Letting God Heal Your Heart
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By Elizabeth Stalcup, founder and executive director of Healing Center International
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. ”
We all know that God wants to heal our hearts and make us whole just like Jesus. What can we do to cooperate with his work in our lives?
Today I am writing about letting God heal your heart, how we can cooperate with God in the healing process. I want to start by telling you a little bit about myself. I did not grow up in a Christian home, but at the age of ten a friend invited me to go to Sunday school with her—they were having a contest March to Sunday School in March. My friend Vicky got points, and my life—and the life of my family—was changed forever. Out of that simple invitation, over the next two years everyone in my family surrendered their lives to Jesus—all that is except my father. He viewed our en mass conversion and went off to become a Christian Scientist. That is a story for another day.
During my teen years I went to church on Sundays and Wednesdays (this was a Baptist church), but the rest of the time I was driven by my wounds to behave in ways that degraded me. In church, I would sing rousing choruses and memorize scripture, and would not infrequently walk the aisle in response to the altar call, tears streaming down my face. But I didn’t know how to let God change me. There was no freedom and inner transformation. I tried to hide the inner me from the good church folks, while filled with guilt and shame.
I had lots of wounds. I secretly hoped that God would be like Glenda, the good witch in the Wizard of Oz, with her silky voice and magic wand. She would touch me so I would wake up in Kansas. It was many years before I realized that most of the time it doesn’t work like that.
This does not mean that God is not committed to our healing. He is all in. In his Word he promises that he will make us new creatures. He has much bigger plans for us than we have for ourselves, plans that he is preparing in advance for us to do. Do you know that? He dreams much bigger dreams for us that we do for ourselves.
I am a prime example.
I was so shy (and traumatized) as a kid that I cried the first day of school every year because I was utterly terrified of new situations. I remember praying each year that I would not fail even though I was a very good student. In fact, the first day of third grade, I cried so hard that my stomach churned, then I threw up on the kid who had been assigned to walk me to the office.
God does heal people supernaturally. Sometimes. We have all seen his healing power and my family has lots of examples. Best-selling author Jan Karon, who wrote the Mitford books, told me during an interview that before she came to faith, she had been smoking unfiltered Pall Malls for twenty-two years. “At the time of my salvation God took the craving from me. That's a miracle,” she shared. All of us have heard stories and I have had many people come back after prayer and tell me, “God healed me.” He does do that.
But most of the time healing is a process that is slow because God is working in human hearts, so he needs to be gentle, so gentle in his approach that we find it easy to ignore his nudges. “It is all too easy,” Dallas Willard writes, to “explain away as coincidences the answers that come to the prayers” that we utter. All too easy to tune him out. Even so, God is committed to our healing. He will not give up. He is not in a hurry, but he is determined. He will save if we are at all willing, at all open. C.S. Lewis paints a picture of what it looks like here:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on extra floors there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but he is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself.”
Some of you today feel that God is knocking about the inside of your house in a way that hurts abominablyand does not seem to make sense. This is understandable. We are living in painful times. Political unrest, racial injustice and the pandemic are bringing our pains to the surface. My message today is for you.
While our pain is near the surface we have a remarkable opportunity to engage with God for renovating the home that is our heart. A great example of this kind of heart renovation is Hannah, in the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 1:1-20. Hannah was one of two wives of a man named Elkanah. And she had no children, which at that time, in that culture was seen as failure, as punishment from God. Not only was Hannah childless but Elkanah’s other wife provoked her, the Bible says in verse 6, in order to irritate her. Many of us have experienced cattiness in our lives, so we can all imagine what this was like. “Look at the sons God has blessed me with. Where are your son’s Hannah?” Nasty stuff. And even Hannah’s husband was insensitive. Instead of saying, “I understand that you are broken hearted,’ he says in verse 8, “Why are you upset, you’ve got me!”
As many of you know, at HCI we teach classes on healthy relationships. We go over mistakes people make in the name of helping and one of them is to give trite, overly simplistic answers. We call this “Mrs. Bumper Sticker.” Elkanah was the perfect example of Mr. Bumper Sticker: “Don’t feel blue, you’ve got me!” How does Hannah respond to all these verbal barbs? Does she lash back? Does she tell her husband, “You don’t understand!” No, she turns to God and in anguish of soul she pours our her heart. In fact her outpouring is so intense that the priest thinks she is drunk.
This is my first point. Healing begins when we get real with God. We all have issues, but most of us, myself included, don’t want to face them because we know through experience that it is liable to be painful. There is a concept we talk about in the Listening for Heaven’s Sake class called the Johari Window and this window represents the soul. There are four windows, the shared area which contains the things we don’t mind other people knowing such as the fact that I am the director of HCI and that I have brown hair and three kids. Then there is the blind area, the area that others see, but I do not. We often call that the bad breath area because we are unaware that anything is wrong, we need God or other people to gently help us see our blind spots. The third is the hidden area, the area that we know about, but we hide from other people.
