God’s healing of your heart and mind is a direct extension of God continuing to create you. It is the epicenter of miracles whereby we experience theophanies that rescue us from madness and restore us into newness, upholding our mind like Christ. This state of being is very different from being washed clean by forgiveness due to shame, or a posture of surrender for God’s will to be done. Healing by God is distinct, leaving no room for bitterness, and also beyond words.
You may know God and have a relationship with Jesus, but how healed are you? There are no degrees to God’s healing. Each part of healing is a whole part healed. There are many areas in our heart and mind that need healing. Each area is its own territory and currently governed by something. In these areas you are either healed or you’re not, in the same way a woman is pregnant or she isn’t. What may feel healed is not healed at all if being triggered gives pain potential in your life.
If you are limited for your protection, or within boundaries to avoid reinjury, you may not be actually healed, but simply strong. God’s healing does not need to negotiate terms to move forward. We have the mind of Christ with attributes that resemble the way Jesus moves, but that mindset can easily be overrode by how we choose to live, changing our mind, demanding a quick fix. Harm calls us to action and leaves us inside a particular perspective. This fight or flight mentality eventually passes, leaving us in a state of weakness or strength. In this context, strength can be an obstacle to wholeness.
“For who has the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2:16 NRSV
Without real healing from God, the kind of healing that makes all things new, we are subject to simple states of strength, where actually, brokenness remains. This is how we often make it. We stay fractured but strong. Have you ever come out of a great struggle and told yourself, “I am grateful for this experience because it has made me stronger?” But when was the last time you heard someone say, “I feel so healed.” Strength can pull people up and out of remnants of suffering. Stability can then become cultivated where we make up our mind on a matter and suddenly, modify our behavior. This type of strength does not necessarily prove healing from anything. It merely measures distance from weakness.
God’s strength in us shows up one way, perfect. It is perfect in our weakness. If we do not realize healing from God then we can become strong in different kinds of ways that testify what we will do, rather than what God has done in us. This kind of recovery does not sustain us, but merely emphasizes our human capacity. Humans healing humans keep us running back to people. Humans healed by God keep us running back to God. Have you ever gone back to the same person or place that continues to destroy your self esteem? How vulnerable we are when reminded of past pain; any life unreconciled by Heaven is an endangered species, less guarded, and prone to injury.
The human heart is fragile. When our heart is left strong but unhealed, we force strength to keep us instead of Christ. This develops a constant need for people to care, especially people that hurt us. Our identity radically shifts becoming defined by others, whereby our worth develops through the created rather than the Creator. This is how codependent behavior develops. It can take a person their entire life to finally realize true healing from God. Do you know Christians that exist offended or without confidence? It is a cycle of processing pain that never ends until an encounter with Jesus happens and heals that exact place. How confusing and confining when this happens to Believers. A Christian can secure salvation and live inside misery until they die. Salvation is about where you are going, healing is about where you are. After all, we won’t need healing in heaven.
“Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Matthew 6:6 NRSV
God’s healing on earth as it is in heaven is a process of steps that actually lead us away from the altar. It calls us first to people or memories, and then, back to God. It’s not that people are before God, it is that God’s presence that calls us in the first place, prioritizes people. You are people, God prioritizes you. You are more important than any role of authority, ritual inside religion, or protocol for worship. You alone were worth dying for. Though your first step for God’s healing requires facetime with offense, this command to make things right is actually between you and the problem, not necessarily a person.
“So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come to offer your gift.”
Matthew 5:23–24 NRSV
You cannot force how another person will receive you, and sometimes the one that you need to make things right with has passed away. So this is about you making things right by being honest about where you are with what has happened to you. Sometimes the one you really need to make things right with is yourself. If you guard your pain with strength and pride and tuck it away, how can God enter in? So you see, leaving your gift at the altar is not because the gift is not good enough, it is that at the altar you can receive so much more if you commit to opening up. The very requirement to go back and make things right does exactly that. It pulls you beyond your pride and softens hard places so that true healing happens. How can God touch you where you need it most if you have your need in a band-aid of strength? Stop, take a moment, pray for what it is that is keeping you safe, and ask yourself is this God keeping me, or me keeping me?
