Dr Charles Stanley - Healing Our Hurts

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:17):
In Touch with doctor Charles Stanley celebrating forty five years
of God's faithfulness in sharing the gospel worldwide. Next on
in Touch Healing Our Hurts.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Somebody hurt you a year ago, ten years ago, or
a lifetime ago, and somehow, deep down inside you can't
shake it. Sometimes you say it never happened, but you know,
deep down inside it did happen. So you try to
deny it, and that doesn't work. You suppress it, and
somehow it keeps popping out, and sometimes it pops out
in an embarrassing fashion. You know, the deep down inside,

(00:54):
something happened back there that you can really identify. In fact,
you can point you a finger to the person. And
what seemingly was merely a little hurt in the beginning
somehow as solidified like concrete in your mind. It's just there.
It lays there, It hangs there. The burden of it
is there. You'd like to shake it, you'd like to

(01:15):
get rid of it, but somehow you just can't do it.
You got hurt so badly that somehow you feel like
I will never be able to overcome this. Well, I
want to tell you, my friend, yes you can, because
you see if you don't overcome the hurts of the past,
what you'll find out is this, those hurts can do great,
great harm to your life. Everybody gets hurt at some

(01:36):
point in life. Children get hurt by their parents, Parents
hurt each other, friends hurt one another. Hurt is just
part of living in the society in which you and
I live. People say things they should not say to
us off the cuff. Sometimes it's very deliberate. Sometimes it
is malicious gossip. Sometimes it is physical injury. Sometimes it
is a abuse of a child, of a teenager, of

(01:58):
another adult. All kinds of things come into our life
that causes hurt. So what we have to do is
we have to decide how we're going to handle this hurt.
Am I going to handle this hurt in such a
way that it harms me in every aspect of my life?
Am I going to learn how to handle this hurt
in such a fashion that I can take it, and
I can handle it properly and be able to learn

(02:20):
something from it, glean something from it, grow up as
a result of it, and not allow it to hurt me.
Because God does not want us to respond to hurts
and such a fashion that we have devastated in our life,
lose their witness in our testimony, go through life bearing
some kind of emotional baggage that we are never able
to escape. So I want you to turn, if you will,
to Ephesians, chapter four, and in this fourth chapter of Ephesians,

(02:44):
which is one of my favorite books of the Scripture,
because Paul has jammed so much theology in the first
three chapters and so much practical Christian living in these
last three, and in this fourth chapter he's been talking
about things that you and I have to deal with
in our life, about renewing our mind and dealing with
anger and so forth. Then he says, if you'll notice,

(03:05):
in coming down to the close of that, in verse
thirty he says, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of
God by whom you receeal for the day of redemption.
And we grieve him in lots of ways, and he's
just talked about some of those ways by our speech
and so forth. Then he says, in verse thirty one,
let all look at this. Let all bitterness and wrath

(03:25):
and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you,
along with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted,
forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has also
forgiven you. Now, I think all of us know that
there are some hurts in life that we can forgive
rather simply and say, well, okay, you know you hurt me,

(03:46):
but I'm going to get over it and understand that
you made a mistake or understood that at that time
in your life you were going through something or whatever.
Then there are those hurts that are so deep in
some people's lives that somehow they just can't seem to
step out of it. They go to church, they hear
the gospel, they know the truth, and they say, well,
you know, I know that's what God says, and that's

(04:06):
what I feel. But and somehow, oftentimes a person doesn't
realize that hanging on the hurts, hanging on to hurts
begins to do them great damage in every aspect of
their life. So hanging on to a hurt oftentimes is
a security for us. When a person has hung on
to a hurt for so long, after a while, the

(04:28):
very idea of giving it up becomes more of a
threat than the damage that hurt does to their life.
When I think about little children who come along and
they're abused by their parents, either sexually or physically or
even verbally, and they grew up and they have to
live with this baggage all of their lives. And what
happens is they grew up with anger toward their parents,

(04:48):
for example, and as a result of that, the relationship,
of course, is never the way it ought to be,
and they go through life wondering, why do I feel
the way I feel? Why do I feel toward my
pain parents the way I feel or towards someone else,
And so oftentimes they can't identify it because what they
say is, oh, yes, I was hurt back on them,
but you know, everybody gets hurt, and therefore I've just

