Tomorrow’s Sermon: Healing 3, Healing Of Memories

Tomorrow’s sermon is another revised sermon on healing for my series at Broomfield. I preached the original (longer!) sermon at Rainham three or four years ago.

John 21:1-25

Introduction
I was practising for the college cricket team. We were using the nets at Clifton College, on a sunny evening in May. I ran into bowl. At the end of my run, I jumped up just before releasing the ball, as most quick bowlers would do. But I never bowled that ball. I landed heavily, and crumpled. For months afterwards, I sustained damage to the anterior ligaments of my knee. It was hard to kneel.

My difficulty in kneeling was like pain of all kinds in our lives. Sometimes a hurt from the past prevents us from functioning healthily in the present. A pain caused years ago can stop us today from doing all the things God wants us to do. This is true of emotional pain and the bad memories linked with them as much as physical pain. The emotional pain from the past can be more disabling than the physical injuries. And it is the healing of memories and emotions we are thinking about this week in our series about Christian healing.

These memories and emotions vary greatly: they may be something done to us – a rejection, a lack of unconditional acceptance, bullying or abuse. They may be something we are ashamed of. They may be long-standing  unhelpful thought patterns or beliefs. They may be messages that keep repeating in our minds, such as “You are useless”.

In one sermon I can only briefly outline these and give pointers to the way in which Jesus Christ can heal us. For those who wish to do further reading on the subject, I highly recommend books by the American author David Seamands such as ‘Healing for Damaged Emotions’ and ‘Healing of Memories’.

For now, however, I shall just explore the three areas I outlined, namely: where others have hurt us; where we are ashamed of our past; and unhelpful beliefs.

1. Sinned Against
While the Gospel deals with our own sins, it also helps us when we are sinned against. The crushing memory or ongoing effects of an incident or persistent wrong behaviour against us damages us. Think of when a victim of major crime is interviewed on the TV. They say, “I can never be the same again.” Often they say they can never forgive the perpetrator.

Jesus can reach into that pain from the past and heal. A story I often tell about this is one I tell with permission, because the person concerned has made the details public.

The lady in question was an only child. Her father adored her, but her mother rejected her: she had wanted a boy. Her doting father died when she was eleven, leaving her only with the mother who had not wanted a girl. This left my friend with deep personal insecurity. It was hard for her to believe she was loved and accepted. She was a permanent worrier and an emotional drain on people who knew her. Some of them avoided her, making her sense of rejection worse. By the time I knew her, she was in her sixties.

It took a while before it became clear that the poor relationship with her mother was behind many problems. I suggested we might pray a little differently from normal. Not prayer where we talked incessantly to God, garbling our list of requests. Instead, listening prayer.

I asked her if in silent prayer she would ask the Holy Spirit to show her a key incident. After some silence, one particular event with her mother came to mind. She had been in the kitchen where she wanted to bake a cake, but her mother came in, swept her aside from where she had laid out all the ingredients, and said to her, “You’ll never be any good at this. Let me take over.” It seemed to typify the way in which mum had consistently treated her.[1]

I then encouraged her to ask Jesus where he was at the time of this incident in the kitchen. In the silence, she did so. I waited until she was ready to tell me what happened next.

She told me this: when she asked Jesus to show her where he was at the time, she saw again the incident in the kitchen with the cake. Only this time, after her mother brushed her aside, Jesus came into the kitchen, gently moved mum to one side, came alongside her and said, “You and me, we’ll bake this cake together.”

My friend could now see things from a different perspective, because she now knew Jesus had been with her, and he understood her pain and rejection.

She needed to do one more thing: forgive her mother. Her mum was long dead and so could not be addressed directly, but I asked my friend if she would say out loud that she now truly forgave her mother for all the years of rejection. She did just that, and it was a turning-point in her life. A lot of her emotionally clingy behaviour began to fall away in the following months, as did her desperate desire to please.

So what changed her? It was having that insight into knowing that Jesus right there with her and for her in her time of need. Jesus who suffered rejection on the Cross is one who understands deeply our rejections. Jesus didn’t physically came into that kitchen and move her mother aside, but the picture of that happening was God’s way of showing her that Jesus was with her.

In the light of knowing that Jesus was with her, she was able to forgive. Sometimes that is the way for many of us: we know we need to forgive someone, but we struggle until we know that Jesus is with us. When we know that the rejected Jesus was able to forgive his tormentors, and that he is with us, then we discover his strength in us to forgive those who have caused pain to us.

2. Shame
How many of us are so ashamed of something that we can’t move on in our lives? Peter was like that. Peter had followed the betrayed Jesus as far as the High Priest’s courtyard. But there, by a charcoal fire, he had done what Jesus had prophesied: he had denied him three times. He had then seen Jesus, and wept the bitter tears of shame.

Now Jesus has been raised from the dead, but despite that, Peter has not moved on emotionally. Those three denials still hang over him.

So Jesus makes a charcoal fire by the lakeside. It’s the only other time in the Bible that a charcoal fire is mentioned. In contrast to the three denials, here Jesus three times asks Peter if he loves him. Peter can affirm his love in place of those denials.

Jesus has recreated the scene of Peter’s shame and taken him back there. He knows that Peter must face the pain of the past with his help and come through it, if he is to become the man he wants him to be.

