Ash Wednesday Emotional Wounds & Healing
3/9/11 Isaiah 53:1-15 Luke 4:14-20
Ash Wednesday is a time when we begin to become clean with God and accept what God says about us. I came across the following section from the book “Imitation of Christ”
“I have been crucified with Christ …” (Galatians 2:20). To become one with Jesus Christ, a person must be willing not only to give up sin, but also to surrender his whole way of looking at things. Being born again by the Spirit of God means that we must first be willing to let go before we can grasp something else.
The first thing we must surrender is all of our pretense or deceit. Our pretending to be something that we are not. The idea that I am almost a perfect Christian is a deception. What our Lord wants us to present to Him is not our goodness, honesty, or our efforts to do better, but real solid sin. Actually, that is all He can take from us. And what He gives us in exchange for our sin is real solid righteousness. But we must surrender all pretense that we are anything, and give up all our claims of even being worthy of God’s consideration.
Here is what God says about us.
10 As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”[a] 13 “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.”[b]
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”[c] 14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”[d] “Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 ruin and misery mark their ways, 17 and the way of peace they do not know.”[e] 18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”[f]
Everybody fits somewhere in these categories and most of us fit into more than one. This means that all of us are going to have some problems and hurts in life, because sin leaves us all with marks and scars.
Not only do we have our own sin, we then have to deal with losses that come to us from the sins and neglects of others. God created us all with some needs that when they are not taken care of, we can end up with some losses and wounds. If we grow up without feeling loved, it does some damage to us. If we grow up feeling unprotected it also can do damage to us.
There are also unintentional losses that come into our lives such as the death of a loved one, a lingering illness, a career loss, or a move that takes us away from family or friends.
Then compound that with the reality that sometimes people intentionally inflict pain on us through physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, abandonment and acts of betrayal.
All of us have something in our past, that has kept us broken as adults if we have not allowed Jesus to heal that particular situation. Most of the times we masque our hurts, and put layers of defenses on our wounds and try to bury them so that they we will not hurt us again. But hiding over a problem does not make it go away. If our arm has a cut that becomes infected, simply putting a decorative bandage on it does not make it get any better. The hurt and infection only does its damage in ways we do not see.
The hurts or the infections of the child can govern the life of the man or the woman without them even realizing what’s going on. We don’t recognize our past is really dictating our present.
I want you to know that God knows you better than you know yourself, and God chooses to love you. God knows that you can’t be trusted and God Loves you. God knows that you have hidden pains, hidden secrets, and a hidden past and God still loves you. God knows how you are praying for things to change, but how your past keeps you doing the same thing that’s messing up your current relationships. An angry child becomes an angry mom or dad or wife or husband or co worker if the anger is never dealt with.
Why did Jesus come to the earth? He says in Luke 4:18-20 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[a]
Jesus did not come to just to let us go to heaven. Jesus came to heal our hurts and our brokenness now. He sees what’s inside of us. He Knows all the hidden wounds we have inside. He knows all the things we have wanted to yell and scream at God about, but have been afraid to do so. There are a lot of punches we have taken in life that we have kept inside of ourselves that were meant for Jesus.
When emotional blows go inside of us, they are stored in different parts of our bodies. We still do not understand the complexity of the human body and how God created it to work. At the last session I had at Ashland Theologoical Seminary, the speaker was sharing how we have memories stored in different parts of our bodies.
He shared the story of a young girl who had been violently attacked and left for dead. When she was found, there was very little chance of a recovery and her parents made the decision to donate her organs to another young girl who needed a lung transplant.
A couple of months later, the little girl began to have nightmares. The parents took the child back to the doctor who did the transplant. The doctor told them to take the girl to the psychiatrist. After listening to the girl awhile, the psychiatrist told them to take the little girl to the police. The nightmares the girl was having was a reliving of the violent attack the first girl had suffered. The police were able to get a description of the attacker and other facts about what had happened from this girl and the guy was eventually caught and convicted. The memories of that first girl had been stored inside of her lungs.
The second story he shared involved a man who was sincerely injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. His wife made the decision to donate his heart for a transplant. A year later she came to the hospital to ask if she could meet the family who had received his heart because she wanted to feel her husband’s heart beat once more. The staff explained to her that they didn’t do that kind of a thing. She begged them to ask the family if they would allow it, and if the family said no, she would drop it. The hospital agreed to ask the family.
The heart had gone into a 14 year old Hispanic male who did not speak his English. His family agreed to meet with her. The doctor told the woman, and suggested they meet in the chapel at the hospital at 1:30 on a certain day. Well on that day, the woman and the doctor sat waiting. 1:30, 1:40, 1:45 and there was no show. The doctor looked at the woman and told her, “I don’t think they’re coming let’s call it a day.” The lady said, “I feel my husband’s presence and he’s been here since 1:30. Could we at least wait until 2:00.
At 2:00 as they were starting to leave, in came a Hispanic woman and her son. She apologized for being late, saying they arrived at 1:30, but they couldn’t find the place they were to meet. The woman then asked the Hispanic woman if she would ask her son if it would be okay to touch his chest to feel her husband’s heart beating. The Hispanic woman spoke in Spanish to her son, and he agreed. The woman put her hand on the boy’s chest and felt the heart beat. When she took her hand away, she said “copacedic.”
The Hispanic woman asked, what did you say. She said copacedic. What does that mean? She replied, whenever my husband and I got into an argument and was upset with each other, we used the code word “copacedic” which meant to us that everything was going to be all right, we were just going through a little problem.
The Hispanic woman said, “my son would just at times say to us, copacedic and we had no idea what he meant. Not only that, he use to like rap music, but now he only wants to listen to 50’s and 60’s music. He use to be a vegetarian but now he wants cheeseburgers and fries. The woman said, my husband was in a band and all they played were fifties and sixties music. His favorite meal was cheeseburgers and fries.
Those memories had been stored in her husband’s heart and transplanted along with his heart. You know when we give our lives to Jesus Christ, Jesus gives us a new heart and we become a new creature, which means the other parts of us may have memories that we need to let go of as well.
The Bible tells us that Jesus 4Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. In the days of blacks being beaten in jail, they would often use a telephone book and place it on one’s head and strike the book so that no mark would be left on the body, but the energy from the blow would be absorbed by the person’s body.
What Jesus wants to do for us is to come and touch us on every area of our body, so that all those painful episodes, abuses, betrayal, disappoints and hurts don’t have to stay inside of us, but can be transplanted from us directly into him. The beatings he took on the cross was part of what was inside of us, being drawn out of us and forced upon him. The stripes on his back and chest caused by the lashes of the whip, were filled with the pain we had suffered in our lives so that we could have peace from our past.
The nails going into his hands and feet were transferring our emotional abuse from our bodies and minds into his. The healing Jesus gave to us on the cross covered far more than we could ever imagine. He’s already paid the price for it. Don’t try to hold it in any longer. Forget about getting even. Forget about hating them. Forget about making sure you get justice and concentrate on being set free in Jesus Christ to become all that God has for you to be.
Ash Wednesday Service
Call To Worship
Prayer
Worship Songs
Enter In
Here I Am To Worship
Say The Name Of Jesus
Meaning Of Ash Wednesday
Ash Anointing---Music
Scripture Reading
Short Meditation Wounded For Us
Invitational For Healing
What If—My Love
I Love You Jesus
Bread Of Heaven
Prayer
Benediction He Who Began A Good Work