(05:09):
sort of forgotten it. No, you don't. You see, you
don't just forget hurt. You have to deal with hurts
in some fashion or other. Hurts that are not handled
properly will harm us in every aspect of our life.
So I want us to look at this because here's
what happens. Those hurts in our life, unless they're handled properly,
will develop into an unforgiving spirit. And oftentimes that unforgiving

(05:32):
spirit can be very sullen. Especially is this true if
it is the result of something a parent has done,
because it is a natural, normal response for a person
to say, well, you know, after all, she's my mother,
after all he's my father. Why sure I love my dad?
Why sure I love my mother? And somehow this I
love my mother, I love my father. Sure they are

(05:53):
my parents is some form of verbal attempt to cover
up and put layer after layer after layer, or forget
illness on what has happened back there. But what I'm
telling you is this, it doesn't disappear simply because you
say I love my mother, loved my father. And oftentimes,
if there has been real hurt there, you don't really
and truly love them. You would like to love them,
You want to love them, You're supposed to love them.

(06:15):
You should love them, we say in our heart, and
therefore we think we do. When deep down inside that
hurt is like a deep, a deep cancer down inside,
and while on the surface everything looks pretty well, deep
down inside it's never healed, and so it's like leaky poison.
It's just poisoning our whole system. And this is why oftentimes,

(06:36):
later on in life, parents and children come to great
conflict and there's a blow up and someone says, well,
I've been thinking this. I've felt this for years and
years and years. And sometimes a person will say to
their parent twenty years ago, thirty years ago, forty years ago,
here's what you did to me. And sometimes it is
something that a parent did not even realize that they

(06:56):
had done, or something maybe a friend did a few
years ago and they didn't even realize they did it.
And all the time it has been there, and sometimes
it reaches down so deep into the core of your
heart and soul you are shaken by it and maybe
thrown off base by it and thrown off course. And
so we have to back off and say, Okay, how
am I to respond to this? Now? Listen, care pit.
No one no one can cause you and me to

(07:21):
have an unforgiving spirit. Nobody can cause us to do that.
No one can make me have an unforgiving spirit. No
one can make me angry, no one can make me hostile,
No one can make me have malice in my heart.
Those are responses that I have to agree in my
own emotional being to accept or reject. And so if

(07:43):
I allow these emotions to encompass me and allow them
to overflow in my life and to control me, it
is because I choose to be angry. I choose to
have malice, I choose to be unforgiving, I choose to
have that kind of natitude. Now here's the thing that
has helped to me above everything else in my own
personal life. And that is when I think about the

(08:05):
fact that when the Lord Jesus Christ went to the cross,
he took all of my sin on the cross with him.
No matter what I've done, will ever do, he has
already forgiven me of every single solitary thing. How can
I hold against someone else be unforgiving toward them when
he has not been unforgiving toward me. Now that person

(08:25):
may be obnoxious, they may they may be obstinate. They
might not want to be my friend or have anything
to do with me. Now, how they respond is one thing.
How the other person responds is one thing. But the
issue is how am I going to respond? Am I
going to allow an unforgiving spirit a hurt in my
life become a harmful thing to me? Or am I
going to respond? No matter how the other person responds.

(08:48):
When he says, put these things away from you, he says,
with all madness and be kind one to another, tender
hearted forgiving each other even as the Lord has forgiven us. Well,
what all the harms that you and I face? The
first thing is damaged emotions. There are many, many people,
in fact, probably most people. I wouldn't say everybody, but
most people are damaged at some point in their life emotionally.

