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God Loves You MEANS You Are God’s Favorite! God’s smile is upon you. You light up his faceas much as anyone has ever lit up a lover’s face. Most of us imagine that in God’s eyes we are just one of millions.We know most people don’t think we are important and so we assumeGod thinks of us in a similar way. But then, again, God is not like‘most people.’ We feel that God has favorites and we think we’re a fairway down the list, but we are about to see this is one way where feelingsdo not correspond to reality. To God, you are special.   Four reasons why God favors no one over you 1.  God’s Son shed his last drop of blood for you.   God loves you with his whole heart. He loves you with every speck of his enormous love. That means no matter how much he loves others, he couldn’t possibly love anyone else more than he loves you. A woman wrote about the above paragraph: I had wanted to say, “God loves me with his whole heart? Come off it! It’s a wonder he loves me at all! Grantley, you exaggerate too much!” But the Lord silenced me with John 17:23 I in them  and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that  you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.  (Emphasis mine.) When praying for all his followers, including those who would believe later (verse 20) Jesus declared that God loves them (me!) just as passionately as God the Father loves his perfect, eternal Son! I can’t get round it; I can’t burrow under it or climb over it. So the only thing I can do is go through it, absorbing it as I go. God has put it in black and white and sealed it with the blood of his only Son that Christ is in me – and God loves me as much as he loves Christ. And no way can God’s love for Christ be half-hearted. I drifted to sleep last night snuggling into that verse. Scripture makes no promise that you will always  feel  loved, nor that circumstances will always make it  obvious  that you are loved. God simply promises that you  are  loved. No suffering or tragedy will ever separate you from God’s love (Romans 8:35-39). A snap-shot in time proves nothing. Only eternity’s movies can adequately portray the infinitude of God’s love for you. The more you love someone the more important that person is to you. So the fact that God loves you with his whole heart means you are more important to God than you could ever imagine. 2.  Before God forgave us we were all spiritually dead.   Scripture affirms that every person on this planet was dead in their sin. You can’t get any deader than dead. God couldn’t say, I prefer her because she’s a little less dead than him. But through Christ we can be forgiven. When God looks at a forgiven person, he can’t find one sin. When you are forgiven, God can’t find a person on the entire planet, more forgiven than you. So without Christ we were all equally dead in our sin and in Christ we are all equally forgiven. 3.  God is all-powerful. That means he doesn’t need some people more than others. If God could only use young people, or strong people, or rich people, or famous people, or educated people, then God must be so weak that he needs human strength; so poor that he needs us to give him a few dollars; so foolish that he needs human education. 4.  The Lord loves using small and seemingly unimportant things.   1 Corinthians 1:26 says, ‘Look at what you were before God called you. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many of you had great influence. Not many of you came from important families. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and he chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose what this world thinks is unimportant and what this world looks down on and thinks is nothing in order to bring to nothing what the world thinks is important. God did this,’ the Bible continues, ‘so that no one could boast in his presence.’ In the Bible, the book of Jonah seems small and insignificant. It’s only 2-3 pages long. I often feel like that: small and insignificant. I have often felt so useless that I would have committed suicide if I wasn’t worried about having to face God afterwards. But the Bible would be very much poorer without this tiny book. And the Kingdom of God would be much poorer without you. In this tiny book we see God using a storm, a whale, a heartless, rebellious, moody man, a plant, and a grub. Are you less gifted than a grub? Then God can do mighty things through you. If God could use a storm and a plant and a grub, God is smart enough to use you. God is so powerful he can use anything to do his work. No Christian is too old, too poor, too uneducated, too stupid, too sick to be gloriously used of God. We can’t explore this in depth here. For just one aspect of this, see  Never too old for God. Do you believe there is nothing God cannot do? Do you believe God could bring a dead person back to life? Do you believe God could bring a dead person back to life through your prayers? Those words ‘through your prayers’ don’t suddenly make God weak. Do you believe God can save thousands of souls? Then you must also believe God can save thousands of souls through you. Either God can do the impossible through you, or he isn’t God. Keep telling yourself, ‘ There is nothing God cannot do through me .’ Heaven stands on tip toe waiting to see the astounding things you will achieve for the glory of God. No one is more important to God than you are: Bible proofs In the book of Galatians 2:6-9, Paul speaks of Peter, James and John. If anyone could claim to have a special place in God’s heart it was these men. When Jesus walked this planet they seemed his closest friends. Later they were called the pillars of the church. Without pillars the whole building collapses. Yet Paul wrote of these men, ‘whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no one.’ Paul was speaking about Peter, the man honored by millions as the first pope. Even his shadow healed people. Paul was speaking about the leaders of the church, the greatest saints, when divinely inspired to write, ‘whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no one.’ Tell yourself,  ‘The Bible says I am as important to God as Peter, James and John.’ One day the disciples told Jesus that his mother wanted to speak with him. Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother? Anyone who does God’s will is my mother’ (Luke 8:20-21). So anyone who obeys God has as much right to speak with Jesus, as Mary has. Anyone who does God’s will has the same place in Jesus’ heart as his own mother. Another time when Jesus was preaching, a woman shouted, ‘Blessed is the woman who gave you birth.’ Yet instead of agreeing with her, Jesus said Blessed rather is the person who obeys God (Luke 11:27-28). Jesus was born only once. So only one woman could have the privilege of giving birth to the Messiah. That was Mary’s unique blessing. But spiritually, we are all equally blessed. In Ephesians 1:3 the Bible says each of us has been lavished with every spiritual blessing. How could it be otherwise? If Christ died (ie gave his all) for  sinners , what would he possibly withhold from them now that they are cleansed and made God’s precious children? As Scripture points out, since you are so dear to God that he gave his only Son for you – the most costly gift in the universe – there can be nothing he won’t give you (Romans 8:32, see also 1 Corinthians 3:21-22). Tell yourself,  ‘I am as spiritually blessed as anyone .’ You have a special place in God’s heart From the age of four, I loved helping my grandpa lay cement paths. Almost anyone could do a better job than a little child, but that was irrelevant. I was irreplaceable. I had a special place in grandpa’s heart. And you have a special place in God’s heart. To him you are irreplaceable. The Almighty needs the help of no one. Yet the Father’s joy could never be complete without your contribution. My grandpa wanted me to share in his work. Not because he needed me, but because I was special to him. And God wants you to share in his work. Think about that for a minute – God’s work is the most important work in the universe. God has something of divine importance; something of eternal significance that he wants you to help him with. Wow! You  are  important! To God, you are special. I used to think yeah, yeah God loves me, but he loves everyone. To him I’m just one of millions of Christians. God has his favorites and I’m not one of them. I thought I was being humble thinking this way. But what I was really doing was accusing God of imperfect love. In fact, I was calling God a liar. God says he loves you. So to believe that you are unimportant to God is to believe that God is a liar. There is nothing humble about calling the holy Lord a liar! It’s sin. God is the most important person in the universe. So if you are important to him, you are important! There is nothing humble about telling the all-wise God that he’s wrong. This is serious. How dare I go up to the glorious Lord who shed his life’s blood for me and tell him, ‘I’m not special to you.’ Dare I go to the cross where I deserved to hang, look into my Savior’s bleeding face, and accuse him of loving others more? He died for me! What more dare I demand he do before I accept the fact that I’m special to him! I need to feel as bad about that sin as if I were guilty of murder. It’s said that a pirate killed a man. He was so horrified by what he had done that he couldn’t sleep properly for weeks. But he kept killing. He got to the point where he could kill a man, use the corpse as a pillow and sleep soundly all night. We are like that. We have committed the sin of wrong thinking so often that our consciences have become as hard as concrete. For other sins our consciences have might still be soft but to the sin of doubt and small thinking, we are hardened. Lepers lose fingers, toes, sometimes noses. It was always thought the disease did this. But a brilliant medical missionary began to question this. Dr Paul Brand noticed that lepers would go to bed whole and wake up without a finger. No one could ever find a trace of the missing finger. He eventually discovered that the fingers were being chewed off and carried away by rats! However could this happen? It’s because lepers lose feeling. And that’s our problem. We have lost feeling in part of our conscience. And then the devil – that fat rat – begins to chew us and instead of shooing him away, we don’t even realize what he’s doing. We desperately need God to make our consciences sensitive. The crunch We now come to the most crucial part of this message. This message could give you a boost for a few days, then fade and ultimately achieve nothing. Or it could be the turning point in your life, making you the powerful force in the kingdom of God that you were created to be. It’s frightening to consider how much this world misses out when any Christian thinks he or she is not special to God. There’s no Christian who cannot be used of God to win thousands of souls, should the Lord so chose. There’s no Christian who can’t be used to change the course of human history. But while we hold on to the sin of small thinking, it won’t happen. This is serious – more serious than any of us can imagine. To rid ourselves of this sin will probably cost us enormously, but for us to be freed from sin cost Christ far more. For us to give up the sin of small thinking is as hard as it is for an alcoholic to permanently give up drink. We need a gigantic miracle in our personal lives. It begins by admitting that we are addicted to the serious sin of not seeing ourselves and our possibilities as God sees them. We must hate this sin. We must admit that we are such a slave to this sin that the only way we can be freed is by a divine miracle. I suggest the following prayer. Pray any part of it that you feel you can agree with. Lord in your mercy begin to open my mind and my conscience to the seriousness of my sin. I have sinned in thinking you have favorites. I have sinned by thinking I’m not important to you. I have sinned by thinking you don’t want to use me to do amazing things of eternal significance for your glory. My addiction to small thinking has hurt you and done enormous damage. Through Jesus’ shed blood, I beg your forgiveness. I ask for total deliverance from my addiction. I now declare that you want to do mighty things through me. I refuse to tolerate any lesser thought. And I look to you for divine strength to forever defeat such sinful thinking. Lord, don’t let me ever again commit this sin without feeling your strong displeasure. No matter what it costs me, be glorified in my life. Maintaining the victory For very many years I have been constantly tempted to feel useless. I wrote a book giving all the reasons why every one of us can achieve great things for God and I had to keep reading that book every day, week after week, year after year. Whenever I stopped reading it for a few days I would slip back into depression again. So I make no apologies for expecting that you will need to hold on to the truths in this message and read it over and over for maximum benefit. They are important truths that the devil tries with all his power to make us forget. We must hold on to them as if our very life depended upon it. In fact, it can be more important than life itself. Other people’s eternal destinies could depend upon whether we grasp these truths and live them. The Lord wants to make you a powerful force in the kingdom of God. Your need, however, is too chronic for any self-help technique to deliver you from your addiction. You must daily ask the Lord to re-sensitize your conscience. The Lord’s prayer – ‘give us this day our daily bread . . . lead us not into temptation’ - proves our need to daily bring to God our need for divine help in conquering temptation. Without this we will be drawn into a false and dangerous delusion that our dependence upon God is less than absolute. ‘Let anyone who thinks he stands,’ warns Scripture, ‘take heed lest he fall’ (1 Corinthians 10:12). However, your divine Helper, the Holy Spirit, dwells inside you, wherever you go, 24 hours a day. It’s tragically easy to slip back into old habits and hardly notice it. Daily look to him to set off the alarm bells whenever you begin to slip back. You then have divine protection. Negative thoughts will still come but, once exposed, you can repel them with the same