Our souls have a voice and our pain has words. We spend an awful amount of time with closed ears, because we don’t want to hear what our souls are telling us. We don’t want to hear them telling us to return to the Source of all that is healing and good, so we can learn about Him through prayer and study. We’d rather listen to our flesh, where the pleasure can be immediate and our senses are continually stimulated, tempted, and tantalized. This is a recipe for distress, and the Word of God tells us so in Romans 8:7(NLT), “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.” Our thinking patterns or mindset is shaped by either the flesh or by the mind of Christ. We grow up in a world where we are taught to listen to our hearts, do what feels right to them, and to pursue whatever makes us feel good. This is not the mind of the Spirit, but indeed the mind of the flesh. And the mind of the flesh is where all shame, sin, pain, and fear have their roots.
Healing comes from learning and knowing the truth. Jesus Christ said in John 8:32(NLT), “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” A person cannot be made free by believing a lie. At a very fundamental level, we must believe that pain and suffering is not a natural state. Pain was not a part of the human experience until we allowed it to come into our being by believing lies rather than believing the truth. Adam and Eve started that whole thing, and every human being after them continued the practice. You and I can reject the actions and the choice that Brother Adam and Sister Eve made. It’s important for us to reject their actions because they took a route that didn’t tell the truth about them and doesn’t tell the truth about who we were created to be.
The first couple wanted independence from God. They no longer wanted to be under His sovereignty, and they thought they were forging a path to independence. Instead, they sold themselves into slavery. The opposite of light is darkness. 1John 1:5 declares that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Adam and Eve walked and talked with God daily, but ultimately, they took the word of the devil over the Word of God. They believed that God was withholding something from them, that there was more to be gained than the enormous bounty of what they enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. Their spirits wanted fuller expression and expansion through fellowship with God, but their flesh was tempted by doubt, and their souls were caught in the middle. Their flesh won and they chose to undermine their relationship with God and sold themselves out.
Psalm 84:11(NLT) says, “For the LORD God is our sun and our shield. He gives us grace and glory. The LORD will withhold no good thing from those who do what is right.” This is the truth! God doesn’t withhold blessings from us, but the false belief that He does drives the beliefs of many people that are living today. Just as it tricked the first couple, the belief that we are incomplete and that we need something more to BE something more is still plaguing many people. Allowing this lie to shape our minds and hearts is to regress—to go back to the place where rejection of God’s truth was humanity’s choice.
Pain, shame, sadness, and fear are all tools of evil to pull us backwards and downwards, so that we do not walk in the truth of our reality in Christ. With God in Christ, we continually move at a forward and upward trajectory. Progression is His goal for us, never regression. So many of us feel as though we take one step forward and two steps backwards, we feel like the devil’s punching bag, and it makes us feel bad about our lives and bad about ourselves. If we were to trace this pain back to its origin, we would find fear and doubt at its root. Somewhere deep inside many hurting people is a wrong belief about God and His love. They have been tricked into believing that something is being withheld from them, that they can’t have access to what they need, and they are continuing to punish themselves by investing in this untruth.
1John 4:18(NLT) tells us, “18 Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.” Believing a lie cannot be any other thing than a punishing reality. It means that we are choosing, for whatever reason, not to trust and believe God with our whole hearts. God’s love demolishes fear and all its cousins. There is absolutely no fear in His love, and we can have His love dwelling and abiding within if we accept it. We belong to God, and He wants His love to fill up our empty spaces through His Son, Jesus Christ. He tells us that by accepting the love of Christ in our hearts, we become children of the light, and because of Jesus Christ, darkness has no power over us. Our souls were created to be containers filled with God’s truth and love, so that we walk with faith in Him—so that we trust Him with our whole hearts. Adam and
Eve chose not to be fully committed, but we can and should make a different choice.
We become so caught up in the flesh, that we are easily offended. We see everything in terms of our emotions and how things make us feel. We can’t be alert and watchful this way. Life isn’t about the flesh. Life is spiritual. Everything pertaining to life is spiritual, and we need to open our eyes to this because it is the truth! Adam and Eve thought they could live a life with authority, dominion, and power even though they separated from the Source of those things. They abdicated their positions in the household of God’s Kingdom, but because of Jesus Christ, we are restored to our rightful positions in God’s house. 1Peter 2:24(NLT) tells us, “He personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed.” Our minds must be renewed to this. Through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God has healed us and renewing our minds to this truth will open our hearts to receive His healing power.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“Open Your Heart to God’s Healing”, written by FMack for Springfield Fellowship © 2021. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
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