Dr. Stanley exhorts us to examine those tender places. Yes, it can be painful to do so, but it is ultimately worth it. Find courage to face your wounds and experience God’s healing touch.
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male announcer: “In Touch”
with Dr. Charles Stanley,
celebrating 45 years
of God’s faithfulness
and sharing the
gospel worldwide.
Next on “In Touch,”
“Healing Our Hurts.”
Dr. Charles Stanley: Somebody
hurt you a year ago,
ten years ago, or
a lifetime ago,
and somehow deep down
inside, you can’t shake it.
Sometimes you say
it never happened,
but you know deep down
inside, it did happen.
So, you try to deny it,
and that doesn’t work.
You suppress it and
somehow it keeps popping out.
And sometimes it pops out
in an embarrassing fashion.
You know that deep down inside
something happened back
there that you can
really identify.
In fact, you can point your
finger toward the person.
And what seemingly was merely a
little hurt in the beginning,
somehow it solidified
like concrete in your mind.
It’s just there.
It lays there, it hangs there,
the burden of it is there.
You’d like to shake it,
you’d like to get rid of it.
But somehow you
just can’t do it.
You got hurt so badly that
somehow you feel like I will
never be able to overcome this.
Well, I want to tell you,
my friend: yes, you can!
Because you see, if you don’t
overcome the hurts of the past,
what you’ll find out is
this: those hurts can do great,
great harm to your life.
Everybody gets hurt
at some point in life.
Children get hurt
by their parents.
Parents hurt each other.
Friends hurt one another.
Hurt is just part of
living in the society
in which you and I live.
People say things they should
not say to us, off the cuff.
Sometime it’s very deliberate,
sometime it is malicious gossip.
Sometimes it is physical injury.
Sometimes it is
abuse, abuse of a child,
of a teenager, or
of another adult.
All kinds of things come
into our life that causes hurt.
So what we have to do is
we have to decide how
we’re gonna handle this hurt.
Am I going to handle this hurt
in such a way that it harms me
in every aspect of my life?
Or am I gonna learn how to
handle this hurt in such a
fashion that I can take it and
I can handle it properly and be
able to learn something from
it, glean something from it,
grow up as a result of it,
and not allow it to hurt me.
Because God does not want us
to respond to hurts in such a
fashion that we are
devastated in our life,
lose our witness
and our testimony,
go through life bearing some
kind of emotional baggage that
we are never able to escape.
So I want you to
turn, if you will,
to Ephesians chapter four.
And in this fourth
chapter of Ephesians,
which is one of my favorite
books of the scripture because
Paul has jammed so much theology
in the first three chapters and
so much practical Christian
living in these last three.
And in this fourth chapter, he’s
been talking about things that
you and I have to
deal with in our life,
about renewing our mind and
dealing with anger and so forth.
Then he says, if
you’ll notice in,
coming down to the close
of that in verse thirty,
he says, “Do not grieve
the Holy Spirit of God,
by whom you were sealed
for the day of redemption.”
And we grieve Him in lots of
ways, and he’s just talked about
some of those ways by
our speech and so forth.
Then he says in
verse thirty-one,
“Let all,” look at this, “let
all bitterness and wrath and
anger and clamor and slander
be put away from you,
along with all malice.
And be kind to one another,
tender-hearted, forgiving
each other, just as God in
Christ has also forgiven you.”
Now, I think all of us know that
there are some hurts in life
that we can forgive
rather simply and say,
“Well, okay, you
know, I–you hurt me,
but I’m gonna get over it, and
I understand that you made a
mistake, or I understood that at
that time in your life you were
going through
something or whatever.
Then there are those hurts that
are so deep in some people’s
lives that somehow they just
can’t seem to step out of it.
They go to church,
they hear the gospel,
they know the truth, and
they say, “Well, you know,
I know that’s what God says
and that’s what I feel, but.”
And somehow, oftentimes a person
doesn’t realize that hanging on
to hurts, hanging on to hurts
begins to do them great damage
in every aspect of their life.
So, hanging on to a hurt
oftentimes is a security for us.
When a person has hung
on to a hurt for so long,
after a while, the very idea of
giving it up becomes more of a
threat than the damage
that hurt does to their life.
And when I think about little
children who come along and
they’re abused by their parent,
either sexually or physically or
even verbally, and they grow up
and they have to live with this
baggage all of their lives.
And what happens is they
grow up with anger toward
their parents, for example.
And as a result of
that, the relationship,
of course, is never
the way it ought to be.
