Inner Healing

Good morning everyone! Welcome to Hope Community Church. Welcome to the first part in our new series…

Today we are going to be starting at the bottom of the new us with the parts that nobody really sees. We’re talking about inner healing.

Inner Healing is the healing of our soul: our mind, our will, and our emotions. Our mind is what we think, our will is what we decide, and our emotions are what we feel. Put them all together and you have what makes us who we are. We all need it.

Inner healing is dealing with our foundation. Nobody likes to pay attention to the foundation. It’s not exciting.

When you go to someone’s new house, you probably don’t do a lot of complimenting them on their foundation. Not a whole lot of “nice slab man.” Instead we focus on the trim work, the flooring, the fixtures, and the paint.

As people we tend to be the same way. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why we are who we are in our deepest places. We instead tend to focus more on what we do than why we do it.

We focus on the trim work.

The problem with this is that the foundation is what allows everything to function like it is supposed to. When the foundation starts to crack and crumble, so does the house and all of the trimming with it.

Again, we tend to be the same way.

Our foundation is faulty, yet we only want to address the symptoms of our faulty foundation. We have anger issues so we treat our anger with anger management. We have anxiety issues so we treat our anxiety with medicine. We have self-worth issues so we end up in bad relationships because at least they love us. Then bad relationships produce bad relationships.

We continually try to feel better but don’t address why we don’t feel right in the first place.

It would be like seeing cracks in you wall and ceiling because your foundation is bad and saying, “I’ll fix the problem by patching the sheet rock and slapping a little paint on it.” The problem will not be fixed and it will probably get worse.

We need to be looking below the surface, past the trim work. We need to be looking at why we do what we do.

We all have emotional wounds and we are all affected by them. We don’t like to look at them because they hurt and we don’t like to hurt. We like things quick and painless.

We want to get from Broken to Healed without any pain involved. So we learn to medicate and live in denial because it is our natural instinct to avoid pain at all cost. Physically, we don’t like pain but if something is wrong, surgery is frequently required to fix the problem. Pain might have to happen for healing to come.

Our souls are no different. Matthew 5:4 says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” To mourn is to “feel regret or sadness because of loss.”

Jesus says that we will be blessed if we feel regret or sadness because then He will comfort us.

If we choose not to feel then He cannot comfort and heal.

In Matthew 8: 1-3 it says this: “When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. 2 And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” 3 And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

Jesus healed many people and many of his healings did not involve Him laying His hands on the person He was healing. Why does He use touch this time on the man who can’t be touched?

He does it to show us that He has to go to those places in us that are unclean. He has to go to those places that we are ashamed of. He loves us so much that He wants to get up in our mess and brings us healing and wholeness.

There is a division of labor here though. He is responsible for the healing and we are responsible for being vulnerable and asking for His help.

We have to give Him access to those places that we might not want to go to. Or maybe we don’t even know that they are there. If we don’t know that we have problems, we will never ask for help.

The problem with knowing and understanding our issues is that the basis of our belief system, the way we view the world, is formed at a very early age; somewhere between 3-10 years old. This is the way we understand love, value, family, and acceptance. It is then molded and shaped as we move through life.

By the time we are adults, we have forgotten why we believe what we believe about ourselves and we just operate on auto-pilot in our conscience mind.

You may have heard that we are only capable of using 10% of our brain power and this is because the other 90% is our sub-conscience mind. Things that we are not thinking about but are ingrained in our belief system.

I have an illustration on the screen of the Titanic and the iceberg that sank it. Only 10% of the iceberg is on top of the water and the other 90%, the part that sinks the titanic, is like a mountain under the surface.

It’s not our conscience mind that sinks us, it is the sub-conscience belief system that is made up of all of the unseen issues that continually drag us down.

What are those things? Fear, rejection, failure, abuse, guilt, shame, unworthiness, insecurity, and the feeling of not being good enough are some of the issues that we carry.

They affect us day in and day out. My dad left my mom right before I was born and I grew up without a father figure until I was 8 years old. There was this empty space in me and I learned how get affirmation. I learned to perform. I learned how to get acceptance.

The problem with this is that I was willing to compromise character and integrity for affirmation and acceptance. God has really had to work that insecurity out of me by walking through moments of failure and exposing my old wounds.

I got to APOR and I was convinced that I didn’t have dad issues because I didn’t think about how mad I was at my dad when I bought drugs. It wasn’t in my conscience mind. What did happen was that I had holes that I tried to fill with the wrong things.

Inner healing is not a blame game. I made bad choices. It is an opportunity to find the source of the problem so that we can begin to take ownership for our actions and grow moving forward.

We have to stop expecting other people to take the place in our soul that God was designed to take.

What ends up happening if we can’t own our issues and invite God in is that we force people to treat us in ways that we don’t want to be treated.

In an effort to mend our own brokenness, we come up with broken ways of medicating our hurts.

This is what I mean: Little Johnny grows up in a home where he is made to feel like nothing that he does is good enough.

Once he feels rejected enough times, he begins to feel that he really isn’t good enough. The lie is born.

Once he believes the lie, he really starts hating the way he feels about himself and begins to do everything he can to not feel that way. He wants to feel accepted and loved. He may even vow to not let anyone make him feel that way when he gets older.

Now as an adult with a joby and a family, Johnny still has this kid living inside of him that doesn’t want to feel rejected. He goes to work and his boss tells him that what he did wasn’t right or wasn’t good enough and Johnny goes off on his boss and tells him all of the reasons that he is no good at his job and gets fired or quits.

He goes home and tells his wife about unfairly he was treated and she wants nothing of it because this same thing keeps happening at job after job. He feels rejected again and blows up on her and leaves to go to the bar.

His greatest fear is that he will be rejected and alone and now he has created it.