Captivating

Chapter 6 – Healing the Wound

*      (pg 93) You, dear heart, are the crown of creation, his glorious image bearer.  And he will do everything it takes to rescue you and set your heart free.

The Offer

*      (pg 94) Isaiah 61:1 He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,…

*      (pg 95) You are the glorious Image Bearer of the Lord Jesus Christ – the crown of his creation.

*      You have been assaulted.  You have fallen to your own resources.  Your Enemy has seized upon your wounds and your sins to pin your heart down.

*      Now the Son of God has come to ransom you, and to heal your broken, wounded, bleeding heart, and to set you free from bondage.

*      He came for the brokenhearted captives.  That’s me.  That’s you.

*      He came to restore the glorious creation that you are.  And then set you free…to be yourself.

*      (pg 96) Here is the core reason we wrote this book: to let you know that the healing of your feminine heart is available, and to help you find that healing.

*      To help you find the restoration which we long for and which is central to Jesus’ mission.  Let him take you by the hand now and walk with you through your restoration and release. 

Hemmed In

*      Why did God curse Eve with loneliness and heartache, and emptiness that nothing would be able to fill?  Wasn’t her life going to be hard enough out there in the world, banished from the Garden that was her true home, her only home, never able to return?  It seems unkind.  Cruel, even.

*      He did it to save her.  For as we all know personally, something in Eve’s heart shifted at the Fall. Something sent its roots deep down into her soul – and ours – that mistrust of God’s heart, that resolution to find life on our own terms.

*      So God has to thwart her.  In love, he has to block her attempts until, wounded and aching, she turns to him and him alone for her rescue.

*      Jesus has to thwart us too – thwart our self-redemptive plans, our controlling and our hiding, thwart the ways we are seeking to fill the ache within us.  Otherwise, we would never fully turn to him for our rescue.

*      (pg 97) Oh, we might turn to him for our “salvation,” for a ticket to heaven when we die.

*      But inside, our hearts remain broken and captive and far from the One who can help us.

*      And so you will see the gentle, firm hand of God in a woman’s life hemming her in.

*      Wherever it is we have sought life apart from him, he disrupts our plans, our “way of life” which is not life at all.

 Turning from the Ways You’ve Sought to Save Yourself

*      (pg 98) We construct a life of safety (I will not be vulnerable there) and find some place to get a taste of being enjoyed or at least of being “needed.”

*      Our journey toward healing begins when we repent of those ways, lay them down, let them go.  They’ve been a royal disaster anyway.

*      ‘The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed.’ (Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey)

*      (pg 99) God comes to us and asks, “Will you let me come for you?”

*      To enter the journey toward the healing of your feminine heart, all it requires is a “Yes. Okay.”  A simple turning in the heart.

*      We let desire speak to us again; we let our hearts have a voice, and what the voice usually says is, This isn’t working.  My life is a disaster.  Jesus – I’m sorry.  Forgive me.  Please come for me.

Invite Him In

*      There is a famous passage of Scripture that many people have heard in the context of an invitation to know Christ as Savior. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in” (Rev. 3:20 NKJV).

*      He does not force himself upon us.  He knocks, and waits for us to ask him in. (Rev. 3:20)

*      But the principle of this “knocking and waiting for permission to come in” remains true well into our Christian life.

*      You see, we all pretty much handle our brokenness in the same way – we mishandle it.

*      It hurts too much to go there.  So we shut the door to that room in our hearts, and we throw away the key…

*      (pg 100)  But that does not bring healing.  Not at all.  It might bring relief – for a while.  But never healing.

*      The best thing we can do is to let Jesus come in, open the door and invite him in to find us in those hurting places.

*      It might come as a surprise that Christ asks our permission to come in and heal, but he is kind, and the door is shut from the inside, and healing never comes against our will.

*      In order to experience his healing, we must also give him permission to come in to the places we have so long shut to anyone.

*      He knocks through many things, waiting for us to give him permission to enter in.

*      Give him permission.  Give him access to your broken heart.  Ask him to come to these places.

Renounce the Agreements You’ve Made

*      Your wounds brought messages with them.

*      They had a similar theme.  “You’re worthless.”  “You’re not a woman.”  “You’re too much…and not enough.”  “You’re a disappointment.”  “You are repulsive.”  Because they were delivered with such pain, they felt true.

*      (pg 101) They pierced our hearts, and they seemed so true.  So we accepted the message as fact.  We embraced it as the verdict on us.

*      As we said earlier, the vows we made as children act like a deep-seated agreement with the message of our wounds.

*      The vows we made acted like a kind of covenant with the messages that came with our deep wounds.

*      We must renounce them.  Before we are entirely convinced that they aren’t true, we must reject the message of our wounds.  It’s a way of unlocking the door to Jesus.

*      Agreements lock the door from the inside.  Renouncing the agreements unlocks the door to him.

