Only Three Choices

Studying the gift of healing this Sunday at church, I was reminded of the three areas of healing that Jesus offers each of us. From His own words Jesus states in
Luke 4:18-28 (Amplified Bible).

The Spirit of the Lord [is] upon Me, because He has anointed Me [the Anointed One, the Messiah] to preach the good news [the Gospel] to the poor; He has sent Me to announce release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to send forth as delivered those who are oppressed [who are downtrodden, bruised, crushed, and broken down by calamity], 19To proclaim the accepted and acceptable year of the Lord [the day when salvation and the free favors of God profusely abound].

The three areas of healing I refer to are:
1. Spiritual Healing - Jesus came preaching the good news (Gospel). Jesus has authority to save us from God's Holiness. In addition, He saves us from God's requirement that we be perfect in order to be in His presence. Jesus also saves us from our own propensity to sabotage our lives.
2. Physical Healing - The recovery of sight to the blind and all other infirmities.
3. Emotional Healing - Deliverance to all of those oppressed, bruised, and crushed by calamity.

From the time I became a Christian, my passion has been healing for the wounded emotions of hurting people. I believe the emotional healing of the Christian clears the way to spiritual maturity. When the Lord began to heal my wounded emotions and I began to experience His freedom and joy, I wanted to pass that good news on to others.

Why my emotional pain you ask? The best I can discern is it was a mixture of several things. One, due to being an "overly protected" child by my parents, I experienced a form of covert rejection. The word covert means hidden, stealth, secret. Neither my parents nor I realized the rejection. None of us knew what the result would be of their over protection. My parents thought for me, fought my battles for me, and made decisions for me. They did not intend to make me feel rejected. What my parents meant for good Satan used against me.

Take a compliant child who has overly protective parents and as time goes by the child begins to believe she must not be able to handle her own life issues. Her parents have to do it for her. As years pass, the child becomes an adult, and because she learned to be helpless as a child, she is a helpless adult. Do you know any people like this?

I learned to second-guess myself and not trust my decisions. Thinking less of myself became a way of life. We would call this low self-esteem. Secondly, I now know that as I went through puberty my brain chemistry changed. I did not have enough neorepinephrine or serotonin to supply my brain. Depression began. This depression lasted 43 years before I was finally convinced that I really was depressed. You see, if you live with depression every day, you begin to think it is normal. When someone tells you it is not normal, it takes time to consider if what was said is truth.

One of the greatest benefits of my own emotional healing, was it had a positive impact on my rather strained marriage. As I have referred to in previous posts, I wanted my husband to think for me, make decisions for me, and give me direction. He would not and I raged for many years. I raged at him and at myself for raging. Sound familiar? Finally, the Lord showed me I had three choices and only three choices regarding the marriage.

t, I could divorce him. I am not saying God said this was one of His choices for me, but it could be a free will choice of mine to divorce. God did give us the blessing and the curse of free will. Many Christians take the divorce route. Does God forsake them and not love them anymore? No. He hates divorce not divorcees.

If we unpacked this statement, we would probably all agree that divorce is extremely painful for all concerned: family, children and friends included. One's world turns upside-down with the discovery that there are more unexpected losses experienced than just the legal aspects of the divorce itself. Divorce was out of the question for me. Why? My husband was not abusive, nor did he have an affair or dabble in things that are blatantly against the law and the will of God.

I had little reason to protect myself from him. He is a good provider, comes home each evening and loves us the best he can. However, I could not say this at that time because my learned helplessness triggered me daily. I believed the pain I was experiencing was intentionally coming from my husband. I continually felt rejected, dismissed, not heard, and trapped. I had no idea it was the unresolved fallout of my upbringing.

My second choice was to remain in misery, raging, not forgiving and not maturing. I could just live a miserable life until it ended. I could see myself as a bitter old woman whose life never began yet ended with death. When you live by this second choice you live life feeling helpless and hopeless, believing there is no way out. As portrayed in "The King's Speech" you have no voice. You are stuck. How terribly sad this is, living an entire life of misery and then dying.

Too many people try to escape (they probably do not see this as an escape at the time) with alcohol, drugs, gambling etc. There are hundreds of ways we try to escape, but in the end, we know our lives were not authentic. It was just a way to survive until life is over.

My third choice was to take God's promises seriously, follow the Lord, and grow in my faith. Paul said he could be content in all circumstance. I wanted that contentment. Jesus said He came to give us peace, a peace the world does not understand. I wanted that peace. I learned God desired to guide me by His Holy Spirit, help me partake of the mind of Christ when making decisions, and fill my heart and mind with the word of God. He led me to my purpose in life, counseling the wounded. God wants to fill and satisfy all of the holes in our souls. I took my umbilical cord from my parents and plugged it into Jesus.

I believe we have only these three choices. I have counseled many Christians who want to hear there is another choice. They are experiencing so much pain in their marriages. Upon getting to know more about the client, I discover their focus is on changing the spouse. God has not given any of us the authority to change another person except ourselves and we cannot even do that without Jesus.

