Wounded by God's People (15 page)
Read Wounded by God's People Online
Authors: Anne Graham Lotz
The End of the Healing Journey
It's Time to Come Home
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest
.
The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!”
So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him
.
Matthew 11:28; Revelation 22:17; Luke 15:20â21
Â
S
unday, June 10, 2012, would have been my mother's ninety-second birthday. While she celebrated in heaven, I wanted to celebrate with my father. Because of a recent trip to India, a subsequent illness, and an overloaded schedule, I had not been to see him for almost two months. So the weekend of Mother's birthday, I drove the four hours home in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The exertion of the drive was more than worth it, not only because I love being with my father anytime, but because of how he welcomed me. When I walked into the house, put my things down, and went back to his quarters, I called out, “Daddy.” As I walked into his room, his face lit up, he threw out his arms, gave me a strong, warm embrace, and then kept holding me. He knew that even though I am a grown woman, when I come home I'm just a little girl at heart who loves to be held by her father. In the midst of all of life's stress, struggles, pressures, pain, and problems, there's something for me that's healing in my father's love.
I wonder ⦠have you been separated from your Heavenly Father for a while? Maybe you've taken a trip to a distant country, a place where you have lived in a way that is contrary to a life that pleases Him.
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Maybe your wounds have made you sick in bitterness or shame or guilt. Maybe you're apprehensive about seeing Him because you don't think He wants to see you. Maybe you've been so busy with an overloaded schedule that He's been crowded out of your life. Maybe you don't know exactly why, but you just haven't felt your Father's love for a while. For quite a while.
It's time to put your things down âyour busyness, fears, doubts, apprehensions, guilt, uncertainties â and enter into His presence on your knees. In prayer. Cry out to Him. Call Him by name,
Abba ⦠Daddy
.
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Experience His arms of love wrapped around you, holding you close, because your Heavenly Father loves you. There is healing in His warm embrace. It's time to come home!
Maybe you are afraid that after years of wandering, burdened with painful memories and all the emotional and spiritual baggage involved, you somehow
can't
come home. That it's too late, that your Father won't receive you, that you have forfeited His blessing in your life, that His love for you somehow over time has been diminished. But dear wounded one, you are the reason He got up from heaven's throne, took off His glory robes, and came into the wilderness of this world. Because He saw you in your hopeless, helpless, wounded condition and came to seek you, to draw you to Himself, and to give you abundant, eternal life. He yearns to hear your voice calling His name so that He can wrap you in His love and fill you with His joy and peace.
Recently, I was with a beautiful young woman who acknowledged her inner agony when she confessed not only to being wounded, but to being a wounder. She had had two abortions that had rendered her unable to conceive a baby she now was desperate to have. But greater than her insatiable longing for a child were her feelings of shame and guilt. She was convinced that her decisions, made years ago out of ignorance and desperation, now prevented her from ever being accepted by God. She was certain that God's punishment for her actions was that she would be childless the rest of her life. The expression on her face was one of utter hopelessness.
While this young woman has yet to have a baby, she does now
have hope. She learned that although there are consequences to our choices, nothing can ever separate us from God's love. And He does not punish us for our sin by withholding a baby or any good thing from us. The wages of sin is death ânot our own, but the death of His own dear Son in our place. So she tearfully opened her heart to Him and made the decision to stop looking back and to move forward instead. The same face that had expressed such hopelessness now is softened with the light of His presence. And while she still longs and prays for a baby, she has embraced the magnificent obsession of knowing God and desires His purpose for her life. His love has healed her heart.
God is the God who loves sinners. He loves the wounders and the wounded. He is the God of second chances â and third and fourth! Rather than rejecting you, He seeks you and draws you into His loving arms so that you might be healed of your wounds. God gives hope when there is no hope because God loves you. He truly loves you! You have not been deluded. He is right here. Right there. With you.
Now
. But to experience the fullness of His healing love, you must close the door on your past.
When I was a teenager, I had horses that I kept at a place called Phillips Farm. To get to the barn, I had to drive down a dirt road that led through a corn field. On the far side of the corn field was a gated fence that surrounded a cow pasture. One of the instructions old Mr. Phillips gave me when I boarded my first horse on his farm was that I had to make sure I closed the gate behind me when I left the barn. Otherwise, the cows in back of me could get out of the fenced-in pasture and ruin the corn in front of me.
Dear wounded one, it's time to close the gate behind you. Don't let the memories and the mistreatment, the words and the wounds,
the jealousy and the hypocrisy, the deceit and the dishonesty, the cheap talk and the inconsistent walk, the meanness, unkindness, rudeness, pridefulness, selfishness, sinfulness, injustice, and unfairness of people from your past creep into the present and ruin the promise of blessing and hope for the future. Don't let
them
inflict the ultimate wound at the end of your life, when you discover that your life has been wasted. Shriveled. Less than God intended. Because
you
refused to close the gate. So ⦠close it.
Let go of the past so that you can move forward into all that God has for you.
Let go of your resentment over the way you've been treated.
Let go of your bitterness toward others who have misrepresented God to you.
Let go of your unforgiveness of those who have hurt you.
Let go of your hardened heart toward those who have rejected you.
Let go of the overwhelming desire to justify what you did and explain what they did.
Let go of your vengeful spirit.
Let go of your offense with God because He allowed you to be wounded.
Let go of the life of your dreams that is less now because of them.
Just let go!