We Find Our Tears

*      Part of the reason women are so tired is because we are spending so much energy trying to “keep it together.”  So much energy devoted to suppressing the pain and keeping a good appearance.

*      A terrible, costly way to live your life.  Part of this is driven by fear that the pain will overwhelm us.  That we will be consumed by our sorrow.

*      (pg 102) Grief, dear sisters, is good.  Grief helps to heal our hearts.

*      Let the tears come.  It is the only kind thing to do for your woundedness.  Allow yourself to feel again.

*      And feel you will – many things. Anger.  That’s okay.  Anger’s not a sin. (Eph 4:26)  Remorse.  Of course you feel remorse and regret for so many lost years.  Fear.  Yes, that makes sense.  Jesus can handle the fear as well.

*      In fact, there is no emotion you can bring up that Jesus can’t handle.

*      Let it all out.

*      Grief is a form of validation; it says the wound mattered.  It mattered.  You mattered.  That’s not the way life was supposed to go.

*      There are unwept tears down in there – the tears of a little girl who is lost and frightened.  The tears of a teenage girl who’s been rejected and has no place to turn.  The tears of a woman whose life has been hard and lonely and nothing close to her dreams.  Let the tears come.

Forgive

*      A real step of courage and will.  We must forgive those who hurt us.

*      The reason is simple:  Bitterness and unforgiveness set their hooks deep in our hearts; they are chains that hold us captive to the wounds and the messages of those wounds.

*      Until you forgive, you remain their prisoner.

*      (pg 103) Forgiveness is a choice.  It is not a feeling – don’t try and feel forgiving.  It is an act of the will.

*      Neil Anderson says, “Don’t wait to forgive until you feel like forgiving.  You will never get there.  Feelings take time to heal after the choice to forgive is made…if your forgiveness doesn’t visit the emotional core of your life, it will be incomplete.”

*      We acknowledge that it hurt, that it mattered, and we choose to extend forgiveness to our fathers, our mothers, those who hurt us. 

*      This is not saying, “It didn’t really matter”; it is not saying, “I probably deserved part of it anyway.”

*      Forgiveness says, “It was wrong. Very wrong. It mattered, hurt me deeply. And I release you. I give you to God.”

Ask Jesus to Heal You

*      We turn from our self-redemptive strategies.  We open the door of our hurting heart to Jesus.  We renounce the agreements we made with the messages of our wounds, renounce any vows we made.  We forgive those who harmed us.  And then, with an open heart, we simply ask Jesus to heal us.

*      (pg 104) This is the offer of our Savior – to heal our broken hearts…The time has come to let Jesus heal you.

Jesus, come to me and heal my heart.  Come to the shattered places within me.  Come for the little girl that was wounded.  Come and hold me in your arms, and heal me.  Do for me what you promised to do – heal my broken heart and set me free.

Ask Him to Destroy Your Enemies

*      (pg 105) There are things you’ve struggled with all your life – self-doubt, anger, depression, shame, addiction, fear.  You probably thought that those were your fault, too.  But they are not.  They came from the Enemy who wanted to take your heart captive, make you a prisoner of darkness.

*      We allowed those strongholds to form when we mishandled our wounds and made those vows.  But Jesus has forgiven us for all of that, and now he wants to set us free.

*      Ask him to destroy your enemies.  He promised to, after all.  Ask Jesus to release your heart from captivity to these things.

Let Him Father You

*      (pg 106) Every little girl was made to live in a world with a father who loves her unconditionally.

*      (pg 107) God invited me to go with him into the deep places of my heart that were hidden and wounded and bleeding still from heartbreaks and wounds I had received from my father’s hand.  Places I did not want to go.  Memories I did not want to revisit.  Emotions I did not want to feel.

*      The only reason I said yes to God, the only reason I would travel there, was because I knew he would go with me.  Hand in hand.  He would hold my heart.  And I had come to trust his.

*      There is a core part of our hearts that was made for Daddy.  Made for his strong and tender love.  That part is still there, and longing.  Open it to Jesus and to your Father God.  Ask him to come and love you there.  Meet you there.

*      We’ve all tried so hard to find the fulfillment of this love in other people, and it never, ever works.  Let us give this treasure back to the One who can love us best.

Ask Him to Answer Your Question

*      (pg 108) How do you come to such confidence?  You take your heart’s deepest Question to God.

*      We all still need to know, Do you see me? Am I captivating? Do I have a beauty all my own?

*      (pg 109) ‘What if you have a genuine and captivating beauty that is marred only by your striving?’

*      Let’s just start with a thought.  What if the message delivered with your wounds simply isn’t true about you?  Let that sink in.  It wasn’t true.  What does it free you to do? Weep? Rejoice? Let go? Come out? Take your heart back?

*      (pg 110) Take your Question to Jesus.  Ask him to show you your beauty.  And then?  Let him Romance you.