Life

Everyone of us is hurt from time to time. Sometimes we are hurt intentionally by others and sometimes unintentionally. Some hurts are little and within a short time we forget about them. What I want to talk about are the times when we are hurt and time doesn’t seem to bring healing. Every time we think of the person who hurt us, the pain and anger wells up inside again. Most people do not know what to do and continue to live with the pain, which often gets worse with time. I believe that there are two things God wants you to do when you are hurt. If you do these two things, God will bring healing into your life.

The first thing to do when you are hurt is the simplest, but often overlooked. Simply pray and ask for God to help you. There is great power in prayer. Life Church has many people attending who are unchurched. They are always so amazed the first time they give a prayer request to our prayer team and God answers the prayer, often very quickly. God is there to help, if we will but ask Him and oftentimes humble ourselves to ask others to pray.

The second thing to do when you are hurt is more difficult, it does not come naturally. When you are hurt, God wants to teach you to forgive the person who hurt you. Many people have trouble with forgiveness, they think that forgiveness is letting the other person off the hook. Forgiveness is really about letting you off the hook, the hook of unforgiveness. An increasing number of scientific studies are now documenting that unforgiveness is a key factor in many sicknesses and that people who forgive are more healthy.

What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is simply yielding your right to get even with the person who hurt you. It is not saying that what they did was right, it is not saying that God will let them off the hook. It is giving up on revenge and praying for them. How can you forgive when the hurt is great? You can forgive as you remember that God has forgiven you. You can forgive when you acknowledge that God is in control. Nothing that anyone will ever do to you can thwart God’s plan for your life. God is able to take even the worst of the hurts and turn it around for good for those who love God.

Recently, I read an amazing story about two men, Tass and Moran, who forgave one another and became lifelong friends. Tass was a Palestinian Arab, trained by the Fatah as a sniper to kill Jews. Moran was a Israeli soldier who had seen many of his friends killed by a suicide bomber. Each man, one a Muslim, one a Jew, became a Christian upon reading the Bible. God allowed them to meet one another and through a process of reconciliation and forgiveness, made possible by God’s grace alone, they became close friends. The answer to broken relationships, the answer to hurts in your life, the answer to problems between nations is found in Jesus. He has forgiven us, so we can forgive others.

TEV Eph. 4:32 Forgive one another, as God has forgiven you through Christ.

When I was a child, I used to play the game of follow the leader. One of the children would be the leader and all the other children would follow. Sometimes following the leader was great fun, but sometimes it got us in trouble because the leader led us to do things that were not right. As adults, we’re not a whole lot different from children. We all follow leaders in our lives. Your leader might be a person that you look up to or it might be that you are your own leader. The problem is that if you’re following a fallible human being, you are going to get in trouble. Only those who follow Jesus, the perfect leader, will never go wrong. Only those who follow Jesus both in private and in public will fulfill their purpose in life.

Now some leaders today claim that their own private beliefs have no bearing on their public actions. They say that we shouldn’t criticize them when what they say they believe in private and what they do in public doesn’t add up. Jesus had a word for those kinds of leaders, “Hypocrites.” A hypocrite is someone who flip flops between a private and a public image. Hypocrites cannot be trusted and if you follow one, he will lead you and all those who follow him into trouble. The private beliefs of a leader who can be trusted and his public actions are one and the same. Jesus came to bring the truth for every person to believe and act on. That truth will produce good in the lives of individuals and nations that live by it.

NLT John 18:37 Jesus said, “… I came to bring truth to the world. All who love the truth recognize that what I say is true.”