You might wonder why I am a counselor if we are not to change people.The client decides they need help. They come in for counseling asking for that help. I am not out in the community trying to fix people who have not asked me for help. This is the difference. In order to help our husbands they need to ask for help and if they don't, God can give you His peace and contentment as you follow Him and let Him, If not let someone you trust, work with you on your childhood wounds. God, too, waits for us to ask for His help. He wants your desire for healing and your request.

Ending the War with Yourself

I haven't said much about my book Ending the War with Myself. Even though I use myself in many of the examples, the book could be titled Ending the War with Yourself. So here are some thoughts about parts of the book.


During my years of counseling Christian clients, I continually found a common theme with each person I saw. Note, we can fall anywhere on the continuum of life. Some of us come across as extremely capable and self-sufficient while others of us believe we can't accomplish much of anything on our own. When either is asked, "How is your relationship with yourself?" They respond, without batting an eyelid, or asking me if I were crazy to ask such a question, "Oh, I am very hard on myself," or "I push myself really hard." "I'm a perfectionist," or "I judge myself all the time."

Now who is the person we are having this "insensitive relationship" with? Do you sometimes wonder to whom your self-talk is directed? I believe as Christians we each experience ourselves through three different avenues. One is the new recreated, born into God's family, filled with the Holy Spirit you. We like this one. The second is the flesh part of you. The part that is tempted to sin and by golly we fall for that temptation, "again!" We are not very happy with this one. :( Thirdly, there is the wounded part of you. Most of us are aware of the first two, but the third one, I am not so sure about.

As Christians we learn a lot about being loved and accepted by God in church. We are taught the Bible with all its principles for living healthy lives. Conversely, we also hear about the consequences of our missing the mark of God's perfection (sin). But the wounded you is not normally addressed. If we do get help, it is generally outside the church. Church for me was only learning about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Once that is under your belt, church was about going out and helping people. Something always seemed to be missing.

I now know we, the church, are leaving out a significant part of ourselves in our healing process with God. It was not until seven years ago as I was helping with a program called Living Waters, that I became acutely aware that the wounded parts of ourselves need to be addressed within the church. We used a small group format as many Bible studies do. I knew the program included teaching, praying and confessing of sin. What I observed was the program not only dealt with our personal failings (sins) but also with the pain of being sinned against.

Being sinned against by others brings on our woundedness. Unless the woundedness is dealt with it follows us into adulthood affecting the quality of our emotional and spiritual lives and the quality of our significant relationships. And to top it off, we continue wounding ourselves over and over again with our negative self-talk. We judge, condemn and drive ourselves without even knowing that we are adding to our own pain.

Is all of this biblical? As God's children He wants us to say about ourselves what He says about us. Of the many positive things He says about us one is Romans 8:1a, " 1THEREFORE, [there is] now no condemnation (no adjudging guilty of wrong) for those who are in Christ Jesus." God's children are no longer judged by God, therefore we are not to judge ourselves and add to our own woundedness. Yes, we are to listen to the Holy Spirit and discern when we truly do sin and ask for forgiveness, which is delivered instantly. There is a difference between judgment and discernment. As I studied judgment in Naves Topical Bible on http://www.biblegateway.com, I discovered that judgment always comes with either a punishment or reward. Discern means the ability to differentiate, recognize, detect between good and evil. Yes, we are to discern our sins, but not pronounce judgment on ourselves. Clients, who cut their bodies, not for suicidal purposes, are cutting their bodies as a judgment on themselves; a judgment of guilty with a self-imposed selected punishment.

One day as I was reading my Bible about the Pharisees asking Jesus, "What is the most important of all the commandments?" I saw something in Jesus' answer, found in Matthew 22:34, I had never seen before. See if you can find it.

34Now when the Pharisees heard that He (Jesus) had silenced (muzzled) the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35And one of their number, a lawyer, asked Him a question to test Him. 36Teacher, which kind of commandment is great and important (the principal kind) in the Law? [Some commandments are light--which are heavy?] 37And He (Jesus) replied to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (intellect) 38This is the great (most important, principal) and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as [you do] yourself. 40These two commandments sum up and upon them depend all the Law and the Prophets."

I knew the first two laws; love God and love others. This time, however, "as you do yourself" jumped out at me. Love myself? Is this heretical? Jesus tells us these two laws are preeminent over all other laws. The first law tells us to love God. The second law tells us to love others as we love ourselves. Look closely at these two laws and you will find Jesus commanding us to love three entities; first and above the others, we are to love God; secondly, to love ourselves; and thirdly, to love others. Only two of these three are generally addressed in Christian circles: God and others.

Leaving out loving yourself is a grave oversight. As Jesus goes on to say; “If you love God, and love others as you love yourself, you will be fulfilling all the law and the prophets.” Harper’s Bible Dictionary says, “Everything hangs upon the law of love; take away this, and all falls to the ground and comes to nothing.” “For the fulfilling of the law is love and the end of the law is love (Romans 13:10).” The Christian faith is about love being preeminent in all facets of our lives. “Love never fails (1Timothy 1:5).”