Beauty for ashes: receiving emotional healing (25 page)

Life always overcomes death, and light always overcomes darkness. Without God's Word, the future may seem dark, but Jesus said that He came to deliver us from darkness: "I have come as a Light into the world, so that whoever believes in Me [whoever cleaves toandtrusts inandrelies on Me] may not continue to live in darkness" (John 12:46). Instead of living in darkness and misery, we are tocontinueto follow Jesus and conform wholly to His example in living (see John 12:26).

You cannotcontinueif you are broken, overwhelmed, or subdued. But by now, you have received enough of God's Word through the testimonies in this book, to know that you are no longer bound to your past, if you follow the Lord. Jesus said, "If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples. And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" (John 8:31-32).

Continue to Follow the Lord

God plants dreams in people's hearts. But many people do not continue all the way to the end in order to follow Him to the

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fulfillment of that dream. Many get started and quit, get started and quit, get started and quit. They do not continue because their broken heart overwhelms their hope. They do not have any inner strength to carry them through to the end. Jesus will bind up your wounds and heal your bruises. His Word is medicine for your soul (see Proverbs 4:20-22). Read the Word of God every day, even if you read only one verse each day. I encourage you to read my daily devotional,Starting Your Day Right,and then as you fall asleep at night, think God-inspired thoughts, such as: Iam the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. God loves me. He has a good plan for my future.Then pray faith-filled prayers such as this:Lord,Ibelieve that You love me and that You can take up all these broken pieces of my life and make something out of them for my good. In Romans 8:28 Your Word says, "All things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and purpose." I love You, Lord.Ibelieve that You forgive me. Father, I receive Your healing for my broken heart.

Do not go to bed at night thinking what a horrible mess you are in and how you will never overcome it, or how nothing will ever get any better, or how nothing will ever be any different. Take the Word as your medicine. It is medicine for your flesh, your soul, and your spirit. Study it so that the power of the Word and the Spirit can work together in your life.

When you read a verse in the Bible that you want to appropriate for yourself, add it to your prayers. For example, Psalm 30:11-12 can become part of your bedtime praises; along with

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the psalmist you can worship God by praying:You have turned my mourning into dancing for me; You have put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness, to the end that my tongue and my heart and everything glorious within me may sing praise to You and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever.God is eager to pour out His Spirit into your life. Just pray,Lord, move in my life. Do whatever You want to do. Heal the people I have hurt, and heal me too.

Your Pain Will Not Be Wasted

As a child I was never able to be carefree, never able to live without worries, never able just to wake up and play. I always felt sorry for myself because it seemed that my childhood and teenage years were just wasted. And then I was in a bad marriage for five years, and I felt that was a waste. As an adult, I felt that I had spent so many years just wasting my life. But God gathered up those wasted years and made my mess become my message.

He found value in every sad situation I lived through. You may be wondering,How could God ever make anything good out of this mess that I have created?God has ways that we know nothing about. He is using all of my wasted years to reach the thousands upon thousands of people who say to me, "I listen to you every day."

Sometimes I marvel at what they are listening to. They hear me tell about what a mess I used to be and how God made me whole again, and that message is giving them hope and faith that He will do the same for them. He is getting value out of my brokenness by using it to heal other peoples' brokenness.

Maybe you feel that you have wasted your life until now, but spending your time thinking about it does not move you

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to a new place. If you trust God, He can do something glorious in whatever time you have left, even if it is only a short while. God can do something so glorious in the time that you have remaining that everything you went through will have been worth it just to see God take it and do what He can do in you.It is impossible for me to be doing what I am doing today When God called me into ministry, to say I was a mess does not even accurately describe it. But I loved God, and I did not want to continue being the way I was. I just did not know how to change the way I was and be different and better. It tookyears for God to get me where He needed me to be, but I believe that He is doing a quicker work of righteousness in these last days.

God Will Do What Seems Impossible

Even if it takes decades, it is better to be on your way up than on your way down. Pray,Okay God, here. Take my broken life and gather up the fragments so that nothing in it will bewasted. Do not remain broken; make a decision to trust your past and your future to the Lord.

You may feel the way Martha felt when her brother Lazarus died. She said to Jesus, "Master, if You had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21). Jesus could have arrived on the scene sooner, but the Bible says that He purposely waited until Lazarus was dead and laid in the grave. He waited until the situation was so impossible that if anything good came of it, everybody would know that it had to be a work of God (see John 11:1-11).

We need to understand that when God does not move in our circumstances, or when He does not move as quickly as we would like for Him to move, He may be waiting on

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purpose. Just when we think there is no way out of our mess, God will prove to us how strong and wonderful He is on our behalf (See 2 Chronicles 16:9).I had been trying to serve God for years. Why did He wait so long to touch me with the power of the Holy Ghost? Why didn't He do it two years before? Four years before?Ithink He was just waiting until it would take a miracle to prove that He was working in my life. The fact that God could use my life for ministry is a miracle in itself.

If Jesus had put His twelve chosen disciples through personality tests, the results would have indicated that they did not have the qualities needed to make a good ministry team. The analysts would have advised Jesus to continue His search for men who were more suited for the work He was going to require of them. Their reports would have read, "Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper, and Thomas is full of doubt," and one by one, each disciple would have been similarly disqualified.

