Therefore strengthen the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather be healed.
Hebrews 12:12-13 (emphases mine)
In my conversations with people something of my faith always comes out in some fashion. I credit the skill in my work to God - it is clearly evident to me that He put me in some very key places to learn some things that few others in my field (even many who have decades more experience) have been exposed to. I credit my work ethic to Him because I frequently remind myself of Colossians 3:23-24 and that it is actually Jesus Christ whom I work for and answer to. That encourages some, offends others. It builds a rapport with some, sets others to thinking they might be able to take advantage of what they see as my naivete (this second crowd always end up sorely disabused, but it's sadly humorous to watch them try). I just really strive to do the right thing for all the parties involved. I fail sometimes to be certain, and that motivates me to do better when faced with the same situation again.
The place where I'm most blessed in my relations with others is to share bits and pieces of healing. I genuinely want holistic wellness for people, and because I've worked to obtain that for myself over the last 23 years especially, I know of whence I speak when I choose to speak. Some people have watched from a distance and eventually approached me in their hard times asking what they know will come with true empathy, but possibly hard answers. That empathy earns me the right to the conversation, but often what I find is that the hard answers often turn the suffering person away - not from me, but from their solution. They are far too often the victim of their own circumstances, reaping what they've sown - and the answers I share from my experience just don't fit their bill. Some try for a minute, and taste and see that the Lord is good, and then with the least bit of relief they resume their former ways of destruction thinking that the storm has passed and therefore they can step out from under the Rock.
The main point of this blog this morning is this: If you want the HEALING for some area of your life, you have got to divorce your thinking from doing the same things you've always done and expecting different results. Notice I wrote THINKING. It starts there and leads to actions.
Notice in the two verses I opened with that there is a different order of events.
- We have suffered some injury - there is a part of our life not working, it's lame
- So we strengthen that member - that part that is injured needs strengthening
- We do this by making straight paths - paths clear and separated from the clutter that lead to the injury in the first place
- We experience healing.
Without #2 and #3 however there can be no #4.
Without #2 and #3 what's going to happen instead? We're going to permanently dislocate that injured member of our body. We are going to push our ways of doing things to the point that we destroy everything that that member could have done for us for years to come.
This is the negative corollary to "taking what you like and leaving the rest." We say we want the healing, but not the work of obtaining it. We want the blessing of God without the work of walking with God in transparency. We want the paycheck without the work. We want the fruit without planting a tree. We want the blessings without the blessor. The author of Hebrews had a couple things to say in this same chapter about that leading right in to the verses I opened with:
"It is for discipline that you have to endure."
"For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it."
Hebrews 12:7a & 11 (ESV) (emphasis mine)
Something I've found over the years is that some Christians who know no better have some kind of predisposition against 12 Step programs or 'Self Help' approaches to facing horrible issues of brokenness or victimization - partly because they are ignorant of the origins of AA and Al-Anon and all the subsequent programs that grew out of those experiences. They fearfully hear "a God of your understanding" and walk out of what must be a new age gathering. They frequently also walk out on their healing. They are unwilling to admit that they themselves will never fully 'understand God' until they are with Him and see Him as He is. They are facing something sordid in their life such as an addiction, or a loved one with an addiction, or the memories of horrible abuse and rather than being able to sit in a room with others walking through those same experiences they return to a congregation who can't help them, or won't help them, or worse - judge them without any shred of understanding or empathy. So they walk through the rest of their "blessed" Christian walk with a dislocated member that the Church should have helped them heal but couldn't and wouldn't.
We rarely do well with the healing stream of counseling in the Church, mainly, in my disgruntled opinion, because we have mostly failed to truly face our own personal sins and realize how extravagant and costly is the grace of God which healeth thee. We mainly judge wrongly in relation to the less respectable victims of sin because we have frequently obtained fire insurance salvation without a clarion experience of repentance, therefore we have no real counseling to give from our personal experience because we were 'good people' before we got saved - just not quite 'good enough' so we needed Jesus. Hogwash and fudderbuddle. Scripture tells a different story about every one of us - there is only one who is good and that is God, He is the very definition of good and the measure to which we cannot attain. In His grace and mercy He made a way in the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. The sinless suffered for the sinful, and by His stripes we are healed. But we're unlikely to need that remedy so long as we've excused and justified ourselves in our own eyes - by making ourselves out to be victims without recourse. We may very well have been victimized at points in our life, but there is a healing recourse to live as overcoming survivors.
So I've known far more people who have a vibrant Christian walk because they have been driven to their knees in humble submission to life circumstances, admitted that they can't do it on their own, turned their lives over to the care of God, and then face their demons down and make straight paths for their feet. When they've been somewhat strengthened and are walking in healing, they extend hands to other victims along their path and sometimes those hands are grasped, sometimes smacked away.
There are a couple things I've seen in reaction to people who obtain healing outside of the Church, a bitter judgmental jealousy of those within the Church who have failed to attain anything resembling healing leading to the "abundant joyful life". And a hardening of the healed person's heart in relation to the Church, because part of keeping their paths clean is to stay away from toxic people who have God in a box and can lay it all out with every answer to every question. It is a failure on the part of the Church to understand that God makes His rain to fall on the evil and the good, the just and the unjust, the Jew and the Gentile. He will pour out His Spirit where He wills, and healing will follow that stream wherever it flows (Ezekiel 47:9). And nothing makes a good religious person madder than a healed person Jesus brought through the back door - because they don't want it to be about Him, they want it to be about them, their knowledge, their understanding, their works, their rule keeping, their reasoning. They don't want anything to do with Ecclesiastes 11:5:
As you do not know what is the way of the wind, or how the bones grow in the womb of her who is with child, so you do not know the works of God who makes everything
(emphasis mine)And the healed person needs to understand that we are in the walk together whether we like it or not, that if you've reached a true experience and understanding of who God has revealed Himself to be, you must walk with others in that Light and that ultimately it's not just about healing from an addiction or abusive life experiences at the hands of some addicted relative, it's about God's glory revealed in you. It's about making God's name famous as some translations have it. It's about bringing the 'good' people in the pew next to you along for the true experience of repentance and walking in newness of life - because maybe God will use your humble story of healing to convict that good religious person and sound the clarion call of repentance in their life. But not if you aren't sitting in the pew for whatever excuse you've justified in your mind.
In closing I will say that one thing is true of every vibrantly healed life I've ever known in the Church or in a 12 step recovery program: although they took one thing they liked at a time, they understood that they would not be able to leave the rest forever. And as the opportunity presented itself they didn't just take the small tastes of peaceful healing for granted, but picked up the other tools God generously gave them and learned where the disciplined application of those principles would continue making straight paths so that they could be healed.
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