Friday, July 15, 2011

Created For More – Consider the Emotions that you House




At a specific time in history, God purposefully used his mind, will and creative powers to fashion all of the intricate parts that make up your unique personality, hair color, ring finger size – everything. Psalm 139:14 tells us that His works are wonderful and that WE KNOW it full well.  Each of us has an innate understanding that we house something unique and special with potential to do great things.  We are made in the image of God and the distinctiveness in our makeup reflects His glory.

In the Garden of Eden, before sin entered into the heart of man, Adam and Eve lived harmoniously with God and each other.

But when sin entered into the heart of man, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, and congruence with God was interrupted. Man inherited a sinful nature within himself that causes him to wrestle between right and wrong, or good and evil.

Transformation of a man’s heart occurs when man is reconciled with God through Jesus Christ and confronts his sinful nature by yielding his will to the leadership of the Holy Spirit. 

Man was designed to live in harmony with God. But man’s sin has thrust him outside that harmony, into living with his own sinful nature, creating confusion about how to meet his own needs. This neediness causes man to act out in harmful ways, resulting in pain and heartache for self and others. If your heart could speak, would it reveal any pain or confusion about self, or the meaning of life?

Emotional wounds and the lies attached to those wounds can prevent a person from:
Knowing the true self because of a false self or false set of beliefs
Taking risks and growing to become all that Christ intends
Living in the moment and experiencing the wonder and joy of life
Making a difference and contributing to society and the kingdom of God
Life as God intends for His Creation
The Lord wants to kill the man of sin inside your heart. He wants to KILL sin just like a cancer patient wants to kill the cancer cells. Kill is a strong word that means to end life. We have to first become aware of the emotional cancer cells in our hearts and then be willing to do WIT, “whatever it takes” to kill them; it requires work to expose the wounds in our hearts (and the false messages attached to them) to enable our replacing the lies with God’s truth.
That work is a battle in your heart to kill sin, but until you can SEE it, you will not treat it. A person does not receive treatment for cancer if there is nothing to indicate its presence. But when the cancer manifests itself through symptoms, that person takes immediate action to establish a treatment plan.
Physical cancer is a menace that no one wants to face. The word “cancer” captures a person’s attention, and creates the willingness to do WIT, “whatever it takes” to get rid of it. Physical cancer is to the body as unhealed emotional wounds are to the heart: untreated emotional wounds lead to spiritual death just like untreated cancer causes physical death. A prudent person has regular checkups to make sure cancerous division and multiplication is not ravaging his/her body. God tells us to DAILY allow His Holy Spirit to inspect our hearts, to see if there is anything that is displeasing to Him, and to see if there is any lie in our heart caused by an emotional wound that is robbing us of His glory and truth.

However, people live for years with depression, unsatisfying relationships, internal pain and suffering, and will go to huge lengths to hide these symptoms either out of fear of being discovered as “less than or not enough”, or simply lack of knowledge about how to be set free from internal pain.
Where is emotional pain?
In your heart.
Where do we invite Christ to live?
In our hearts.
We are all in need of a Savior to love and redeem us.

Keeping emotional pain at bay is like trying to keep a beach ball submerged under water; it takes constant energy and will never succeed. But, when exposed - or brought into the light - that pain or darkness will lose its power.
So what is the solution?
Dr. Phil says you cannot change what you will not acknowledge.
Jesus Christ says to confess your sins so that you may be healed.
Honesty leads to getting well. It is that simple. Once you discover lies that have become your beliefs that keep you from living in freedom, you can identify your heart battle, and can work to replace those lies with God’s truth.
When false beliefs are keeping you from experiencing the joy of your salvation, you are being denied the glory for which you were created.