I can recall being in a fight with a friend on the playground back in my youth. I needed to say sorry but I couldn’t seem to do it right away. The repercussions stayed with me for many years. The process of dealing with damaged areas in our life can feel unbearable. This is why people avoid issues in life, it is too painful. But if we peel back the layers of our human condition, we can expose the root of a matter and allow God to heal us deeply. Looking in the mirror where we do not forget what we are seeing requires humility. Being able to say sorry to ourselves for allowing a person more power in our life than Christ is an accomplishment. But we cannot stop there.
Squashing pride feels victorious. It takes strength to apologize. Even if you did nothing wrong you can still realize forgiveness toward people that know not what they do. They may never know, but you know. Saying sorry is an act of obedience, an order from God. Sorry can feel good, and cultivate the standard of righteousness meant to guide us. It can bring us back into a relationship with a person, or course correct your life when a relationship is meant to end. But it does not mean we are healed. So then, we must pause on possibilities and reroute back to the altar where we left our gift. Pick that gift up, forgive yourself, act like Christ really did die for you. Be made new. Then and only then can we be reminded of any past pain and actually celebrate—look what the Lord has done!
“So if the Son makes you free, you are free indeed!”
John 8:36 NRSV
The world will always have a counterfeit for God, baiting humanity into something less than great. Sorry became a solution rather than a step of a process to get free and ultimately, totally healed. Have you ever found yourself able to say sorry to someone after many years? You finally became strong enough, but strength does not heal either. Have you ever refused an apology, holding a person hostage to their mistakes? Sorry can be so problematic that waiting for it can prolong a person’s potential. Receiving it can substitute God’s healing with a sense of accomplishment. If sorry could heal, we would not need the cross. If sorry could heal, we would not find death an absolute value. If sorry could heal the way humanity needs healing, then we would not need Jesus.
Acts of obedience make us spiritually strong but a strong spirit can still live offended. Mustering strength is how the world heals itself, and it never lasts forever. People become stronger and better from trials in life. God’s healing is greater than becoming stronger. Strength will always be subject to weakness. God’s healing is subject to heaven. It is a timeless product that lasts forever. Jesus never got stronger or better from his trial. He just died. God healed Jesus from his state of being, created him to be something new, and also, untouchable. God’s healing is not wholeness, it is holy.
Christ became something so holy that it teaches us all things, even today, in a supernatural way, we now connect spiritually to Jesus Christ. In this, we can experience the living God. This is how we are called to live, by our testimony, from healed to holy. Anything less simply does not testify the same way. Only when our testimony matches holiness do people covet Christ. A holy testimony is born from death, not from perfection, it settles for nothing less than newness. In this way we prove a standard that is not developed from experience but from an exchange. This exchange proves righteousness in our everyday lives. It is a product from God from an action by you.
“But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
John 14:26 NRSV
God’s healing is the way we can know ourselves again and again as reborn on earth as it is in heaven. Inviting God to come into your life takes commitment. To realize God’s healing is to understand Christ’s death, not your death. Christianity has taught people to die to themselves. I believe Jesus died so we do not have to die for one more thing. So how about we start loving ourselves with quality care so His death is not in vain. Live a life healed because you can. Live and realize acutely when you are not healed from any attack. Be responsible and do something about it with God. Accept the gift. When God healed Jesus, God made him something else, something more, something supernatural. That is what we can expect from our pain, supernatural change.
God’s healing is so profound a product that no agreements, rituals, or practices could ever buy us into such a state. It is not manifested by covenants or confessions but is the result of refusing to settle for any person’s apology, or approval, or kindness, to satisfy you after you have been deeply (or even slightly) hurt. Sorry is a step in the right direction but it requires something other than sorry to become healed by God where you can celebrate who you are, not where you have come out from.
Sometimes people are stuck between the rock of God and a hard place never realizing this positioning is indeed profitable. Moreover any valley or season, crushedness leaves us subject to a kind of deliverance that transforms. In this space we can know an outpouring from heaven that creates the impossible. Something that seems so grave can become glorious when we go to God and not people for our healing. The evidence that we have been healed from the Father is when forgiveness becomes a product in our life, from an action we must take, rather than any word we might say.
Jesus said: “I am that I am.” So then, in Him, you are that you are. Go into all the world and live by your testimony so that the world might know Him. I believe the most important question to ponder is not where you are going when you die, but understanding the condition you are in while you live.
“And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.”
Revelations 12:11 NRSV