If we go back to the picture of our soul being a house, the hidden area is the hall closet where we keep all the stuff we don’t want people to see locked up. You know the house looks pretty good with the closet door shut, but every once and awhile the Holy Spirit opens the doors and throws all the stuff out onto our nice oriental carpet and says, “Ahh, this is starting to stink. Let face this stuff and deal with it.” Now when this happens I usually say to God, “Stand aside,” and I shove the stuff back into the closet. But then Jesus gives me that look, that look that says, I love you my daughter, there is a better way. That look that invites me to get real with him about what is going on.
The last area of the Johari Window is the unknown area and that is the area that only God sees. The goal of healing is for the shared area to become larger—to be free of anger, guilt, shame, fear and all the things that keep us from being who we were meant to be. As the shared area grows we are more aware of who we are, more comfortable with who we are, including our limits, and more open about who we are.
Hannah got real with God. She did not hold back. Now this can be very hard. I recently had a healing prayer session where I was shocked to see how much pain I was carrying. I thought I was never going to stop releasing pain to Jesus. Sometimes we don’t even know what the problem is, we just know something is not right and many times we are blind and we don’t even know we have a problem.
Let me tell you a secret. We all have issues that impact our lives in negative ways. No one has arrived. This brings up my second point: get quiet and be with God. Once you have gotten real with God and released all the physical and emotional tensions, be still and be with God. Let him near so he can comfort and strengthen you. Let him speak to your heart. Write it down. Remember it. He restores our soul.
My third point is to take action. Hannah didn’t stay home. She didn’t say, the trip is such a pain—stuck in a hotel room with Peninah and Elkanah. I’m just not going to go.I’ve experienced such disappointment. I am going to sit home and enjoy having some peace and quiet. No she moved ahead. She got up and went to the place where she would encounter God. You may be wondering, how do I do that? Book a trip to the wailing wall? For me what this looks like is to pursue healing, wholeness and understanding. To stop turning to BEEPS[1]. To take a class, teach a class, get healing prayer. Or spend time in solitude journaling with God and reading scripture. It may mean reading nourishing books, and pausing every so often to talk to God about what you are reading. Ask God what next steps would look like for you, even if they are baby steps . . . then take those steps one after another.
One baby step might be to come to Daily Connect where we listen to God and to each other. It is a start. Daily attendance is making a difference in the lives of so many people. I recently had someone ask me if I thought she should take Facing Life’s Losses and when I said yes, she asked why. I did not have a reason, but the thought that popped into my mind is that every Christian should go through this program because grieving our losses is a huge blind spot in our culture. It is a bit of a graduate level course, so I am not recommending that everyone start there, but eventually we should all get there.
Early in my healing journey, before there was an HCI, I went through Living Waters. The program lasts nine months, from September to June and covers everything—mother issues, father issues, self-hatred, narcissism. And each week I would think, this isn’t an issue for me or that used to be an issue for me, but I have worked that one through. And then they would start talking about the symptoms of that issue and it would be me! That program was profoundly healing because it helped me see some of my blind spots and give them to God. After I was done, I even had a neighbor say that I had changed dramatically that year. Living Waters may not be for everyone—they can take only a limited number of people each year. But I would urge you in 2021 to engage with some program that will support you as you develop your secure attachment to God (and other people).
So my first point is that we start by getting real with God. By facing our issues and bringing them to the Lord. Stop stuffing them. Stop medicating them with shopping and chocolate or whatever we use to make us feel better. Stop blaming other people. Stop helplessly submitting to unhealthy garbage. Do what Hannah did. She did not get distracted by other people and their issues. She took her pain to God and poured out her heart. My second point is quiet and be with God. Don’t storm forever, let it out then let the storm pass and let God in. Practice quieting and listening until you can hear him clearly. Get help if you get stuck. Thirdly, take action. God wants you whole. He will do what he can, but a lot more can a happen if you are proactive and willing to place yourself in a community that will support you as you draw close to God and face what hinders you. A place where you can practice engaging with God because that in and of itself will change you. My fourth point is to get obedient. Hannah gave her son, her only son at that point, to God. Yes, after she cried out to God, he spoke to her through the priest. She conceived and after she weaned her boy, she offered him up to the Lord. I cannot imagine how painful that must have been. She brought him to the temple and gave him to the priest. Now in that culture, weaned may have been three or four or even five years old. Imagine her, sewing him a little coat, knowing she was letting him go. She gave him up. This is so powerful to me. We cannot hang on to even what God has given us. In verse 27, she says, “I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” Hannah later had three more sons and two daughters. But yielding her first born to the Lord for his entire life was extreme obedience. It changed the world.
I was in my late twenties before I began to comprehend the importance of obedience. Our culture says that we should do what feels good and it is an utter lie. Our hearts are so easily deceived. I grieve for all the people who are doing what seems best to them, and experiencing so much hurt and confusion because they do not see the connection between their behavior and the pain in their life. If we are ever going to be healed, we have to obey God. This can mean laying down our cherished dreams at the foot of the cross and trusting God with them. I always quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer—who died trying to stop Hitler—and I cannot resist doing it again because it is so true. He wrote, “Only those who believe obey and only those who obey believe.” It is only as we believe that we realize, it was God! That builds faith. As our faith grows we are more and more willing to step out in response to God’s gentile nudges.
[1] Behaviors, Experiences, Events, People, and Substances—which can include just about anything we turn to other than God and safe people.