It is interesting to note that before Jesus chose these twelve men (see Luke 6:12-16), He prayed all night! I wonder how long He prayed before He chose you and me to do what we are called to do. Jesus knows all about each one of us, yet He picked us anyway. Why? He wants to heal the brokenhearted. He wants to gather up the fragments and show His power. And the weaker the people He chooses, the greater His power is visible through them.

When I first started serving God, I spent half of every week crying in self-pity. In spite of that fact, I was still anointed to teach Bible studies; I could preach then just as well as I can right now. But God kept me trapped in my living room with twenty-five people for years before He began to lead me into the worldwide ministry I have today.

I learned that God would not release me for public ministry until I had let Him do a work in my most private life. But during

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all that time of faithfulness to little things, I was progressing little by little, from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18 kjv).The great thing about God is that He does not just see where we are, He also sees where we are going. And He treats us with the end in mind throughout the whole trip. He loves us with an unconditional love from the beginning of our relationship. We may try to get His love every way imaginable, but all we need to do isreceiveit.

Sometimes we try so hard to get into the presence of God, but the truth is that it is impossible to get away from Him. He is in constant pursuit of us.

In Psalm 139:7-10 the psalmist wrote of God:

Where could I go from Your Spirit? Or where could I flee from Your presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol (the place of the dead), behold, You are there.

If I take the wings of the morning or dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there shall Your hand lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.

In verse 16 of this passage, the psalmist says that all the days of our lives "were written before ever they took shape, when as yet there was none of them." And in verses 17 and 18, he says that God thinks about us all the time: "How preciousandweighty also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I could count them, they would be more in number than the sand."

Do not determine your self-worth by how others have treated you. Receive your worth and value from who you are in Christ.

You may sometimes feel that the Lord is not near, but that is why knowing the Word is so important. The prophet Isaiah

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brought a complaint before the Lord, reporting that His people were saying:"The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me."

[And the Lord answered] "Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, they may forget, yet I will not forget you.

Behold, I have indelibly imprinted (tattooed a picture of) you on the palm of each of My hands" (Isaiah 49:14-16).

Parents did not originate the idea of keeping pictures of their children handy-God carries a picture of His children everywhere He goes. The next time you question your self- worth, remember that God has your picture tattooed on the palms of His hands.

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Double for Your TroubleNo matter what you have gone through, if you stick close to God, He will reward you. The Word says in Hebrews 11:6, "But without faith it is impossible to pleaseandbe satisfactory to Him. For whoever would come near to God must [necessarily] believe that God exists and that He is the rewarder of those who earnestlyanddiligently seek Him [out]."

Many people seem to believe that God is a punisher. But they obviously do not have an intimate knowledge of God. By His very nature of love (see 1 John 4:8), God is a rewarder.

God wants us toexpecta reward; He wants us to believe for and look forward to His reward. His Word says that those who come to Him must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder. We should not focus on what we have been through; we should set our thoughts on what God is going to do for us, as we remain faithful to Him. Our testimony should be filled with praise for Him as we proclaim, "I have a reward coming!"

The expectation of a reward fills us with hope. It helps us get through difficulties. The Bible says that although Jesus despised the cross, He endured it for the joy of the prize that was

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on the other side of it. Consequently, we are to continue "looking away [from all that will distract] to Jesus, Who is the Leaderandthe Source of our faith [giving the first incentive for our belief] and is also its Finisher [bringing it to maturity and perfection]" (Hebrews 12:2).Nobody would want to go to work if they did not think they were going to get a paycheck. When there is a prize for endurance, there is motivation in us that gives us the stamina to keep going. We say, "It's okay; I can go through this, because I know I'm going to get something out of it."

It is important to realize that God is a loving Father and that He is going to take care of us. We are faithful to Him because of His goodness to us. He brings a reward and special blessings into our lives, not because He owes us anything but because it is His very nature to demonstrate love to those who diligently seek Him.

If you were not diligently seeking after more of God, you would have put this message aside many pages ago. But here you are, still reading, hoping to learn something about God that you did not know before. That tells me that you are in line for a reward from Him, as one who is faithfully seeking the Lord.

God Is Watching You

God is watching you, and He sees everything you do. The psalmist said of Him, "You know my downsitting and my uprising; You understand my thought afar off" (Psalm 139:2). The Bible says, "For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth to show Himself strong in behalf of those whose hearts are blameless toward Him" (2 Chronicles 16:9). God is eagerly seeking opportunities to reward you for your faith in Him.

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Jesus said, "Behold, I am coming soon, and I shall bring My wagesandrewards with Me, to repayandrender to each one just what his own actionsandhis own work merit" (Revelation 22:12). That means that people will receive pay for the actions they commit while on this earth. Now, that can be exciting in one way, and frightening in another way. We need to realize that God is watching us, and that no one is really getting by with anything.God neither sleeps nor slumbers (see Psalm 121:4). He knows everything that goes on behind closed doors. So we need to live as if we really believe that God is watching our every move. When we sit and have a conversation, we need to remember that God is the unseen Guest Who is listening to everything that we have to say.