And they go through
life wondering:
Why do I feel the way I feel?
Why do I feel toward
my parents the way
I feel, or toward someone else?
And so, oftentimes
they can’t identify it.
Because what they say is,
“Oh, yes, I was hurt back
yonder, but you know,
everybody gets hurt,
and therefore I’ve just
sorta forgotten it.”
No, you don’t.
You see, you don’t
just forget hurt.
You have to deal with hurts
in some fashion or the other.
Hurts that are not handled
properly will harm us in
every aspect of our life.
So I want us to look at this
because here’s what happens.
Those hurts in our life,
unless they’re handled properly,
will develop into an
unforgiving spirit.
And oftentimes that unforgiving
spirit can be very subtle,
and especially is this true if
it is the result of something a
parent has done
because it is a natural,
normal response
for a person to say,
“Well, you know, after
all, she’s my mother.
After all, he’s my father.
Why, sure I love my dad.
Why, sure I love my mother.”
And somehow this
“I love my mother,
I love my father, sure, they’re
my parents” is some form of
verbal attempt to cover up
and put layer after layer after
layer of forgetfulness on
what has happened back there.
But what I’m
telling you is this,
it doesn’t disappear
simply because you say,
“I love my mother,
love my father.”
And oftentimes if there
has been real hurt there,
you don’t really
and truly love them.
You would like to love them.
You want to love them.
You’re supposed to love them.
You should love them.
We say in our heart, and
therefore we think we do,
when deep down inside,
that hurt is like
a deep cancer down inside.
And while on the surface
everything looks pretty well,
deep down inside,
it’s never healed.
And so it’s like leaky poison.
It’s just poisoning
our whole system.
And this is why
oftentimes later on in life,
parents and children come to
great conflict and there’s a
blowup and someone says,
“Well, I’ve been thinking this,
or I’ve felt this for
years and years and years.”
And sometimes a person
will say to their parent,
“Twenty years ago,
thirty years ago,
forty years ago,
here’s what you did to me.”
And sometimes it is something
that a parent did not even
realize that they had done, or
something maybe a friend did a
few years ago and they
didn’t even realize they did it.
And all the time
it has been there.
And sometimes it reaches down so
deep into the core of your heart
and soul, you are shaken by
it, maybe thrown off base
by it and thrown off course.
And so, we have to
back off and say,
“Okay, how am I to
respond to this?”
Now, listen carefully,
no one, no one can
cause you and me
to have an unforgiving spirit.
Nobody can cause us to do that.
No one can make me have
an unforgiving spirit.
No one can make me angry.
No one can make me hostile.
No one can make me
have malice in my heart.
Those are responses that I have
to agree in my own emotional
being to accept or reject.
And so, if I allow these
emotions to encompass me and
allow them to overflow in
my life and to control me,
it is because I
choose to be angry,
I choose to have malice, I
choose to be unforgiving,
I choose to have that
kind of an attitude.
Now, here’s the thing that has
helped me above everything else
in my own personal
life, and that is,
when I think about the fact that
when the Lord Jesus Christ went
to the cross, He took all of
my sin on the cross with Him.
No matter what I’ve
done, will ever do,
He has already forgiven me of
every single solitary thing.
How can I hold
against someone else,
be unforgiving toward
them, when He has not
been unforgiving toward me?
Now, that person
may be obnoxious.
They may be obstinate.
They might not want
to be my friend
or have anything to do with me.
Now, how they
respond is one thing.
How the other person
responds is one thing.
But the issue is: How
am I gonna respond?
Am I going to allow
an unforgiving spirit,
a hurt in my life,
become a harmful thing to me?
Or, am I gonna respond no matter
how the other person responds?
When he says, “Put these
things away from you,” he says,
“with all malice, and be kind
one to another, tender-hearted,
forgiving each other even as
the Lord has forgiven us.”
Well, what are the
harms that you and I face?
The first thing is
damaged emotions.
There are many, many people,
in fact probably most people.
I wouldn’t say everybody, but
most people are damaged at some
point in their life emotionally.
They live with damaged emotions.
They’re not–somehow,
they don’t recognize it,
they don’t
understand what it is.
They just know they’re unhappy.
They just know they
don’t have any contentment.
They just know that somehow
things don’t work out for them.
Somehow, they just can’t seem
to really and truly get on with
enjoying life and moving ahead.
Somehow, they can’t lay
the past behind them.
And I’ll tell you one of the
tragedies of life is to find
somebody who’s
holding on to past hurts,
holding on to past injury.
