your scars are beautiful to God (3)

Do you want to be healed? This sounds like a silly question to ask. Of course everyone wants to be healed, you may say. Do you? Have you been wounded by past unhappy experiences but refuse to let go of your feelings of hurt, anger, sorrow, self-pity, despair, revenge?

Some Christians choose to live with these wounds all their lives. They become miserable & deprive themselves of a full abundant life that God has promised. Do you truly want to be healed? Then read this 3rd instalment of the book review.

Book Review (by Belinda Elliott of CBN.com)

Choose to be Healed
Author : Sharon Jaynes

Each of us can be healed, Jaynes says, but first we must answer a question. She recalls the story in John 5 of Jesus healing a man who had lived as an invalid for 38 years. Before He healed him, Jesus asked the man, “Do you want to get well?”

Perhaps the reason Jesus asked this, Jaynes says, is because the man’s life would drastically change once he was healed. He would have to learn to walk and get a job, among other things. Our lives, too, will change when we allow Jesus to heal our wounds.

“I think we can be so comfortable with that wound that it almost becomes who we think we are,” Jaynes says. “‘I am a rape victim.’ ‘I am a woman who has been abused.’ ‘I had an abortion, and that’s who I am.’ We can become very comfortable in that and to let go of it and be healed is scary. You take on a whole new life.”

Healing, Jaynes points out, also involves choices about forgiveness. If our wounds are from poor choices that we made, we must ask God to forgive us and accept that His death on the cross is enough to pay for our sins. Then we need to release the guilt and shame that we have felt.

Healing often involves forgiving others as well. “I think that many people believe forgiveness means that we are saying that what they did is okay,” Jaynes explains. “It’s not okay. What it is saying is that I’m not going to let that control me any longer. I’m giving it to God.”

Until a hurting person accepts God’s forgiveness, forgives themselves, and forgives the person who hurt them, Jaynes says, healing can never take place.

.......... to be continued in part (4)

nothing can separate us from the love of God,
sockkim