(09:12):
They live with damaged emotions. They're not somehow, they don't
recognize it, they don't understand what it is. They just
know they're unhappy. They just know they don't have any contentment.
They just know that somehow things don't work out for them.
Somehow they just can't seem to really and truly get
on with enjoying life and moving ahead. Somehow they can't,
they can't lay the past behind them. And I'll tell

(09:32):
you one of the tragedies of life is to find
somebody who's holding on to past hurts, holding on to
past injury, and they can't let it go, won't let
it go, refuse to let it go. It becomes their security.
And then if they had to let it go, they
don't know what they would do because it has become
listened like this elephant in their life. It's this big

(09:53):
thing in their life of somehow feeling and expressing and
harboring and nurture this kind of resentment, hostility or one
of the things. One of the areas which it causes
hurt is emotional damage. Now think about this for a moment.
When a person is feeling all of these things that
he said here, anger and resentment, so forth, and they

(10:14):
can't escape them. Here's what happens. It colors everything in
your life. There's no exception of this. It colors everything
in your life. If you don't deal with it, it colors
everything in your life. And what happens. Here's what happens.
Your emotions freeze. Listen, listen. You cannot you cannot have

(10:35):
hurts in your life that have caused you to become
bitter and resentful and unforgiving and hostile and angry, as
well as you may be able to suppress that, you
know what happened. It freezes your emotions. You cannot love.
You may try to, but you can't. You can't love,
you can't be free, you can't be giving, you can't
be generous. Why Because something's frozen you up. It's hung

(10:58):
you up, it stuck you up. Your emotions are frozen.
Not only can you not genuinely love someone else, you
can't accept it. And oftentimes husbands and wives one cannot
accept the other's love. Why well, they don't know why,
they just can't. They say love me, please, please, please
love me, at the same time they're pushing the other
person away. Why because something, something cemented, something froze down

(11:23):
in there, something down in there is wrong. Something needs
to be listen, it needs to melt. Their anger and
resentment and hostility. Those hurts need to melt the way,
and God needs to bring some healing in that person's life.
They can't love, and so what happens is we carry
this emotional baggage. We freeze our emotions, we freeze how
capacitor to love and listen. Someone may try to love you,

(11:45):
love you, love you, love you, and you know what,
somehow you don't trust them, or somehow you just can't
feel it. You can't experience, you can't receive it. You
can't because you've been hurt so badly. You just can't.
You don't know why you can't. So what happens You
have to be you know tough, Well, my friend, listen,
you can be tough all you want to. I'd rather

(12:06):
be tender he says, he said, listen, he says, be tenderhearted,
loving one another, forgiving each other, even as the Lord
has forgiven us. And if you're one of those persons
and you've wondered, why am I not free to love?
Why can't I just give myself away? Why can I
not do that? Maybe you need to ask yourself the question,
what is there inside of me that maybe I have

(12:26):
never dealt with that I need to lay down, that
I need to face up to that, I need healing
in my spirit, healing in my soul, healing in my
damaged emotions. Well, it will certainly harmless. A second area
in which I think it harms us is this, and
that is it erodes listen, It erodes our fellowship with

(12:46):
the Lord. You see, I cannot be right with him.
I can't be free with him. And there have been
times in my life when I was not, when I
was dealing with things that I knew I had to
deal with, and somehow just I didn't have that freedom
and live in my relationship to him. It will the
road your relationship to the Lord. You can't hold on
the hurt's friend. You can't hold on the hurts and

(13:07):
hold on the bitterness and hold on the resentment and
be right with God. And so what happens You get
out to pray, and you can talk to him all
you want to, and I can tell you exactly how
it feels. Something doesn't click, You can say the things
you used to say, and doesn't make any difference. You
can try to conjure up some kind of feeling. Won't work,
because you see, you cannot be unforgiving. Now listen, it

(13:32):
has nothing to do with the other person, does They
may be forgiving and loving, or they may be hostile, angry, bitter, resentful.
You know what, has nothing to do with how I respond.
It has to do rather with my relationship to the
Lord and how I'm going to react. And now I'm
not going to respond, how I'm going to receive or
reject or handle those hurts. And so it will to

(13:53):
road your relationship with the Lord. You listen, you cannot
walk in this place and rejoice and sing and praise
the Lord Lord and freedom and liberty and enjoy yourself
and at the same time you have this something deep
down inside you that's just gripped you, and it's just there.
You'd like to but you can't. You want to, but
you can't. I mean, you just give anything. If you

(14:14):
could just be free enough to praise the Lord and
sing and just glorify God and thank him. Can't do it?
Why because there's something on the inside that's harming you.
Harming listen, harming you internally, harming your relationship to the Lord.
But likewise it harms us in our health. And listen, friend,
if you think that you can have hurts in your