Never mind the injustice and hurt and confusion and fear and loneliness and emptiness and dryness and woundedness. Let go of yesterday.
That was then. This is now
.
God is calling you today. I can hear His still, small voice echoing through the story of Hagar, an Egyptian slave, wounded by God's
people, a believer in exile, when she wandered in the wilderness:
What's the matter? Do not be afraid. I've heard your heart's cry
. Your cry has reverberated all the way up to heaven and back down into My heart. I've written this book for
you
.
God has a wonderful plan for your life from this day forward, just as He did for Hagar.
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To possess it, you must do what Hagar did. Let go of the past so you can embrace the future God has for you, especially when it's different from the future you had planned. Come to the end of your healing journey by forgiving those who have wounded you. Those who have marred the picture you had of the life you had wanted to live. Love them, not just in word, but by doing something for them that's sacrificial in nature. Then let go. Enjoy being free at last! Healed at last! Never mind
them
, whoever they are. It's time for
you
to move on. Embrace all that God has for you from this day forward! Embrace the One Who Sees you. The One who's been pursuing you. The One who even now is waiting for you to whisper His name â¦
Quarried Deep
T
he personal stories I have shared with you in this book are the small tip of a larger and ugly iceberg. The wounds in my life run deep in almost every area â family, church, ministry, and community. I have not shared some of the more severe ones out of concern that if I did, I would in turn become a wounder. Again.
I am convinced that were it not for the utter sufficiency of God's grace, mercy, and power to bind up my wounds and heal my broken heart, I would be just a shadow of a person. But instead of lashing out, fighting back, or crumbling, I have embraced the pain. I have asked God to use it to furrow me deep. And He has. I am getting stronger in my faith and growing deeper in my trust of Him for this simple yet profound reason: God is
with
me, His Spirit is
within
me, and His Son is
going before
me.
I can honestly say that I love Him more and trust Him more,
because
I've been wounded. I know that at the end of all things, He will make everything right. He will sort out the motives, the accusations, the betrayals, the jealousies, the deceptions, the slander, the lies, the gossip. This frees me to get on with my life, living each moment for an audience of One.
But I will also admit that from time to time I have cried out to
God, “Lord, did You see that? Did You hear that?” And I know that He has. His answer to me has been simple and repeated over and over again: “Vengeance is Mine. I will repay ⦠You too be patient; strengthen your heart, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not complain ⦠against one another, that you yourself may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing right at the door.”
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The Judge is at the door. God will settle accounts. But perhaps not just yet. From time to time I remind myself of the two farmers who were gazing out at their fields of wheat that were ready for the October harvest. One farmer was an agnostic who didn't believe in God, never went to church, and worked as hard on Sunday as he did the other six days of the week. The second farmer was a devout Christian who always went to church and never worked on Sunday. The first farmer mocked the second one because he said his field and seven-day work week had yielded more grain, proving that it did not pay to honor God. The second farmer thought for a moment, then drawled, “Well, God don't settle all of His accounts in October!”
God may not settle His accounts on our timetable, but He will settle His accounts. The Judge is at the door. Jesus is coming! So I will be patient as I leave vengeance to Him. I, for one, do not want Him to return and find me licking my wounds, plotting revenge, holding a grudge, or trying in some other way to go forward by looking in the rearview mirror.
I am encouraged by the apostle Paul who said that he bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus â that he had been crucified with Christ and had a thorn in the flesh.
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Those are all wounds. But he didn't get mired in his woundedness, because he was clearly pursuing his goal. While sitting in prison, arrested unjustly for preaching the Gospel, here is how he described his life's ambition: “I want to know
Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death ⦠Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”
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Paul's wounds furrowed him deep, and the faith that took root and grew in his life has borne abundant eternal fruit for two thousand years. Without wounds in his life â or in mine or in yours â he and we would remain shallow, living on the surface of our relationship with God, and barren of any eternal, spiritual fruit. One of the early Puritan writers was convinced of this, also, and his beautiful prayer, which follows, expresses my heart's desire to be “quarried deep.” And that requires pain. Even as a field is wounded by the plough that turns over the soil in preparation for planting seeds, my life needs to be ploughed deep â wounded, even to the depths of “death.”
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So this is my prayer. Make it yours too â¦
Lord Jesus
,
Give me a deeper repentance
,
A horror of sin
,
A dread of its approach;
Help me chastely to flee it
,
And jealously to resolve that my heart
shall be Thine alone
.
Give me a deeper trust
,
That I may lose myself to find myself in Thee
,
The ground of my rest
,
The spring of my being
.
Give me a deeper knowledge of Thyself
As Saviour, Master, Lord, and King
.
Give me deeper power in private prayer
,
More sweetness in Thy Word
,
More steadfast grip on its truth
.
Give me deeper holiness in speech, thought, action
,
And let me not seek moral virtue apart from Thee
.
Plough deep in me, great Lord
,
Heavenly Husbandman
,
That my being may be a tilled field
,
The roots of grace spreading far and wide
,
Until Thou alone are seen in me
,
Thy beauty golden like summer harvest
,
The fruitfulness as autumn plenty
.
I have no Master but Thee
,
No law but Thy will
,
No delight but Thyself
,
No wealth but that Thou givest
,
No good but that Thou blessest
,
No peace but that Thou bestowest
.
I am nothing but that Thou makest me
,
I have nothing but that I receive from Thee
,
I can be nothing but that grace adorns me
.
Quarry me deep, dear Lord
,
And then fill me to overflowing
With living water.
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