Healing the heart: unblocking the 'u' bend

Introduction

• the most significant healing we receive from God is a healing of the heart; the healing from being alienated from God and alienated from our true selves.

• I wonder whether the biggest and hardest lesson we have to learn in this life is how much God loves us. If we feel unloved or believe that we are fundamentally unlovable, then it will be nigh-on impossible to love others.

• to be a people of grace we need a healing of the heart

A Model used in Christian Counselling

(adapted from Lawrence J Crabb, Basic Principles of Biblical Counselling, p. 51)

Often Christian teaching tries to tackle sin at the situational level or at the level of behaviour or feelings.  We say, "avoid situations that cause you to sin, change sinful behaviour/feelings", but this may not result in our healing and transformation until we address the underlying sinful beliefs held about ourselves; in other words, until the heart is healed.

It’s like a blocked sink.  Trying to change situation/behaviour without dealing with underlying problem, is like removing the surface water without attending to the blockage, the real problem, the need for a healing of the heart. 

The psalmists wrote, ‘You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.' (Ps. 51.6)

Application Questions

• what situations bring out the worst in me?
• how do I behave/what do I feel?
• what thoughts and beliefs cause this?
• what does the Bible teach/the Spirit of Jesus say to this?
• have I taken to heart how much God really loves me?
• what new beliefs/thoughts emerge?
  or new feelings/behaviour
• Can I name these things?

Will we allow Jesus to meet our deepest need to be loved, accepted and forgiven, and receive the healing we desperately need?

• we all need love - a human being can survive without many things, but not without love. 
• we can only live in freedom, forgiveness and grace, if we have understood and experienced at the deepest core of our being God’s love, forgiveness and grace communicated to us by Jesus.

‘But God demonstrates his love for us in this: that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5.8)

(from a sermon preached on 15 July 2012 at St. John's, Muxton to listen go to http://www.stjohnsmuxton.org.uk/category/sermons/)

Peter in the black hurricane (Luke 22.54-62)

'Then seizing him they went and entered the high priest's house; but Peter followed at a distance.  But when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and had sat down together Peter sat among them... and the Lord turned around and looked straight at Peter, and Peter remembered what the Lord had said to him ... and he went out and wept bitterly.' (Luke 22.54-55, 61a & 62 translation mine)


If we look carefully at the string of third-person plural personal pronouns in Luke's retelling of Peter's denial of Jesus, we notice that the whole sorry event takes place at night around that fire kindled in the court-yard of the house of the high priest.  


Jesus has been arrested, forcibly led to the house, and now sits under guard around the fire.  The trial has yet to begin (Luke 22.66).  Peter, who at first followed at a distance, joins the gathering.  He may have been less than 10 feet away from Jesus when, undercover of darkness and the shifting shadows of the amber flames, he denies knowing the man who meant so much to him.  That turning, that look from Jesus, is all the more poignant when we discover that he heard every word of his friends betrayal.


What more could be done?  Peter finds himself swept up in the blackness of the moment when all humanity turns against the Lord of life.  He has yet to be touched by the reality of Jesus true identity, by the drama of Jesus' death and resurrection.  His foolish attempt to stay close to Jesus at all costs is trumped by weakness and human sin.  There is nothing he can do to escape the black fiery hurricane that enfolds Christ in his darkest hour.


...And yet there is mercy.  Jesus needs to speak no other words at this moment other than that which he has already been spoken.  The look is all that is needed.  Peter's denial is complete and he is spared going one step further in his duplicity and complicity with the events that are unfolding by leaving before the guards turn on Jesus.  


If he had stayed would he have been compelled to join them in mocking and beating his dear friend to prove the point.  No, in mercy, he is spared this at least...