disgust as you would a blood-sucking leech. These filthy invaders from the sewers of hell are not part of you. We can’t think of nothing, nor can we think of two things at once, so the best way to eject wrong thoughts is to seize the opposite thought, ideally, a statement you know to be true because it’s in the Word of God. Cling to it like a non-swimmer holding a life rope in swirling waters. Thrash the devil by using every approach of an invader as a cue to throw a praise party in your mind, exalting in the fact that the truth (reality) is the exact opposite of the lie trying to invade you. This shines a floodlight on low life that can survive only in darkness. Resist the devil and he will flee (James 4:7). He’ll try to sneak back later, but as you daily look to the Lord you will live in victory. Appendix: why the sin of unbelief is so addictive This section details some of the reasons why I became addicted to wrong thinking. The cause of your own addiction will not necessarily be the same, but it is still helpful to be alerted to the dangers. I used to sometimes put myself down in the hope that whoever I was speaking to would take pity on me and give me an ego boost. I was oblivious to how pathetic such behavior is until one day I met someone who refused to play my game. Instead of boosting me, all she would do was rebuke me and accuse me of sin for being negative about myself. I was most annoyed until I began to see myself more accurately. By making myself dependent upon ego boosts from other people I had made myself frighteningly vulnerable. I was expecting others to do something that was my responsibility. Moreover, my actions proved that human praise meant more to me than the divine approval I already had. And every time I got the flattery I was seeking, I was being rewarded for my put downs, thus increasing my addiction. If the success of achieving a goal is sweet, to be significantly more successful than I had dared dream is exceedingly delicious. The simplest way of ensuring a repeat of this highly addictive thrill is to convince myself I will do poorly. The exhilaration I get when I exceed my low expectations is rich reward for having a low view of my God-given potential. I was grieving God, defaming his name and committing the sin of unbelief – deliberately lowering my faith – in the (sometimes unconscious) hope of experiencing a high. And although I knew faith pleases God, I also knew that taking a faith step is scary. It’s easier to take the lazy, cowardly way out. Making wise-cracks at my own expense was another trap. Every time someone laughed, I got my reward, but every such wise-crack chiseled negative attitudes a little deeper into my mind. I was baiting my own trap. Addictions have their momentary pleasures. In the end, however, they are a curse keeping us from the full and exciting and God-glorifying life we were created for. As we daily look to Jesus, however, the curse will be broken.

Courage   Paralysis   Edison invented the light bulb not by trial and triumph, but by trial and error (over 1600 errors, I’m told). During his life, he didn’t stop at mere failures. He made some spectacular blunders – like when he was meant to be selling newspapers and ended up setting a train on fire. (I must look into this: Edison and I might be related.)   Mistakes are rarely the black ogre they seem. Failure can be a valuable asset, cleansing us of ugly pride; correcting and directing us; barricading enticing avenues that meander away from heaven’s best, or purging us of reckless independence and pushing us deeper into the heart of God.   Out of control, however, the fire that warms can destroy. When failure piles on top of failure, the hideous shadow of a psychological barrier slithers across our mind. As failures mount ever higher, we all begin to quake. Yet Edison refused to be intimidated, though the dark mountain grew every day. With a mere three months of formal schooling and considered to have had a learning disability, Edison eventually became one of the most prolific inventors of all time. In his struggle to invent a method of storing electricity he is said to have had tens of thousands of failures. Attempt 50,000 – or thereabouts – worked.   We can cower in defeat like the mass of humanity, afraid of shadows, or we can become Edisons.   ‘The way to succeed,’ said Thomas J. Watson, ‘is to double your failure rate.’ Watson isn’t your average crack-pot. He founded IBM.   What often distinguishes successful people is the uncommon number of failures they suffer. The rest of us give up before experiencing our full quota.   If failures are rungs on the ladder to success, we reach the top not merely by seeing failures, but by mounting them.   