're going to get bad instead of good because most people are looking to humanistic philosophies to help.

They try something and it seems to work and so they figure it works instead of figuring that there is a right and there is a wrong and there is a truth and there is an error and God has a plan marked out.

So they'll say, well, go home and scream curses into your pillow about how much you hate your parents all this week.

Then come back the next week and report to me how it feels.

Well then, I guess that's the thing to do.

So I'm just telling you, if the Lord guides you toward finding a counselor, find someone who is a biblical counselor who's going to tell you the gospel has the solution to your problems.

He's not going to say, you know, the problem is deep down within you is good, and you just need to dig until you get to that good.

No, actually, deep down within you is a carnal heart, and it's not going to have the solutions.

But the gospel has the solution to your carnal heart.

And within the gospel, you will find everything you need to be able to find healing and freedom from the power of sin.

When God works with us, he helps us to take refuge in his justice and his mercy, and that gives us the power to forgive.

Those sins of response don't have to keep festering in our lives, continuing that process of destruction that was started by someone else's sin against us.

If someone sins against me, I'm going to naturally want to sin back against them.

When my son slaps my other son, what do you think the other 1 wants to do back?

So you're not gonna be surprised when those sins of response well up in your own body and your own mind as a response to someone else's sin against you.

Just recognize that God has a solution to our sins.

Then there are the results of just living in a sinful world.

You know, it's not my fault if a drunk driver crosses the line and hits my car.

I may be the 1 who suffers from that sin that's committed, but it doesn't have to be my sin to make me suffer for it.

Now, there might be, you know, for example, my husband's hepatitis C.

It's probably the result of somebody in Zimbabwe using a dirty needle and boiling it for a while and then reusing it for the next surgery or something like that.

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Turning Wounds Into Scars, Part 2

Transcript

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