Three Steps Toward Healing 2

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When your story is dotted or defined by painful events, losses, abuses, traumas, failures, and sins committed against or by you it is easy to retreat to the hiding place. Hiding people are everywhere.

Like a wound under a bandage, the pain doesn’t go away in the hiding place. It can fester and manifest itself in all kinds of distorted beliefs and behaviors - sometimes for years or decades.

Emotional wounds left uncared for may become a silent or violent war that rages within and outward toward others. You really can’t hide it; you just learn to disguise it – we “mask the pain”.

I’m praying you will allow God to gently call you out. Key Thought Two: Exposing Our Wounds is War Taking Us to The Honest Place (from Psa. 32)

• v. 5. The first casualty of war is truth. Satan seeks to get you alone and takes pleasure in your pain. If the enemy can keep you hiding from God, alone in your pain, he wins (Pro. 28:13).

• v. 5b-7. Exposing your wounds is where the momentum in the war shifts in your favor. When you know God is for you – even when you’re at your worst or deeply wounded – you can safely move to the honest place and defeat the darkest most difficult enemies (Psa. 56:9, 1 John 1:9).

• v. 7 - Jesus now becomes the “hiding place” - the safe place to expose what has happened to you and what you’ve done to others (Psa. 62:8).      [Read Rom 8:1, 31-39 on your own!]

The second step to healing is exposure. Come out of hiding and trust Jesus to tend to your wounds. This is war because lies can be easier to believe, giving us permission to not trust - even God.

But when we battle to the honest place, exposing what has happened and what we’ve done, the pain of “pulling off the bandage” gives way to the process of healing (Mt. 4:23-24, 11:28-30).

Jesus can handle whatever the wound. So, instead of keeping it all buried, festering, unhealthy –
come out of the cave and bring the wounds, sickness, pain to Jesus, your present help in trouble.

War creates casualties. Look around the room and in the mirror. But war also demands courage. I encourage you to take the next step toward healing and move to the honest place. Here’s how:

1) Ask God to show you ways you have trusted yourself instead of Him by self-protecting, self-providing, or seeking to always be in control by choosing your own way (Psa. 139:23-24).

2) Write down the lies you believed when making those choices, then speak God’s truth to them.

3) Admit that going your own way (for whatever reason) was a sinful choice. Then seek God’s forgiveness and trust Him to restore your heart and mind. Then receive it (Psa. 51:4, 7, 10-13).

4) Consider the ways you have hurt / offended others. Be honest, write down the person, offense, your feelings related to the offense, then ask God (only) to forgive you - He will and does.

5) Recover! You took another step toward healing. What sin ruined God is restoring. Come back for # 3.