One rejection from a publisher would send me reeling. How many blows could you sustain before forever abandoning the idea of becoming a writer? Ten? Fifteen? Fifty? Would-be novelist John Creasey received an unbroken succession of 743 rejections. I’d be throwing in the towel, the soap, the bath water, my rubber duck, my little red tugboat, everything I could lay my hands on. Few people would ever expose themselves to such devastating failure. That’s why so few enjoy the renown he finally achieved. While unsuccessful, he was forced to write deep into the night. He came late to his paid employment so often that he was fired from twenty-seven different jobs. Undaunted, he continued to perfect his writing, striving to be so good that his skill could no longer be ignored. Shy success crept near, then swept him to fame. Over sixty million of his books have been published.   The chilly winds of rejection can ruffle our feathers or carry us to new heights. Sag in doubt or stretch wings heavenward and soar: the choice is ours.   It is not arid persistence that success finds irresistible, but a dogged resolve to improve. Don’t huddle in self-pity. Harness rejection’s power. Let it spur you to a greater commitment, inspiring you to new levels of excellence.   We often let God down. It is even worse if Satan persuades us that the resulting failure is God’s fault, rather than our own. (Proverbs 19:3) But we must not let past fizzlers paralyze us.   The cost   Although living below the best God has for us can be agonizing, the greatest horror is when the pain subsides. We begin to feel safe in our hole and imagine all sorts of horrors are poised to savage us should we step into the security of God’s will. Such fears are largely Satanic bluff, (Take comfort from Philippians 4:6-7 and 2 Timothy 1:7) doomed never to materialize.   Nonetheless, heaven’s assignments aren’t always a piece of angel cake. There are times when the only thing more frightening than doing the will of God is  not  doing his will. We have as Leader and Supreme Example, One who suffered immensely. (John 15:20-21; Hebrews 12:2-4; 1 Peter 2:19-21)   When people came to Jesus desiring to serve him, you’d think he would have smothered them with praise. But he knew the human heart. His blunt response shocked would-be followers into a painful realization of the great cost involved. (Luke 14:25-33; Matthew 10:21-22) ‘Sell all you have and give it to the poor.’ (Luke 18:22) ‘Wild animals will better shelter than you’ll have if you follow me.’ (Luke 9:57-8, loose paraphrase)   ‘To serve me,’ he declared, ‘you must take up a cross.’ (Luke 9:23) Two thousand years later, it is easy to romanticize that brutal statement. Carrying one’s cross involves nothing less than anguish and devastating humiliation. It is suffering inflicted as a direct result of serving God; torment you could avoid by compromise. Jesus wasn’t looking for adherents; he was looking for martyrs. He wanted not admirers but imitators – volunteers who could shoulder a gibbet of pain. (Matthew 20:22-3) The person more concerned about his neck than the exaltation of God, is unworthy of ministry. (Luke 9:23-6)   Many are called, but few rise to the challenge. ‘Let me first establish my business.’ ‘Let me first raise my family.’ ‘Let me first ...’ Not surprisingly, few are chosen. (Matthew 22:14; Luke 9:59-62)   Those who shrink from hardship or danger shrivel up inside; dead, long before their hearts stop. Don’t throw your life away, enslaved by the allure of opulence; lazing while suffering humanity floods past your door. The easy path leads to destruction. (Matthew 7:13)   How would you like the incomparable thrill of being greeted by the strains of native voices singing ‘All hail the power of Jesus’ name’ on the very spot where twenty years before you had been driven off by a frenzy of spears aimed at your heart? Imagine savoring the ecstasy, the satisfaction, the triumph. That was George Grenfell’s reward for putting his life on the line; for boldly defying a hostile government; for suffering bereavement after bereavement until finally his young wife and four of his children were buried; for serving in a place so dangerous that three out of every four missionaries died before completing their first term.   ‘Count the cost,’ ordered Jesus, using parable after parable to hammer the point. (Luke 14:28-33; Matthew 13:45-6) Will you pay the price and take the risks, or become a laughing stock, melting away when the heat is on?   The cost is exceeded only by the glory. So immense is the glory, in fact, that the cost fades, totally eclipsed by the reward. (2 Corinthians 4:17; Revelation 7:16,17)   Why should serving God involve humiliation, hardship, and toil? ‘Writing is the work of a slave!’ lamented C. H. Spurgeon – the man who wrote 135 books, edited 28 others and whose 3,500 sermons were published as 75 additional books. Why must missionaries waste years wrestling with a language that God could miraculously impart to them? Why does uplifting music demand hours of irksome practice? Why do church floors get dirty? Why ...? Because it frees us to express the depth of our devotion. Moreover, it’s the cost that produces the exhilaration, the fulfillment, the honor. Look at any field of endeavor: we admire heroic achievements; people who overcome the odds, who endure hardship and succeed where others would have slunk away. That’s the glory of Christ-likeness. There’s no honor in being swept along by a godless throng; no satisfaction in fleeing at the sight of a challenge; no glory in being dominated by fear or frozen by doubt. Limp-willed, lily-livered pretenders turn God’s stomach. (Revelation 3:16) We either walk through the curtain of fear or end up a broken shell of the person we could have been. To choose the soft life is to turn our back on our bleeding Savior and lose ourselves in Satanic deception. It’s those who sow in tears who reap in joy; (Psalm 126:6) those who endure who win the crown. (1 Corinthians 9:24-27; James 1:12; Revelation 2:10; 3:11) Insipid, half-hearted ‘Christianity’ is sickening to God, the world and the devil.   That’s not for you. You belong in heaven’s hall of fame. You were born with the desire for it; born-again with the power for it. You were made for daring persistence, stunning triumphs, awe-inspiring excellence. While others wallow in the mud of mediocrity, sentenced to eternal obscurity by their half-heartedness, you’re changing the face of the planet, bringing honor to the One who redeemed you.   If you’re crazy, they say you ought to be committed. I reckon if you’re  not  committed, you’re crazy.   Fired by the love of God, live life to the full.   Christ’s champions   In a heart-stopping display of skill, Blondin pushed a wheel-barrow along a tight-rope over Niagara Falls. ‘Who believes I could carry someone across the falls?’ he asked. The crowd went wild. Of course he could. So he asked for a volunteer.   Shocked silence.   Serving God is like that. Anyone can slip into Christ’s embrace and be carried to startling conquests, but when the call comes, knees begin to quake. The weakest saint who dares follow Christ will excel; the strongest who stays behind will be crushed.   There are many different callings, but no one is called to be a spectator. There is a cost and a degree of involvement in being a spectator, but higher things are expected of you.   Spectators pay at the gate. They have read their subject until they’re self-declared experts. They clap and cheer. They view the victory celebrations. But there’s seldom sweat on their brow. They know nothing about bruises and aching muscles. They are foreigners to the thrill of personal achievement, the exhilaration of record-breaking performances, the satisfaction of a job well done. Their greatest accomplishment is to guzzle a drink in the midst of a jostling crowd without spilling it. They are potential champions pouring their lives away; non-achievers who love their bed more than success.   There’s a world of difference between these Walter Mittys and players on the bench. Players kept in reserve are red hot in a tepid world. They don’t flinch at pain. They have toughened their minds and hardened their bodies; drilled to spring into action the instant they are needed. They are champions in the making.   Conquest   The last time I flirted with danger was when I decided against a double knot to tie my shoelace. I have a heart of gold – yellow to the core. Yet Christ died that I might rule. Yield to my old nature and I cower; yield to my Christ-bought nature and I conquer.   Fear will come. I can’t avoid it, but through Christ I need not bow to it. Victor or victim: it’s my decision.   The tragedy is that we are often enslaved by forces that are meant to be  our  slaves. Rather than being tyrannized by fear, we should rise up and let it serve us. Fear’s duty is to impel us to prayer. Deprived of this faithful servant we might foolishly expose ourselves to danger without activating God’s wall of safety.   Ensure your plans are in the will of God. Then list every fearful possibility. Pray through each point for as long as it takes to muster the faith that God has taken control. Now you have divine protection, the highest conceivable security. Fear has done its work. Bid it farewell. Like a naughty puppy, fear may still tag along, but ignore it. Reciting the fear-crushing promises of Scripture, fix your eyes on the goal and stride toward it.   Waiting for fear to fade before advancing is like Peter waiting for the lake to evaporate before stepping out of the boat. Faith is the defeat of fear – not usually by fear’s removal, but by moving us to proceed despite fear’s yelps.   