And they can’t let it
go, won’t let it go,
refuse to let it go.
It becomes their security.
And then if they
had to let it go,
they don’t know what they
would do because it has become,
listen, like this
elephant in their life.
It’s this big thing in their
life of somehow feeling and
expressing and harboring
and nurturing this kind of
resentment and hostility.
Well, one of the things, in
one of the areas which it causes
hurt, is emotional damage.
Now, think about
this for a moment.
When a person is feeling all
these things that he said here:
anger and
resentment and so forth,
and they can’t escape them,
here’s what happens.
It colors
everything in your life.
There’s no exception to this.
It colors
everything in your life.
If you don’t deal with it, it
colors everything in your life.
And what happens?
Here’s what happens.
Your emotions freeze.
Listen, you cannot have hurts in
your life that have caused you
to become bitter and
resentful and unforgiving
and hostile and angry.
As well as you may be
able to suppress
that, you know what happens?
It freezes your emotion.
You cannot love.
You may try to but you can’t.
You can’t love,
you can’t be free,
you can’t be giving,
you can’t be generous, why?
Because
something’s frozen you up.
It’s hung you up
and stuck you up.
Your emotions are frozen.
Not only can you not
genuinely love someone else,
you can’t accept it.
And oftentimes
husbands and wives,
one cannot accept
the other’s love.
Why?
Well, they don’t know why.
They just can’t,
they say love me.
Please, please, please love me.
And at the same time,
they’re pushing
the other person away, why?
Because something cemented,
something froze down in there.
Something down in
there is wrong.
Something needs to be,
listen, it needs to melt.
Their anger and
resentment and hostility,
those hurts need to melt away.
And God needs to bring some
healing in that person’s life.
They can’t love.
And so what happens is we
carry this emotional baggage.
We freeze our emotions.
We freeze our capacity to love.
And listen,
it–someone may try to love
you, love you,
love you, love you.
And you know what?
Somehow you don’t trust them.
Or somehow you
just can’t feel it.
You can’t experience, you
can’t receive it, you can’t–
Because you’ve been hurt
so badly, you just can’t.
You don’t know why you can’t.
And so what happens?
You have to be, you know, tough.
Well, my friend, listen, you
can be tough all you want to.
I’d rather be tender.
He says, listen,
be tender-hearted,
loving one another,
forgiving each other
even as the Lord
has forgiven us.
And if you’re one of those
persons and you’ve wondered:
Well, why am I not free to love?
Why can’t I just
give myself away?
Why can’t I not do that?
Maybe you need to ask yourself
the question: What is there
inside of me that maybe
I have never dealt with,
that I need to lay down,
that I need to face up to,
that I need
healing in my spirit,
healing in my soul,
healing in my damaged emotions?
Well, it will certainly harm us.
A second area in which I
think it harms us is this,
and that is it erodes,
listen, it erodes
our fellowship with the Lord.
You see, I cannot
be right with Him,
I can’t be free with Him.
And there’ve been times in my
life when I was not, when I was
dealing with things that I
knew I had to deal with,
and somehow, I just–I didn’t
have that freedom and
liberty in my
relationship with Him.
It will erode
relationship with the Lord.
You can’t hold on
to hurts, friend,
you can’t hold on to hurts and
hold on to bitterness and hold
on to resentment and
be right with God.
And so what happens?
You get down to pray and you
can talk to Him all you want to,
and I can tell you
exactly how it feels.
Something doesn’t click.
You can say the
things you used to say,
and doesn’t
make any difference.
You can try to conjure up some
kind of feeling, won’t work.
Because you see, you
cannot be unforgiving.
Now listen, it has nothing to do
with what the other person does.
They may be forgiving or
loving, or they may be hostile,
angry, bitter, resentful.
You know what, has nothing
to do with how I respond.
It has to do rather with my
relationship with the Lord and
how I’m gonna react and
how I’m gonna respond,
how I’m going to receive or
reject or handle those hurts.
And so it will erode your
relationship with the Lord.
You, listen, you cannot walk in
this place and rejoice and sing
and praise the Lord in freedom
and liberty and enjoy yourself
and, at the same time, you have
this something deep down inside
you that’s just gripped
you and it’s just there.
You’d like to but you can’t.
You want to but you can’t.
I mean, you’d just give anything
if you could just be free enough
to praise the Lord and sing and
just glorify God and thank Him.
Can’t do it.
Why?
Because there’s something on
the inside that’s harming you,
harming, listen,
harming you internally,
harming your
relationship to the Lord.