(14:36):
life that are undealt with it, and if you don't
deal with it, that ultimately it is not going to
have any effective on you, better think again. It is God. Listen,
There's going to be a fuse blown physically in your
body somewhere somehow. Unless you deal with the hurts that
are there, it's gonna happen. It would be interesting if
you took the average drug bill in the average home

(14:58):
in America and you analyzed what those drugs were more
than likely they have to do with headache, backache, chest ache,
or stomach ache or some abdominable pain. Usually it is
because not always, because a person can have some they
can have a bad disk, or they could have some
kind of problem in the stomach that they didn't. Necessarily,

(15:19):
it was not the result of anger or something. I'm
not saying that all diseases that, but oftentimes, oftentimes these
things are the result of something going on inside of
us that's affecting our body. You see, God wants to
get our attention in one way or the other. Now,
he'd rather us just listen to a message, get on
our face, deal with it and repent of it and
move on. But if we don't, what happens. So here's

(15:41):
what happens. Instead of people listen instead of dealing with
their hurt, now listen carefully. Instead of dealing with their
hurts and having them healed, it is easier to go
to the doctor. Well, doctor, here's what I'm just tired.
I just feel bad all the time. And I hurt.
I hurt here, I hurt here, I hurt over here.

(16:03):
And I imagine most doctors when people walk in, they've
already got a prescription. They're just hurting over this, that
and the other. And so what do they do? They
write yet a prescription to do what to help alleviate
your pain, not heal your problem? And so what happens?
I agree, it's easier to go to the doctor to
get a prescription make you feel a little bit better.
But you know what happens when that prescription runs out,

(16:25):
what do you have to do? You have to go
back and get another one. And there are people who've
been on drugs for years and years and years and
years and years because they will not deal with the
hurt deep down inside that may have happened way back
yond the years and years and years ago in their life.
It's easier, it is much easier to take something to listen.

(16:46):
These are the kind of people who live for the moment.
Just let me feel good for the moment. I'm not
worried about the future. I'm not worried about hurt, not
worried about the ultimate consequence of this. I just want
to feel good right now. And I'm here to tell
you it's devastating. It will listen. It will damage your emotion,
It will erode your relationship to the Lord, it will
affect your relationship to other people, it will affect you
health wise. Ultimately, somewhere along the way, some fuse is

(17:10):
going to get blown if you and I don't do
what he says, and that is he says here, he says,
put away from you let all bitterness and resentment and
hostility and all these things be put away. Now, he says,
all right, suppose there is somebody I need to forgive.
How do I do that? Now, listen, carefully, let's define
what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not justifying the other

(17:31):
person's actions. Forgiveness is not forgetting it. Forgiveness is not
tolerating it, saying well, you know, everybody makes mistakes and
so whatever. It is not denying it. It is not
excusing what that person's done to you. It is not saying, well,
you know, inevitably, time will heal this, know it want

(17:52):
unless you're willing to deal with whatever it is that's
caused that hurt and pain in your life. You see,
if I forgive someone, here's what I've done. I've said,
I deliberately and willfully lay down, put aside this debt
that you owe me as a result of somehow the
way you hurt me and someone to lay it aside,
I put it down, no longer hold it against them anymore.

(18:15):
Now does that mean that everything is absolutely correct between us?
Not necessarily, because you see, listen carefully, you and I
are not responsible for someone's response. To our forgiveness. You
may be forgiving. God may heal you. And the other
person who did something to you may not ever be healed.
They might not be interested in healing. They might not

(18:37):
be listen. Their malice is just as strong today as
it was yesterday, and so therefore they may never change.
But you know what, you and I are responsible for changing.
No matter what the other person does. We are not
responsible for another person's actions. They are responsible for their
own responses. They give an account to God for their
own responses. And you say, well, suppose it's somebody that

(18:59):
hurt me long time ago and they live in a
distant state, or maybe what they did to you you
cannot even begin to share with anyone else under any condition.
Or it may suppose they died. Then what and I
think of the tragedy is now here's a real tragedy.
I think of the tragedy is the things that happen
between children and their parents, and then the parent, for example,

