Growintheword's Blog

Synopsis of Bible Study 12/02/09
Delivered by Bishop Walker III
It is important for us to understand how serious this topic is, because many of us are still shackled by things that have happened to us. A lot of people are chained to their past because of emotional wounds, broken relationships, and addictions. Lots of things make us frustrated because we cannot move beyond what has happened to us. It is kind of like one of those things in church that people don’t want to talk about, because we have learned how to live with pain. So as a result of having learned how to live with our pain, we have desensitized ourselves to the reality of what we are dealing with and we go through life with denial and sugar coating our issues. We are talking to people today that have some real issues. How do we move past it? How do we fulfill our God given assignment and get past the pain that is attempting to paralyze us and that is preventing us from fulfilling our assignment? Well we want you to understand that there is an anointing available to you as a child of God and that anointing through Jesus Christ has come to set you free. In Luke 4:18 the bible declares “18The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, ”.
Let’s talk about this. When you see this first you are seeing the progression of pain. When you look at it again, Jesus says that he has been anointed for something. He says he has been anointed to bring the gospel to the poor. Let’s look at poor as a condition instead of a mind set. So he is saying we have been anointed to bring good news to people in a bad situation. Jesus said he has been anointed to bring good news to a people whose head is not right and he was sent us to bring healing to people whose hearts have been broken. If our head gets right, then our heart gets right. If our head gets right and our heart gets right, guess what happens next? Then we preach deliverance to those who are held captive. The reason we are in bondage and the reason we can’t move on is because our head is messed up, our heart is broken, we were paralyzed and couldn’t move.
Jesus said he came to give us good news. The good news is that the bad news was wrong. Jesus came to preach unto us the good news no matter what our state of mine is. We came to tell you that God has something better for you. We came to tell you that even though somebody broke your heart and no matter who left you, we have come to heal you. As a matter of fact, in John 14:1 when Jesus got ready to leave, he had to remind his disciples not let their hearts be trouble. John 14:1:1Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. Jesus deals with matters of the heart. Jesus came to bring deliverance to people who are held captive, but not only that; he came to bring sight to the blind. Jesus did heal people physically. He did restore blinded eyes. There are people who’s prospective is tainted by carnal cataracts. There are people who do not have a clear view of the reality out of their pain. It is like a form of blindness, because they don’t see life the way God wants them to see it. These people look at somebody who reminds them of someone who hurt them and all of a sudden they treat that person like they are the person who hurt them. The people that are being looked at wrong wonder why this person that has been hurt looks at them the way they do. It is all because they are being viewed through the lines of another person’s pain. You are literally blind, but the reality is Jesus says he came to open up our eyes. Jesus says he came to help us see past who hurt us. Jesus says he came to let us know how to take people for who they are and not make them pay for who hurt you received 15yrs ago. Not only that, the scripture says Jesus also came to set at liberty those who were bruised. Look at all the folk around you. There are folk reading this today who are still bruised. Do you know what a bruise is? It is that thing that hurts and hasn’t healed yet. It is there, but it is painful. Ex-You know when you are bruised, you are going through life and then you see somebody that hurt you, you are reminded that the bruise is still there. You talk about them and your voice goes up 4 octaves. This is an indication of being bruised. You see someone in the Mall that hurt you and you are reminded that you are bruised. Like a bruise, the injury is still affecting you. It is still painful. You don’t want to talk about that area because that area is still tender. What is it that is in your life that is still tender? We say that we are delivered, set free, and that God’s been good to us, but if we bring up certain things to us, that area is still tender. Jesus says I cam e to heal you from that. Jesus says he doesn’t want us going through life having those tender spots. He is trying to help us get to a place of complete healing and wholeness.