But we can’t face our shame alone. We don’t have the resources to come through them healthily. We need to face them with Jesus. He has what we need to conquer shame and move forward.

Graceis how Jesus brought Peter through his shame. Grace is when God generously gives us good things that we don’t deserve. Jesus gave Peter a second chance: he didn’t deserve it. Jesus gave Peter a calling to a holy destiny: he didn’t deserve it. Most of all, Jesus gave Peter complete unconditional acceptance and love: he didn’t deserve it, but Jesus gave it.

The same grace of God heals us of our shame. Nothing we have done is too terrible for God to forgive. God forgives to a shocking extent! Nothing any of us has done is a surprise to God. Nothing we have done falls outside the power of the Cross. Everything is covered. There are no exemption clauses.

Yet some of us say, “I know God has forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself.” The knowledge in our heads that God has forgiven us hasn’t travelled to our hearts where we feel that truth. How might it?

If we need an experience of truth in our hearts rather than simply an intellectual knowledge in our heads, then a logical argument is inadequate. They only help us with head knowledge. We need an experience that will touch our hearts. That means the work of the Holy Spirit, perhaps as someone prays with us. The Spirit makes the truth we know in our heads come alive in our hearts and change us.

I knew a friend who started sleeping with boys when she was fifteen, became a Christian when she was nineteen, but the promiscuity didn’t abate. She was so desperate for a baby that as a single woman she had an affair with a married man. When they broke up, he would still leer at her. Imagine how she felt. No clever argument would bring her through that destructive behaviour and the shame: only the Holy Spirit revealing the truth through prayer could change her and let her hold her head high as a forgiven woman.

But shame is something we largely keep to ourselves. If we open up about our shame, perhaps people will be so shocked that they will reject us. And where will that leave us? Worse off than we were with our secret shame, we surmise.

Yet eventually we may realise there are some people around like Jesus who are full of grace and truth, accepting us completely but without making excuses for us. They may be the ones who will pray with us. As they do, the Spirit will break through with a revelation of the life-changing truth of God’s forgiveness that goes deep into our hearts. We can forgive ourselves as God has forgiven us.

3. Wrong Beliefs
How can unhelpful beliefs hurt us emotionally? I mentioned in the introduction that for some people it’s like there is a loop playing in their minds with negative messages repeating: “You are useless”; “You’ll never amount to anything”; and so on. These are wrong beliefs, because they are untrue, compared to what God says about us. He says he knows the worst about us, but he still loves us.

I can best illustrate this with a story from personal experience. The wrong belief I held for many years – from childhood into my late twenties, at least – was that perfectionism was a good thing. People would say of me, “He’s a perfectionist”. They meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. If God’s standards were perfection, surely nothing less in your own life was acceptable?

But I began to realise – through reading one of David Seamands’ books – that perfectionism was a curse. Instead of being gently led by God, a perfectionist was a driven person. The perfectionist didn’t allow for the possibility of both failure and forgiveness.

One day, some friends prayed with me. As they prayed, I saw in my mind’s eye a time when I took home my first school report. I was proud of it: I had straight ‘A’s. My parents said, “We love you whatever grades you get.” As a child, I thought they didn’t care about my achievements. Only as an adult was I to see that they were offering me something infinitely more precious: unconditional love.

I came to realise through this experience in prayer that my perfectionism had not come from my parents, because they loved me unconditionally. Instead, I moved on to what my teachers had said: “David, you won’t get merit badges for being clever; you’ll only get them for extra effort.” That led me to perfectionism, with all the unhealthy drivenness I mentioned. Again, it was only in retrospect that I understood what the teachers were really saying, namely that it wouldn’t be fair to the other children if rewards were given purely on natural ability: they had to be encouraged, too. But as a young boy I didn’t understand things in that way, and I began many years as an unhealthy perfectionist.

When I was healed of perfectionism, I didn’t automatically became slapdash instead. I still wanted to do my best, but my motivation had changed. Now I wanted to do my best out of gratitude to a God who loved me despite my faults. That was a world apart from trying to do the very best all the time and just feeling condemned every time I didn’t get things ‘just so’.

I was free to take risks, and not worry if they failed. The perfectionist may well not take the risks of faith, because failure is unthinkable. But the one who has been delivered of this and knows the grace of God in Jesus Christ is more willing to go out on a limb. It’s a huge difference.

We can erase the repeating messages in our minds and replace them with truthful ones. We can replace the old messages with those that tell you what God truly thinks of us. It is worth memorising Bible verses that emphasise just how much God loves us. Committing them to memory and reciting them eventually erases the old false messages. This is often a useful follow-up after having received prayer or Christian counselling.

Conclusion
How many of you have read Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’? You may recall how Miss Havisham is jilted at the altar by her fiancé and never recovers. She keeps everything in her house exactly as it was at the very minute her hopes had come crashing down. Even the clocks are stopped.

That is a powerful picture of what we are like when our emotional wounds from the past hold us captive. We are frozen at the time when the injury happened to us. We do not mature, we stop, and the dust starts to accumulate.

The Gospel says Jesus wants to heal our pain from the past. He can heal us from the rejection inflicted by others; he can take people who filled with shame and make them new; and he can replace the lies that have distorted our lives with his liberating truth.

Let us believe the Good News.

 

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