The Healing Power of Love
10/24/2010 - The Power of Confession
There's a story that's told about Henry Ford and Charles Steinmetz. Henry Ford, of course, is best known for developing the assembly line that mass produced automobiles and made them affordable for the masses back in the early 1900's starting with the Model T. Most of us have heard of Henry Ford, but not many of us recognize the name Charles Steinmetz.
Charles Steinmetz was a brilliant electrical engineer. He was one of the greatest minds in the field of electricity that this country has ever known. He worked for General Electric which had built the sophisticated generators that powered Henry Ford's automobile plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
Well one day those generators broke down and production at the plant came to halt. So Ford brought in mechanics to try to fix the problem, but nobody could figure out what was wrong. So finally he contacted Charles Steinmetz, the great genius.
Steinmetz came to the plant and tinkered around awhile checking out all the generators. Then he took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and made an "X" mark on one particular spot of one particular generator. To their amazement the mechanics disassembled that part of the machine and discovered that it was the exact location of the breakdown.
A few days later Henry Ford got a bill from Steinmetz for $10,000. He couldn't believe it and so he sent it back and asked Steinmetz to please itemize it. So he did and a few days later Ford received a second bill ... itemized. And it said, "For making an "X" mark on the generator $1.00. For knowing where to make the "X" mark on the generator $9,999.00!"
Henry Ford paid the bill. Charles Steinmetz knew where to tinker when nobody else did and that made all the difference.
This morning we continue the series we began last Sunday calledThe Healing Power of Love. And we said last week that if we're going to get healed from the wounds of our past that can keep us from becoming better lovers of God and lovers of others we need to invite the Holy Spirit to tinker in our lives and take out the chalk and put an "X" mark on the places in our hearts that need to be healed.
The apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:26-27, In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God.
The Holy Spirit wants to help us in our weakness. He's praying for us and he's ready to use all kinds of ways to show us where that weakness is. He can use a teaching like this or a series like this or a passage of Scripture. He can use an event or an experience in our lives. He can speak to us through a prompting like we talked about inThe Sacred Echo series. He can use a spouse or a friend or a professional counselor to tinker and put an "X" mark on the broken piece. How he does it is up to him, but whether we dial him up and invite him to do his work is up to us.
In the Old Testament King David is described as a man after God's own heart partly because he opened up his heart to God. He asked God to reveal his wounds. In Psalm 139:23-24 he writes, Search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
So last week we said that the first step to emotional healing is exposing the wound to God and asking his help to heal it.
And that's a significant step because not everyone wants to be healed. Some of us are afraid to be healed because for years our identity has been wrapped up in our hurts and the pain of our past and we've grown comfortable living with a "victim" mentality. "It's everybody else's fault, not mine!"
And it can be frightening to think about what might be expected of us if we were no longer the "victim," but instead took responsibility for our lives and our emotional well being. Going through life with a victim mentality can make it very difficult for us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves because we're too wrapped in ourselves. But I believe the Spirit of God wants to set us free from that if we're willing. "Victim" is not the identity that God wants us to have as his beloved sons and daughters. That's one of the weaknesses the Spirit wants to help us with.
There's a story in the gospel of John where Jesus walks into a crowded square in downtown Jerusalem, it's actually a pool where people gathered to be healed. The blind, the lame, and the paralyzed were all lying around. And there was a tradition that had developed over the years that when the water in the pool was stirred by the wind or perhaps something supernatural the first one to jump in would be healed.
And so Jesus approaches a man who had been lying by the pool for a long time. The story says that he had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. And in John 5:6 we read,When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?"
That's an interesting question isn't it? Jesus asks the man if he wants to be healed because he knows that not everybody does. Why not? Why wouldn't someone want to get well? Because we can use our problems and our issues to our advantage, to get attention, to get sympathy, to avoid responsibility, as an excuse to hurt others. All kinds of reasons. But as long as we do that we're not going to find healing.
The man never answered Jesus' question. So we really don't know whether he wanted to be healed or not. Instead he complained that nobody would carry him to the pool and that others would jump in before he got there. But you know what's amazing to me? Jesus healed him anyway.
Look at John 5:8-9, Then Jesus said to him, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk." 9At once the man was cured. He picked up his mat and walked.
That, my friends, is the grace of God, but I wouldn't presume on it. I think Jesus is much more willing to help those who want to be helped and to heal those who want to be healed.
So if the first step to emotional healing is exposing our wound to God and asking for his help to heal it, then what's the next step? Where do we go from there?
The next step I believe is to open that wound up to another person and to bring it out into the open, out of the darkness and into the light. 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.
The Bible calls it confession. James, the earthly brother of Jesus, wrote about 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.
It's a risky thing to confess our faults and our wounds and our hurts to another person. Someone has said, "Confession is good for the soul, but bad for the reputation." And that's true. Confession is a scary thing and there has to be a lot of trust in the relationship before most of us are willing to go there. These kinds of confessions don't come easily, they can be extremely painful and they're not meant for a bunch of people to hear. They're meant for a select few, one of which may be a professional counselor.
And when genuine confession takes place it's a sacred, holy moment both for the one confessing and the one listening. And as we said last week if Valley View is going to be both a mission and a hospital, a healing community as a church, we need to be a safe place where confession and healing can happen.