All of us in this place have pain that is un-dealt with. King David says in Psalm 109:22: 22For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me.- In this scripture, King David declares that he is poor and needy. How can a king say that he is poor and needy? It is because poverty is not a condition. It is a mindset. The scripture says and his heart was wounded within him. In other words the scripture is saying he is in the wrong place in his head. He is Poor! Because his head ain’t right, now his heart ain’t right! Now this makes him needy! When we are needy, we start reaching out to people for stuff to try and make it right, so consequently, everywhere we go, we are end up in a dysfunctional relationship. If David had never been in this state of neediness, maybe he would never have went over to be with Bathsheba. This kind of stuff happens because of this type of neediness and this kind of un-dealt with pain. When you see the manifestation of behavior, you cannot make judgment calls based on the behavior without identifying the source of the pain. People are hurting these days. People, who hurt, turn around and hurt other people. No matter whom you are, whether you are a white collar worker, blue collar worker, construction worker, mother, father, son, or daughter, everybody reading this has some deep wounds or deep pain. The question that has to be recognized is this, is there any hope? Well we come to tell you that there is. There is hope for you. Listen carefully. We have to begin to examine, what caused our pain.
I. What caused our pain and what gives rise to our wounds?
1. Was it an emotional wound inflicted by your parents? Some people reading this right now haven’t gotten over some things that their parents did to them. It could be something their parents did not do, or a father that was not there. Maybe it was a mother that wasn’t there. Maybe it was something said that you never got over. . Mark 9:22 says 22And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him: but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us.- The scripture shows a father owning up to his responsibilities. He says if you can do anything Jesus, have mercy on us, because he felt he had failed his son. He acknowledges that what is wrong with his son may also be wrong with him.
2. Was it some physical, mental, or verbal abuse? Proverbs 18:21says 21Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. What did somebody say to you that hurt you that bad? You would be surprised how you can murder someone with your tongue or with the things you say. The physical and mental and verbal abuse that people carry around is so heavy some time. Some of you right now have low self esteem which was a result of what somebody said to you when you were a little child and you haven’t out lived it yet.
3. Sexual abuse-This is the big shhhhh in church. Nobody wants to talk about this in church. You would be surprised how many females and males reading this today have had some inappropriate touching by people who were not supposed to touch them. Even in 2 Samuel 13 you have the rape of Tamar by her own brother. (We encourage you to read it sometime). This was nothing new. All throughout the bible, you have people that had been sexually abused and all kind of different things manifested out of the pain of the sexual abuse.
4. How can something like this happen? What do you do with the general meanness of some people? You know how some people can just be mean and how that can affect you. It’s like when you go on the job and you ask why come some people have to be so mean to us. Sometimes this can create pain in your life.
5. Broken relationships- What about that person that said I am going to be with you and they assure you that it is going to last forever, then all of a sudden the Little House on the Prairie ends up like Nightmare on Elm Street. What do you do with that broken relationship or that big major disappointment? What do you do when things disappoint you and begin to let you down? What about that nasty divorce or that major moral failure you had. What do you do with those things? This is all examples of pain.
II. What are the affects of these wounds
1. What does it do? It creates side effects. Some of the side effects can be:
a. Hurt people, hurt people-Wounded people, or victims that don’t’ get help, become When you see people acting out, I guarantee you can trace it back to some pain that they didn’t deal with form the past. Anger, bitterness, and violence that people have are symptoms. People are just not born that way. These things over time just happen to them. Ex- A person might say “Somebody played me, so I guess I will be a player. “
b. Shame, guilt, and unworthiness and this whole idea of self condemnation and then having no confidence at all.-These are people that go through life lonely and withdrawn. They don’t have many friends.
c. People that are unable to respond to people properly. – These type of people hate to be in healthy relationships because they don’t know how to be in a healthy relationship.
d. Eating disorders and people that are slow to love. These are people that have big guards around them or barriers even. When someone of the opposite sex speaks to them, they don’t want to engage, because they are so guarded. They feel like everybody that has been in their life has hurt them so they don’t allow people to get close to them and they don’t want anyone to talk to them. They build unhealthy boundaries around them. As a result they don’t trust other people and they have misconceptions about God, because now their psychology is messed up, and their sociology is messed up, and their theology is messed up. They wonder why God let this happen to them. This is the trick of the enemy. He wants to turn you against God. They say if God loved them then this pain would never have happened to them. This then makes them become mythical about life and they begin to feel that they have no hope. This makes them go through life in depression and despair. This can cause a spiral that leads to addictions like alcohol and drugs and before long, they have a gun to their head and it is over. This is the cycle that is created.