But likewise, it
harms us in our health.
Now listen, friend,
if you think that you can
have hurts in your life that are
undealt with, and that it’s–and
if you don’t deal with it,
it–ultimately it’s not
gonna have any effect upon you,
you better think again.
It is going–listen, there’s
going to be a fuse blown
physically in your body
somewhere, somehow, unless you
deal with the hurts
that are there.
It’s gonna happen.
It would be interesting if you
took the average drug bill in
the average home in
America and you analyzed
what those drugs were.
More than likely, they
have to do with headache,
backache, chest ache or stomach
ache or some abdominal pain.
Usually it is
because, not always,
because a person can have
some–they can have a bad disk,
or they could have some kind of
problem in the stomach that they
didn’t–necessarily was not the
result of anger or some–I’m not
saying that all disease
is that, but oftentimes,
oftentimes these things are
the result of something going on
inside of us that’s
affecting our body.
You see, God
wants to get our
attention in one
way or the other.
Now, He’d rather us
just listen to a message,
get on our face, deal with it,
repent of it, and move on.
But if we don’t, what happens?
So here’s what happens.
Instead of people, listen,
instead of dealing with their
hurt–now, listen carefully.
Instead of dealing with their
hurts and having them healed,
it is easier to
go to the doctor.
Well, doctor, here’s
what I–I’m just tired.
I just feel bad all the time.
And I hurt here, I hurt
here, I hurt over here,
and I imagine most
doctors, when people walk in,
they’ve already
got a prescription.
They’re just hurting over
this, that, and the other.
And so what do they do?
They write you
out a prescription.
To do what?
To help alleviate your
pain, not heal your problem.
And so what happens?
I agree.
It’s easier to go to the
doctor, get a prescription,
make you feel a
little bit better.
But you know what happens?
When that prescription runs
out, what do you have to do?
You have to go back
and get another one.
And there are people who’ve been
on drugs for years and years and
years and years and years,
because they will not deal with
the hurt deep down inside
that may have happened way back
yonder years and years and
years ago in their life.
It’s easier, it is much easier
to take something to–listen,
these are the kind of people
who live for the moment.
Just let me feel
good for the moment.
I’m not worried
about the future.
I’m not worried about hurt,
not worried about the
ultimate consequence of this.
I just want to
feel good right now.
And I’m here to tell
you it’s devastating.
It will, listen, it will
damage you emotionally.
It will erode your
relationship to the Lord.
It will affect your
relationship to other people.
It will affect you
health-wise ultimately.
Somewhere along the way, some
fuse is going to get blown if
you and I don’t do what He says.
And that is, He
says here, He
says, “Put away from you.
Let all bitterness and
resentment and hostility and
all these things be put away.”
Now, you say,
“All right, suppose
there is somebody
I need to forgive.
How do I do that?”
Now, listen carefully, let’s
define what forgiveness is not.
Forgiveness is not justifying
the other person’s actions.
Forgiveness is
not forgetting it.
Forgiveness is not tolerating
it, saying, “Well, you know,
everybody makes mistakes,
and so whatever.”
It is not denying it.
It is not excusing what
that person’s done to you.
It is not saying,
“Well, you know,
inevitably time will heal this.”
No, it won’t, unless you’re
willing to deal with whatever it
is that’s caused that
hurt and pain in your life.
You see, if I forgive
someone, here’s what I’ve done.
I’ve said I deliberately
and willfully lay down,
put aside this debt that you owe
me as a result of somehow–
the way you’ve hurt me.
And so I’m willing
to lay it aside.
I put it down, no longer
hold it against them anymore.
Now, does that mean
that everything is
absolutely correct between us?
Not necessarily,
because you see,
listen carefully, you and I are
not responsible for someone’s
response to our forgiveness.
You may be forgiving.
You may be–God may heal you,
and the other person who did
something to you may
not ever be healed.
They might not be
interested in healing.
They might not be–they–listen,
their malice is just as strong
today as it was yesterday.
And so therefore,
they may never change.
But you know what,
you and I are responsible
for changing no matter
what the other person does.
We are not responsible for
another person’s actions.
They are responsible
for their own responses.
They give an account to
God for their own responses.
And you say, “Well, suppose it’s
somebody that hurt me long time
ago, and they live
in a distant state.”
Or maybe what they did to
you, you could not even begin to
share with anyone else
under any condition.
Or it may–suppose they died.
Then what?
And I think the–I
think of the tragedies.
Now, here’s a real tragedy.
I think of the tragedies,
the things that happen between
children and their parents.
