The Healing Power of Love


01/23/2011 - An Appetizer of the Kingdom of God



This morning we continue our series called The Healing Power of Love. And because it's been awhile I thought it best that we resume the series with a review of where we've been so far.

We began this series in the fall with the hope and the prayer that it might help heal some of the wounds in our lives that keep us from fulfilling the great commandment of Jesus which is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as ourself. That, Jesus said, is the bottom line. Love is what we were all created for, to reflect the love that God has for us back to him and to share it with one another.

The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:13,Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. We want to be a church community that's marked by love. We want to be an appetizer of the kingdom of God.

But wounds and hurts and scars from our past can distort our image of self, get in the way, and make it difficult for us to love God and love other people because we're not very happy with who we are. And unless those wounds and hurts find a measure of healing it can be very difficult to fulfill the great commandment.

In his classic book called Healing for Damaged Emotions, David Seamands talks about the hurts and the wounds in our lives using the analogy of a majestic sequoia or giant redwood tree. And if you go out west, like Jen and did in November, you can see cross sections of these great trees that have been cut down. And by looking at the rings in the wood trained naturalists can see what happened to the tree throughout its lifetime.

Each ring represents a year of growth. One ring might reveal a year of drought when there was hardly any rain, another ring a year when there was too much rain. One ring might show that the tree was struck by lighting that year or the victim of a forest fire or that it experienced some kind of blight or disease. And of course a bunch of rings show normal years of growth. All of that data lies embedded in the heart of the tree, but you'd never know it unless you got behind the protective bark and into the core.

And that's the way it is in our lives too. Beneath our protective bark, the person we are on the outside, is the story of our lives written on the rings of our heart on the inside. And that story includes all the wonderful things that have happened to us, but it also includes the wounds and the hurts and that pain from our past that make us who we are today.

And those rings, those life experiences affect how we look at life and look at God and look at others and look at ourselves.

But healing begins when we expose those wounds and that pain first to God in the safety and security of our relationship with him and then to at least one other person that we can trust. It might be a friend, a family member, a pastor, or a professional counselor.

Confession is good for the soul. Confession is powerful and so we talked about the power of confession and bringing the hurts out of the darkness and into the light of God's healing power.

I don't believe any healing can take place as long as we keep our wounds hidden in secret. Doing that just leads to more anger and bitterness, more despair and isolation.

James, the earthly brother of Jesus, wrote about the power of confession in James 5:16, Therefore, confess your faults to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Confession and prayer bring healing, James says. Martin Luther called confession "a cure without equal." That's true. It's a huge part of our emotional healing for the hurts and sins and struggles of our past and of our present as well. And confessing our faults to a trusted, mature person who can handle the information responsibly and who will pray for us and encourage us can be a powerful, transforming experience.

So the first two weeks we talked about the power of confession and its importance in the healing process. But after that comes, what I believe, is the most critical choice of all. And that's the choice to forgive which is at heart of being a Christ follower. So we spent a few weeks talking about the freedom of forgiveness.

We told the story that Jesus told in Matthew 18 to illustrate the fact that we've all been forgiven a mountain of moral debt and we're commanded to extend that same outrageous forgiveness that we've received from God to others. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. We're not to keep score. 70 x 7 is not enough!

We said that forgiveness is a choice. It is not a feeling. Forgiveness is not forgetting. It's remembering the hurt so that the forgiveness is real. Forgiveness is not always a once and done deal. It may need to be affirmed again and again. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Forgiveness takes one person, me. Reconciliation takes two. And at the end of the day the heart of forgiveness is releasing the right to get even and instead wanting the best for the other person.

The word forgive literally means "to release." To forgive is to release a person from retaliation. I know I've forgiven some one when I can look past the hurt they've caused me and see them as a person with hurts of their own and then eventually get to the place where I actually wish the best for them and mean it.

Forgiveness is huge in the healing power of love. It sets us free to love people, even our enemies. I love what Max Lucado says about forgiveness, "You know what we learn when we forgive somebody. We learn that when we open the door to our prison of bitterness and let them out, the real prisoner was our self. And we're the ones who can finally walk free."

Forgiveness releases others and releases ourselves.

After Matt did such a great job teaching on Jesus, the Wounded Healer, I gave another talk on forgiveness specifically aimed at forgiving our parents and forgiving ourselves, the two most difficult people to forgive. It came right after my backpacking hike on the Appalachian Trail and so I said that all of us go through life carrying a backpack. They come in all different sizes, but we all have one. And whenever we get hurt in a relationship another stone gets added to the backpack. Some of the hurts are big, hurts by our parents, or by our siblings, or by spouses, or significant others in our life. Some of the hurts are small by people we don't even know well. But every time we get hurt another stone gets put in the backpack.

And after awhile it can get real heavy to carry it around. It takes a toll on us emotionally and physically and spiritually. And we can choose to numb the pain by working real hard or staying real busy or by escaping into a world of alcohol or drugs or food or sex or some other addiction. But that won't lighten the load. In fact, that only makes things heavier and adds more stones to the pack. There's only one way to lighten the load and that's by forgiving others and forgiving ourselves.

Forgiveness lightens the backpack because every time we forgive a person who's hurt us we take a stone out of the pack and give it to God. And eventually, with God's help, I believe it's possible to get most if not all of the stones out and keep them out by living a lifestyle of forgiveness.

And that's what Jesus wants for all of us. He wants to lighten our load and put a bounce in our step. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, he says.

So there's the power of confession. The freedom of forgiveness. And then the reward of reconciliation.

That's what God is out to do with everything he created. He's out to reconcile all things to himself, to heal what is broken, to right what is wrong, to straighten what's crooked.