2. The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus says he came that we might have life more abundantly. John 10:10: 10The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. – This is life. We are not talking about just a free ticket to heaven. We are talking about the God life that you can have on the earth. We are supposed to live life. Life is not supposed to live us. We are supposed to have life , peace and love. We are not supposed to go through life saying that we hate to give up! We are supposed to wake up saying this is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it. We are not so much responsible for what the day brings, but we are supposed to be rejoicing in whatever it brings. We have to thank God that our name is not in the obituary column, and thank him that we have breath to breathe, that we have clothes on our backs, and that we have the stuff money can’t buy. Every day we wake up we ought to thank God for life!
III. How then does the healing come
10 principles to get healing
1. Recognize that Jesus really wants and desires to heal us. Jesus really wants us to be healed. Mark 2:17says 17When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.- This scripture declares that those who are whole, don’t need a physician, but the people who are sick do. He says he came not to call the righteous. He came to call the sinners to repentance. In other words, Jesus says he came for the people that have something wrong with them. Jesus says his ministry is for those who are sick! It is for those who can bring their issues and their pain to the great physician and say “here I am”. One of the worst things you could ever do is go to your physician with something wrong and not honest with your physician. You have something hurting you but you tell him that you don’t feel any pain or it’s really not that bad. It is killing you and here is the person that you need to tell it to, but you say no it’s fine and all the time you are coughing up blood. You are in position to get help but you are so stubborn to tell the physician about it.
a. Jesus said he came for whatever is ever wrong with you. Hebrews 4:14-16: 14 So then, since we have a great High Priest who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe. 15 This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin. 16 So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.-Jesus knows what you are going through because he felt pain. He was through all points tempted, but he resisted it. He went through what we went through what we went through without acting a fool. He showed us how to go through it and manage our pain. He was betrayed, sold out, denied, and he even saw people that he blessed ask for him to be crucified.
b. Jesus taught us how to deal with it. He did not sin. He helped us manage the pain. Why do we go everywhere else but to the throne with our pain? There comes a time where we have to say what we need is at the throne. What we need is not in our self, it is at the throne.
2. Must come out of denial and openly confess the pain. Stop denying it. It hurts, so acknowledge it. Psalm 62:5-8 says 5 Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him.6 He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will not be shaken.7 My victory and honor come from God alone. He is my refuge, a rock where no enemy can reach me.8 O my people, trust in him at all times. Pour out your heart to him, for God is our refuge. Interlude -He is our salvation. God doesn’t deliver from nothing. He delivers from something. One scripture we ought to remember is Psalm 118:5-6 which says 5 In my distress I prayed to the Lord, and the Lord answered me and set me free.6 The Lord is for me, so I will have no fear. What can mere people do to me? – Jesus took us out of the confined space and gave us room. When we are hurting everything tries to close in on us. Ex-Imagine if we were playing basket ball in a gym and Michael Jordon comes in and asks if he can join in. Everyone would quickly say yes he could join in and guess who you want on your side? If we were playing golf and Tiger Woods comes out and he asks if he can play with us, we would immediately say yes and guess who we would want on his side? If we have that much confidence in Jordan and Tiger then imagine how we ought to feel about having God on our side. Why are you walking around afraid what people are going to do to you and what is going to happen to you? If God be for you, he is more than the whole world against you! We got somebody with us! You might not know it until you mess with us, but we got somebody on our side. When stuff jumps off, god will in front of us to protect us.
3. Must have the courage to face the pain and the ugliness of the wound. How bad is it? This is when you have been hurt and you don’t want to deal with it. You don’t want to talk about it. You tell people you are going to be alright. It is your inability to deal with the pain. You will have to turn to it and face. You can’t fix it if you don’t face it! When Job lost everything he had, Job looked around and accessed everything Job 1:20 says 20Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, – Job looked out and rent his mantle. He became angry. He acknowledged that he didn’t like it because it was painful, but he moved to a point where he began to worship God. You have to be able to look at this and transcend your natural human emotion and come to a place in the spirit where you can give God the glory even through the stuff that didn’t feel good to you. If it didn’t kill you, it made you stronger. Look at the stuff you hate to look at .Though you might be still salty and realize that you would not be in church probably if it wasn’t for it.
