Inner Healing Through Forgiveness (1)

Forgiveness is the key God gave each of us to heal us from the inner wounds of the past or present thus giving us a blessed future. God showed us all a precious forgiveness lesson when His Son Jesus Christ was dying on the cross. Seeing others killing you and in spite of that having the power to say "Father forgive them" is amazing.

Physical health is a great blessing and the privilege a person is given to have it is oftentimes ignored. Yet people have inner wounds that are well hidden in their hearts and even if their physical appearance seems great, the inner being might be suffering to a great extent.

Or, even worse, they might not even realize what is actually wrong, but they see that they simply don’t have satisfaction, energy and oftentimes anger and disappointment come regardless of how hard they try to keep those away. Especially when it comes to Christians this is seen as a discouraging process because they might be saying something like this:"Well, I prayed Lord but nothing happened! I don’t see the results."

I have to start by saying that what I am about to write has given me a tremendous help in the inner healing of my heart, in fact God healed, restored and comforted my heart in ways I have never thought possible. I had people that I thought I have forgiven but somehow the pain of what they did to me was still there. How to deal with that?

Understand who you are

Ever since the beginning, God intended a great Father - son relationship with us, yet, God gave us free will and since our ancestors chose to listen to want Satan was saying, thus disobeying God, we’ve all come under Satan’s authority because we’ve all been infected with sin.

Picture something like that: walking on a nice plain with your friends and all of a sudden, you fall in this deep well (no water in it luckily) but you can’t possibly come out because it is simply too deep. In the same time, all your friends (in fact all humans) have fallen in similar wells and regardless of how much you’d cry for help, none of them can give it to you, not because they wouldn’t, but because they are in the very same situation, just like you, in the deep dark fountain.

Why did this happen? Because of the nature – the sinful nature- we choose to have by disobeying God. Our Father saw the impossibility we were in, that’s why He sent Jesus, His Only Son, to take us out of our wells. Why was He able to do that? Because even if Jesus came on earth, He didn’t have our sinful nature, He did not sin, Satan has no authority on Him. That’s why He is the Only One capable to take us out of our state.

To be able to understand what is going on, you need to first know who you are. Satan knows how precious you are in the eyes of God and this enemy will try to destroy and steal from you all he can, in an attempt to hinder you from reaching your whole potential that God has endowed you with. For that, the evil one will use every opportunity – since the day you were born- to hurt you, to discourage you, to steal your confidence and trust. He does that trough many people including your closest ones.

The role of your earthly father

In this process of reaching maturity, God placed the responsibility of making Himself known to us on our parents’ shoulders. It is especially the father’s image that we grow up with as the closest resemblance to God’s image, that’s why the father’s role is crucial in this process. Not all people have had the blessing to have a father that really showed the love, affection and responsibility that God showers upon us. In fact…unfortunately there is no such thing as "the perfect human" therefore, you might need to realize that even in your very family, there were times when you might have felt rejection, even abuse, fear, lack of love and many other negative actions that you are still carrying with you in the dark chambers of your heart, chambers you want to keep looked and never open again.

This is the reason why you need to know that between your earthly father and the Heavenly Father, there is a tremendous difference. If your dad was always busy working, you might have grown up with the concept in your heart (without even realizing it) that God is too busy for you, and you have to draw His attention upon you somehow.

Understanding that your own parents have also had imperfect parents that might not have known how to show their love to them is a great step to make you understand your parents, understand and know that they simply did not know better.

It is very important to start by understanding these truths, understanding that oftentimes Satan might have used your own parents who abused you- emotionally or even physically – to deprive you from knowing real love, making you say and feel that there is no such thing as real love.All the other words used by your parents "Nothing good will ever come out of you!" or "I wish you had never been born!" and all similar to these, have created a deep wound of rejection in your heart. But now, you know who really was behind those words and actions – it was Satan- he wanted to hurt you as much as possible using all the ways/ methods he could find.

Make the decision to forgive

Forgive, starting with your parents. Put them first on the list. In the next article I will deal with the rest of the steps to inner healing through forgiveness. (Make a list; Start forgiving; Ask God to free you; Ask forgiveness for having blamed God; Ask God to forgive those who hurt you; Enjoy freedom and healing!) I have to mention that Peter Horrobin’s book "The strongest prayer on earth" was the source of inspiration for these series of articles about inner healing. See the next steps in the next article.