Colossians 1:19-20 says, For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, that is in Jesus, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

God wants to reconcile all things to himself and calls us to join him in that process. And that involves fixing broken relationships. In fact, Jesus said reconciling a relationship that's broken is more important than sitting in a worship gathering.

If we've been offended or hurt by someone or realize that we've offended or hurt someone else it's our responsibility to go and make it right. The ball is always in our court. That means confessing the matter and forgiving or asking forgiveness and restoring the relationship. We are to be peacemakers. Matthew 5:9,Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.

We said that true peacemakers have received God's peace. True peacemakers make peace with others. And true peacemakers make peace among others. Peacemakers are like the little four year-old boy in the divorce court who took his mommy's hand and pulled her over to his daddy and with tears in his eyes put their two hands together and said, "Don't fight, mommy. Don't fight, daddy."

Peace is the reward of reconciliation. And peace is how the whole story of God is going to end. When God's kingdom finally comes in all it's fullness to this earth it will be a peaceable kingdom. But until that time we're called, as God's children, to be reconcilers.

So you have the power of confession. The freedom of forgiveness. And the reward of reconciliation.

Then we turned a corner in our last teaching. We moved from talking about our relationships with each other to our relationship with ourselves and the dangers of a low self-esteem, a warped view of self. Because how we value ourselves affects how we value others. If we don't respect ourselves it's difficult to respect others. If we don't love and care for ourselves, in a healthy way, it will be difficult to love and care for others.

In his bookHealing for Damaged Emotions, David Seamands writes, "Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut-level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth. This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences, in spite of their faith and knowledge of God's Word. Instead of viewing themselves as beloved sons and daughters of God, they're tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling of inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness."

I think he's absolutely right. If we don't see ourselves as God sees us, created in his image, beloved sons and daughters for whom Jesus died, children of the King, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we're going to struggle our whole life with a warped view of self that will cause a nagging sense of failure in our lives and make it difficult to love others as ourselves.

Jesus was so capable of loving others because he knew exactly who he was. When he got down on the floor and washed the dirty feet of his disciples like a slave would in that culture he wasn't threatened by that act of humility because John 13:3 says, Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.

Jesus knew exactly who he was. He had an accurate picture of himself. He knew where he came from and he knew where he was going. He was secure in himself and so he could serve others in selfless way. And I think God wants us to be secure in who we are in him.

It is so much easier to love and serve others when we have an accurate picture of ourselves, when we know who we are and where we came from and where we're headed because then we're not driven by the need for constant affirmation and accolades and pats on the back. But if we don't know who we are in God's eyes or where we came from or where we're headed, it's going to be difficult to put water in the basin and get down on our hands and knees and wash other people's dirty feet because we're always going to be expecting from them.

We'll never be 100% secure in this life. I know that. We all struggle with self-esteem issues to one degree or another. I know I do. That's part of the sin disease. That's the crack in the mirror. I think that's why God loves to describe us as sheep because we're all so skittish and afraid. But that doesn't mean we can't grow in this area and become more secure and rooted in Christ and the love that our heavenly Father has for us. And we need to if we're going to be better lovers of God and of others.

Maxwell Maltz said, "Living with a low view of self is like driving through life with the emergency brake on." It drags us down and paralyzes our potential and destroys our dreams. It ruins our relationships and sabotages our service for Christ.

So that's been the series so far. I know that's a lot to chew on, but these are timeless truths that need to be revisited again and again if we're going to be the kind of loving community that Jesus died to create. Next week I want to talk a little more about our view of self and how God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are all involved in the healing process.

Last week during ourHalftime Report, Matt was talking about the attractional church and the missional church. The attractional church draws people in and the missional church sends people out. And we said that Valley View needs to be both. We need to be inviting people in, to come and check out Jesus. But we also need to be going out from behind these walls and serving others in the name of Jesus because Jesus did both.

In the process Matt discovered a blog written by Ben Sternke that he sent to me and a few others. And I like what Ben says we he writes, "The church needs to be a tangible foretaste of God's future kingdom, a place where heaven touches earth. It needs to be attractive to outsiders.

"The issue at stake is not whether or not people are attracted to your community, butwhy they are attracted. What are they attracted to? The quality of music? The length of the services? The aesthetic sensibilities of the interior decorator? The warm feeling I get in my tummy when that one guy talks? Those are all life-denying dead-ends.

"But there is another kind of attractive-ness that should characterize Christian community. It should commend itself to outsiders as a profoundly wonderful way to live, even if it makes demands that many are not prepared to make.

"The result should be a transformed community that really is quite attractive to people. A community of people who seem to really be able to forgive one another and be reconciled with one another. A community of abundant joy and laughter. A community of love where the bad habits of life are broken and people are regularly and consistently transformed.

"Leslie Newbigin, that seminal missional thinker, said the church was called to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God, like an appetizer of the new heavens and new earth. What could be more attractive than that?"

That's the kind of church community we want to be. We want to be an appetizer of the kingdom of God. And we can be if handle our relationships the way Jesus taught us.


Questions of the Week

  • In what ways can our wounds shape the way that we think about ourselves? About God? What effect can healing have on these views of self and God?
  • We've spent some time in this series talking about confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation. How do each of these practices help us to heal? How have they been important in your own life? Why might they be important to a community?
  • What does it mean to be a peacemaker? How have you practiced peacemaking in your life? What does peacemaking say about the Kingdom?
  • Leslie Newbigin said the church was called to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God. What do you think he meant by this? How can we as a community be an appetizer of the new heavens and new earth?