4. Must deal with the root and not just the symptom. You have to get to core issue. When you start dealing with symptoms, you don’t address the whole problem. Symptoms are indicators that there is something wrong. You don’t treat the symptoms and just stop. You have to go and treat what caused the symptoms. When God dealt with Israel’s enemies, the Amorites, in Amos 2:9 the Lord declares he destroyed the Amorites. God says he destroyed the Amorites right before them and their height was the height of cedar trees. He says they were as strong as oak trees, but he says look at how he destroyed them. Amos 2:9: 9Yet destroyed I the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath. God said he took out their fruit first, above, but he didn’t just stop there. He took out the root from beneath. He says he went to the core issue. He went to the roots. He went to what caused this tainted fruit to come forth. Many times we see people acting out in a variety of ways. They act violently, promiscuously, and various kinds of dysfunctional relationships. Ex- Bishop Walker says he is not as quick to pass judgment. He states he recognizes that it is his responsibility to pray for them in hopes they get to a place to go back the root of their problem, because the ministry of Jesus Christ dealt with the root. Every miracle that Jesus performed involving another person, he always went for the root. EX- There was a woman who had an issue of blood. Ex For 12 yrs, she has a flow of blood that is uncontrollable. There are a variety of things going on with her like psychological and physiological state. Imagine someone who is anemic. Imagine how it would affect their mind. She has a physiological disorder, she goes to physicians that are unable to help her, so now she is frustrated because the folk that should be able to help her, doesn’t have any answers. Now she is a social outcast, because according to Leviticus code, because she is bleeding, she is unclean so now she has to be in isolation, but she heard that Jesus was coming by. Now faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God so when she heard that Jesus was coming by, she broke protocol. She said I need a miracle so bad, I don’t care what the law says. She was determined that she was going to get to Jesus. She presses her way to Jesus thought the crowd and Jesus says somebody touched me. The disciples say there are a lot of folk touching him, but Jesus says that he noticed that virtue has come out of him. He says to the woman, I feel your desperation and sincerity. The woman has come to Jesus, because she is frustrated. She is in pain. She is in physical and emotional pain. She is tired of this happening to her. She wants to be healed. She touches the hem of his germant and the bible says immediately, her issue dries up. Jesus turns to her and says woman, thou faith has made you whole. She came for healing, but Jesus was not going to just let her leave with a dried up issue. If she left only with a dried up issue, she would have left bitter and still not speaking to people that looked at her and said get away! She had all this anger and bitterness and rejection and all this pain, so Jesus says you don’t just need a healing, he says he needs to make her whole. Our problem is people come to church and act out, but we need to recognize that people need wholeness. Ex- Bishop says he is a theologically trained pastor. He literally spent 7 yrs after undergrad studying the bible in formal education. In seminary they don’t teach you a lot of practical stuff. It is a lot of heady stuff, theory. There is an assumption made that because people Pastor they can counsel. There are probably less than 35% of churches that have trained clergy. A lot of churches just have Pastors that were called and they start preaching without any formal education. There is nothing wrong with going to talk to your pastor, but Pastors are confined to the word. All pastors can give you in the word. Infact Lawyers say that Pastors are safe by giving the congregation the word, because you Pastor can’t say to a woman that she ought to leave her husband, because he is going to come and sue your Pastor. All the Pastor can tell you is what the bible says. The issue is, we put Pastors and ministers in these positions who have not been formally trained in clinical counseling so as a result, we want people to treat our symptoms. We just want a Pastor to give us a word or lay hands on us and if we fall out, we still get up with a root issue. This is why you see the same people joining church every Sunday (Ex-you were just down her last week. You already have a membership). This is because we want the easy way out. We just want a quick scripture, some oil on our head, and we fall out and think our trouble will go away when in fact we should be saying as spiritual men and women, it is our responsibility to give you the word and the word is going to help you get a better perspective on life. God has some good Christian counselors that can help us get to the root of why we are acting the way we are acting. There are some core issues that we need to discuss with somebody who is a professional and can deal with it. It is the Pastors’ responsibility to give us the word of God. It is the word of God that is going to bring healing. You got to get to the root. If you don’t get to the root, then you are going to be in a continuous cycle. Ex-Bishop says he goes to counseling. He Pastors a church and feels he should. He assures that he is not crazy. You have to get to the root of what’s wrong with you.