And if and when we find ourselves on the receiving end of someone's confession that's not the time to give the "roach letter," some pat, simplistic, scripted answer. That's the time to be quiet, to be still, and to enter into that person's pain. And if we're going to say anything at all perhaps the best thing to say is, "l'll pray for you and if there's anything else I can do please let me know. You're not alone. Thanks for trusting me. I'm here for you."
Prayer, James says, is powerful and effective especially in the context of confession. And I believe prayer is a big part of the healing process because it brings God into the picture and invites him to unleash his healing work in our lives. But it all starts with confession.
Over the years many in the Valley View community have benefited from the Twelve Step program used in addiction recovery groups. And step Number Five of the Twelve Steps is all about confession. It actually says, "We've admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."
In his excellent book, A Hunger for Healing, Keith Miller writes that many Protestant believers think that the Protestant Reformation was all about ending confession, that John Calvin and Martin Luther put a stop to confession. But that's not true. Both Luther and Calvin were in favor of confession and knew the power of it. They were just against selling it for profit.
At one point Martin Luther wrote, "Confession is useful, even necessary. I would not have it abolished. Indeed I rejoice that it exists in the church because it isa cure without equal for distressed consciences. For when we have laid bare our consciences to a brother or a sister and privately made known to them the evil that lurks within, we receive from their lips the word of comfort spoken by God himself. And if we accept this in faith, we find peace in the mercy of God speaking to us through our brother or sister."
Confession is "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 confessing our faults to a trusted, mature person who can handle the information responsibly can be a powerful, transforming experience.
Richard Foster in his book, The Celebration of Discipline, tells of the time when he felt stuck in his spiritual life. I'm sure all of us have felt stuck at one time or another. He felt like there was something missing, something blocking God's work in his life. And as he prayed about it he had a sense that there might be something in his past that was causing the problem. So he decided to divide his life up into three parts: his childhood, his adolescence, and his adulthood, and then he took an inventory.
He asked God to reveal anything that needed forgiveness or healing or both. He had a pad and a pencil and on the first day he wrote down anything that came to mind from his childhood. He didn't analyze it or put a value judgment on it. He just wrote it down. On the second day he did the same thing for his adolescence. And on the third day he reflected on his adult life.
And when he was done he made arrangements to meet with a trusted Christian friend. He told the friend ahead of time what the meeting was about. And when they met together he read his list slowly and sometimes painfully. And when he was done he went to put the paper back in his briefcase. But instead, without a word, his friend took the paper and tore it up into hundreds of pieces and dropped them into a trash can. Then he put his hands on Foster's shoulders and prayed that he would be healed from the sins and the hurts of his past.
About that meeting Foster says, "I can't say that I experienced any dramatic feelings. I didn't. But I'm convinced that it set me free in ways I had never known before. It seemed that I was released to explore what were for me new and uncharted regions of the Holy Spirit... An interesting sidelight, he says, is that directly following his prayer for me, my friend was able to express a troubling sin that he had been unable to confess until then. Freedom begets freedom." That's the power of confession.
So if we really want to be healed from the hurts of our past and from the sins of our past there needs to be confession to God and to someone we can trust who will pray for us. And then there also needs to be ownership. As I said already we're not going to get very far into the healing process as long as we're blaming others and staying stuck in the victim role.
Now does that mean that everything that's happened to us in our past is our fault? Absolutely not! Much of the hurt in our lives can be caused by other people. Often in childhood it's a family member, a father, a mother, an uncle, a so-called family friend. In our adolescence it might be a boyfriend or a random act of violence or a sexual violation of some kind. There are lots of forms of abuse.
And in most, if not all, of those situations we were the victims and did nothing to deserve that kind of treatment. It was completely out of our control. And it was awful and the pain runs deep. It's absolutely inexcusable and unjustifiable. But unfortunately it comes with the hazard of living in a broken, sin soaked world.
No. Many of the hurts and wounds in our lives have come our way unjustly and we ultimately trust God that one day he will make all things right. That's why the justice of God is so important to so many of us. We long for God to right every wrong.
But how we respond to what has been done to us is our responsibility and over that we do have control. We can either stay stuck in the hurts of our past or we can move forward with God and experience the healing power of his love.
On Wednesday of this week Tyler Perry was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Tyler Perry is a forty-one year-old actor, director, producer, and author. In 2009, he was ranked by Forbes magazine as the sixth highest paid-man in Hollywood. His films have grossed nearly $400 million worldwide.
But he shocked his fans this week when he revealed the abuse in his past and how his father brutally beat him. "To this day, I don't why he did it," Perry said in the interview. "But I remember him cornering me in a room and hitting me with this vacuum cleaner cord. He just wouldn't stop."
After another abusive incident, Perry said he blacked out for three days. Along with the physical abuse there was sexual abuse by four different adults beginning when he was five or six years old.
When it became unbearable, Perry said he slit his wrists and tried to commit suicide. "I thought, 'What is the point of living?' My mother was truly my saving grace, because she would take me to church with her." But he kept his wounds hidden and locked up.
All these years later, Perry said the catalyst for his candor was his mother's death last year. "I knew if I spoke about this, that she would be hurt. But now I feel this tremendous sense of, 'Now it's time for me to take care of me and get some of this stuff out of me and be free from it.'"
Ultimately, Perry said it was forgiveness that helped him begin to heal. "I forgave my father. The same amount of strength to take it is the same amount of strength it takes to let it go. As a man I am not going to sit here and let myself suffer anymore."
That's the power of confession. And that's the freedom of forgiveness that we'll talk about next week.