(19:20):
the father and mother dies, and this bitterness and resentment, hostility.
They say, now, what do I do Have I got
to live with this the rest of my life? Do
I have to live with this stuff in me the
rest of my life. Now I can't settle it. I
didn't I couldn't at the time, and now they're gone.
Now what do I do. Here's what you do, and
this will work. You get by yourself. You set up

(19:43):
two chairs, you sit in one of them, and you
put the other person out the other chair. That person
may live on your block, but they won't talk to
you and they won't deal with it. That's okay, or
they may be dead. You put them in another chair
and you sit in this chair. And then here's what
you do. Carefully, you express to the other person all

(20:03):
the feelings that you have, the way that you believe
they hurt you, and all the feelings that you have
let them out. And then you say to the other person,
because the Lord Jesus Christ through is my personal savior,
went to the cross and paid my sin dead in full,
and because he has continually forgiven me over the years,

(20:25):
I choose to forgive you for what you have done
for me. And then you pray this prayer. Father, I
want to thank you for the giving me the power
and the privilege to lay down this hurt that has
been there for years and years. I want to thank
you for enabling me to be able to forgive my father,
my mother, my sister, my brother, my son, my daughter,

(20:46):
my friend. Thank you for making it possible for me
to forgive them and then acceptlessen accept the forgiveness that
you have given to the other person as done, and
my friend, from that moment on, the healing process will
take place in your life, begin to take place in
your life, and what could have or was harming you

(21:07):
and hurting you far more deeply than you realize, the
healing process will begin to take place, and God will
set you free of the hurts that would ultimately have
harmed you and ultimately have destroyed you. Now you know,
only you know who in your life, what in your life,
what experience in your life has caused you great hurt.

(21:30):
Only you know how deep and how marred and marked
you may feel. And I understand that there are some
situations in circumstances that are so devastating and so evil
and so wicked and so vile and so bad and
so injurious, and so hurtful and painful and difficult to handle.
I understand that nobody probably understands how you feel the

(21:50):
way you feel, and so you can't compare yourself with
someone else. You just have to ask yourself the question,
do I want the hurts to harm me physically and
emotionally and my relationship to God and my relationship to others,
or do I want to be healed. That's a decision
you have to make. And I'm simply saying this, God
the Father, if you will trust his son, the Lord,

(22:11):
Jesus Christ is your personal savior. The Holy Spirit will
come into your heart, and yes, what he'll do. He
will enable you to be forgiving. He will strengthen you
and help you. He will place that you love in
your heart that you'll be able to look at the
other person and think about them differently. You'll see them,
oftentimes in a different perspective. You'll see them as someone

(22:31):
who's been injured in their life, and therefore they just
responded to you all that in a time in their life,
they reacted in the wrong way on a moment of weakness.
They did something to you that harms you deeply. Your
whole attitude will change. Here's what will happen when you
trust the Lord. As you save you, he enables you
to be able to be forgiving because for the first
time in your life, you understand what it means to

(22:51):
be forgiven yourself, and so I want to encourage you
that if you've never trusted Jesus Christ as your savior,
my friends, you may think that you're getting along with life,
but you see the truth is you're hurting on a deep,
invisible level than you realize. Ultimately it's going to take
and have its effect upon your life. If you are
a believer and you know that you're saved, and yet

(23:12):
you say, well, you know, I thought i'd forgotten those things.
I thought just forgetting that and shoving it aside that
somehow would go away. No, it doesn't, And I want
to encourage you. It may be that you say, well,
I don't know about that, sitting down with somebody talking
to them. Try it. If you don't want to do that,
here's what you do. You write them a letter. You
just write it out in longhand and however you want to,

(23:33):
just write it out all the things that you feel,
and then you express expressing that letter, write at your
prayer in that letter. And then here's what you do.
You burn it up. And with that burn goes your anger, resentment, hostility,
of bitterness and all the hurts that you nurtured all
those years of your life. My friend, the Father wants
you free. Here's what he says. He says, if you

(23:55):
know the truth, the truth will set you free. And
here's the truth that sets you free. When you and
I are willing to be forgiving, even as if Father
has forgive, has forgiven us, we will be free of
the hurt. We will be free of the harm that
those hurts could cause to us, if we will trust
Him for it.