5. Forgive and let go. How many of us right now have people that we have not forgiven. Colossians 3:12-14 says 12Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; 13Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. 14And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness. – As Christ forgave you, you must forgive them. – Charity means love and perfectness means maturity. You don’t forgive for people for them. You forgive for you. Ex-You try to hold a grudge and the person you mad at done went on with their life. The person you mad at is with somebody else in the mall and moved on and you still holding on to your issue with them. Why you are we still bitter talking about them and they not even thinking about us. Ex- Bishop Walker explains that he has had people walk up to him and say,” I forgive you” and he says, well ok. He explains that he doesn’t even know what he did that he need to be forgiven for. Evidently it was something they felt went on that he didn’t hang on to.
6. Love your enemies. Love the hell right out of your enemies. If they have hell in them, you have to love it out of them. Matthew 5:44 says 44But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; – Make a list of all those folks that you need to love that has done stuff to you and pray for them. That will increase your prayer life right there! Ex- Bishop says he loves to love his haters. He says he loves to walk into a social setting and find that there are less than 1% of people there who hate on him. Bishop says it is his job to empower them with the love of Christ, and not empower their hatred towards him by being bitter to them. As a result he says he goes out of his way to be nice to them. If he asks how he is doing, he will reply fine. We can’t empower people because they have an issue with us. He is going to love them anyway. Some of you now is jumping locations simply because there is somebody there that you don’t like or who don’t like you
7. We must find a safe environment to take off the mask. James 5:16 says 16Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.- This scripture says confess you faults not your sins one to another. Who can you be real with? Do you have somebody that you can allow to mentor to you? You got to have somewhere you can take off the mask. Bishop says he has some guys that he can go to and take off his Bishop hat and talk to real with.
8. We must find comfort in God’s word. God’s word is so powerful; we have to know that he sent his word to heal us. Psalm 119:50 says 50This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me.-The word resurrected something in us. It brought us back to life. Psalm 119:92-93 says 92Unless thy law had been my delights, I should then have perished in mine affliction. 93I will never forget thy precepts: for with them thou hast quickened me.-if it wasn’t for Bible Study or Sunday Service we believe we would be gone. We will never forget what he Lord told us, because that word keeps quickening us over and over again. The moment we find our self slipping, that word keeps coming back in our spirit. Time will get rough and we start running down and that word just pops back up and revives us.
9. You must repent in areas where your sin has caused the damage. A lot of the pain we have we have to take responsibility for. Yes people hurt us, but there was stuff we did to contribute to our pain. A lot of our pain is because we are angry that we let this happen to us! Ex- Nobody told you to marry that person; you did it on your own.
10. You got to engage in spiritual warfare. What hurts us is a real devil. Ephesians 6:10 says 10Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.-What came at you was not a human being. What hurt you was a real devil that got into a very pain filled individual who refused to deal with their pain. The person that hurt you was a willing vessel. The devil uses these types of people. These are people who will not deal with their pain or people who are not whole, people that are looking to be filled with something. The devil says he will come in and cause you to do things to hurt other people, because you won’t deal with your own pain.
Hebrews 12:1-2 says 1Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, 2Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.-God has a lot for us to do. And our pain is trying to prevent it. We must look to Jesus Christ says verse two. The joy was the assignment. , Luke 4:8 says 8And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. – Jesus came to set us free by purchasing us back from the devil. What did it cost him? It was pain. He was looking out at people that he helped denying him and he saw people betray him. It cost him 39 lashes on his back and being put on the cross, and offered vinegar when he asked for water. He went through it though he could have come down. His assignment was so great to save us that he went through the assignment. The greatness of his assignment minimized his pain. The reason your pain is so great, it is because you don’t know how great your assignment is. Your pain is causing you to want to give up. The moment you see how awesome and great this thing is that God wants to do in your life, then your pain will be minimized. Eyes have not seen nor ears heard nor has it entered into the hearts of men, the things that God has in store for you. He says he knows the plans he thinks towards us. These are thoughts of good and not evil to give you an expected end. God has all of this great stuff and you think I am going to let the pain cause me to forfeit it? I got to get over this and I have to go after what God has for my life.