And then the
parent, for example,
the father or mother dies, and
this bitterness and resentment
and hostility, they
say, “Now what do I do?
Have I got to live with
this the rest of my life?
Do I have to live with this
stuff in me the rest of my life?
Now I can’t settle it.
I didn’t–I couldn’t at the
time, and now they’re gone.
Now what do I do?”
Here’s what you do.
And this’ll work.
You get by yourself.
You set up two chairs.
You sit in one of them and
you put the other person
in that other chair.
That person may
live on your block,
but they won’t talk to you
and they won’t deal with you.
That’s okay.
Or they may be dead.
You put them in the other
chair and you sit in this chair.
And then here’s what
you do very carefully.
You express to the other person
all the feelings that you have,
the way that you
believe they hurt you.
And all the feelings that
you have, let them out.
And then you say to
that other person,
“Because the Lord Jesus Christ,
who is my personal Savior,
went to the cross and
paid my sin-debt in full,
and because He has continually
forgiven me over the years,
I choose to forgive you for
what you have done for me.”
And then you pray this prayer.
Father, I want to thank You
for giving me the power and the
privilege to lay down
this hurt that has been
there for years and years.
I want to thank You for enabling
me to be able to forgive my
father, my mother, my
sister, my brother,
my son, my daughter, my friend.
Thank You for making it possible
for me to forgive them, and then
accept, listen, accept the
forgiveness that you have given
to the other person as done.
And my friend,
from that moment on,
the healing process will
take place in your life,
begin to take
place in your life.
And what could have or was
harming you and hurting you far
more deeply than you
realized, the healing process
will begin to take place, and
God will set you free of the
hurts that would ultimately
have harmed you and
ultimately have destroyed you.
Now, you know, only you
know who in your life,
what in your life, what
experience in your life has
caused you great hurt.
Only you know how deep and how
marred and marked you may feel.
And I understand that
there are some situations and
circumstances that are so
devastating and so evil and so
wicked and so vile and so bad
and so injurious and so hurtful
and painful and
difficult to handle.
I understand that.
Nobody probably understands
how you feel the way you feel.
And so you can’t compare
yourself with someone else.
You just have to ask yourself
the question: Do I want the
hurts to harm me physically and
emotionally and my relationship
to God and my
relationship to others?
Or do I want to be healed?
That’s a decision
you have to make.
And I’m simply saying this.
God the Father, if
you will trust His Son,
the Lord Jesus Christ,
as your personal Savior,
the Holy Spirit will
come into your heart,
and here’s what He’ll do.
He will enable you
to be forgiving.
He will strengthen
you and help you.
He will place such a love in
your heart that you’ll be able
to look at the other person and
think about them differently.
You’ll see them oftentimes
in a different perspective.
You’ll see them as someone who’s
been injured in their life,
and therefore, they
just responded to you.
Or that, in a time
in their life, they
reacted in the wrong way.
In a moment of weakness,
they did something
to you that harmed you deeply.
Your whole attitude will change.
Here’s what’ll happen, when you
trust the Lord as your Savior,
He enables you to be able
to be forgiving because,
for the first time in your life,
you understand what it
means to be forgiven yourself.
And so, I want to encourage
you that if you’ve never trusted
Jesus Christ as your
Savior, my friend,
you may think that you’re
getting along with life,
but you see, the truth is
you’re hurting on a deeper,
invisible level
than you realize.
Ultimately, it’s going
to take and have
its affect upon your life.
If you are a believer, and
you know that you’re saved,
and yet you say,
“Well, you know,
I thought I’d
forgotten those things.
I thought just forgetting
that and shoving it
aside, that somehow
would go away.”
No, it doesn’t.
And I want to encourage you.
It may be that you say, “Well,
I don’t know about that sitting
down with somebody,
talking to them.”
Try it.
If you don’t want to do
that, here’s what you do.
You write them a letter.
You just write it out
in longhand in–however
you want, just write it out, all
the things that you feel.
And then you
express in that letter.
Write out your
prayer in that letter,
and then here’s what you do.
You burn it up.
And with that burn
goes your anger,
resentment, hostility,
bitterness, and all the hurts
that you nurtured all those
years of your life.
My friend, the
Father wants you free.
Here’s what He says, He says,
“If you know the truth,
the truth will set you free.”
And here’s the truth
that sets you free.
When you and I are
willing to be forgiving,
even as our Father
has forgiven us,
we will be free of the hurt,
we will be free of the harm that
those hurts could cause to us
if we will trust Him for it.
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