Where acceptable, take small steps. If the torment is intense, the support of experienced counselors can be valuable. Be prayerful about your choice of help, however. Unwise counselors can wound.   When the pressure is on, there are just two types of people: those who cling to Christ and those who run away. Heaven’s heroes are natural weaklings who are willing to let Christ make them supernaturally strong.   All of heaven is on red alert when you follow Father’s orders. Help is a prayer away. Heaven’s resources – infinitely more than you will ever require – are available the instant you need them. (Matthew 21:12-19; Luke 10:19; 21:12-19) As you march forward in obedience success is certain.   If Jesus suffered for us when we didn’t deserve it, how can we refuse to suffer for him when he does deserve it?   To snuggle into the will of God is to be enveloped in the fiercely protective love and infallible wisdom of the Omnipotent One. Outside that warm cocoon lurk genuine reasons for fear, but inside the Almighty’s perfect will, fear – no matter how intense – is ultimately an illusion. The pain is transitory; the fulfillment, eternal.

Smashing the Age Barrier Defeatists say ‘Yesterday’; winners say ‘Yes’ today. It’s too late to lament the past. That’s lost forever. But it’s never too late to move into overdrive. The present is ours to charge with defiant faith. ‘You’re too old,’ the mission board told a rejected candidate. God, who’s a little older than most of us, must have thought she was too young. He waited two more years before sending her to the field. Perhaps you have heard it calculated that John Wesley preached over 40,000 sermons and traveled 225,000 miles (his horse had never heard of kilometers). Did you realize these figures belong only to the latter part of his life, from age 36 to 88? I was impressed; until reading George Muller’s figures. He is said to have traveled 200,000 miles, using his linguistic ability to preach in several languages to an estimated three million people. Now admittedly, Muller traveled extensively overseas. If I had a choice between traveling a thousand miles on horseback or a thousand miles by sailing ship, I’d go by plane. But here’s the spice: Muller’s statistics only began after his seventieth birthday and continued for the next 17 years. Dr. Robert Lowry, renowned for many accomplishments as a Christian musician, first undertook the serious study of music after turning 40. Fanny Crosby was forty-three when she found her life’s work – she wrote her first Gospel song. So many songs followed, under so many different pen-names, that no one could keep track of them. Informed estimates range to beyond 8,000 (some say 9,000), with more than a hundred pseudonyms. Francis Schaeffer was little known until he was in his fifties. Child Evangelism Fellowship was founded by a sixty-year-old, who remained at its helm for the next 15 years. At 63, Clara Mcbride Hale began caring for addict babies. The number she has helped now runs into the hundreds. Peggy Smith, 84 and blind, and her sister Christine, 82 and crippled, were key people in the world-famous revival in the Scottish Hebrides. Elizabeth Wilson felt the tug of China when she was 20. She arrived thirty years later. Conditions were harsh and dangerous, yet her age proved a treasured asset. The Lord had called her to the Orient, where – as in most societies outside our own - age is honored. Paul Kuo presented the administrators of Hong Kong Theological College with a headache. He was already 60 and he wanted to enroll. By the time he graduated he would be too old for any church to want him. He was reluctantly admitted and although he learned, he failed to obtain a degree. In 1975 he left for Thailand’s ‘Golden Triangle’ to labor for Christ amongst mercenaries, bandits and opium farmers. His past military training earned him respect and his age made him a celebrity. He dived so deeply into ministry that he soon had to recruit other missionaries. Before long, Paul was heading up a large missionary venture. In 1968, two middle-aged tourists, florists for over 30 years, were so moved by what they saw in Kenya that they decided to return as missionaries. Denny and Jeanne Grindall, with no engineering skills or even formal Bible training and very little money, instigated the building of a dam almost 80 foot high and piped the clean water nearly three miles to tribespeople. The Maasai gradually became so responsive to the Grindall’s message that twenty churches were opened and hundreds came to Christ. I received the following e-mail from Gordon Ogden: Please pray for my ministry in marriage and family counseling. (I am 70.) Today I will work with child sexual abuse, teenage depression, adult depression, and marital discord. My weeks are filled with such. Then just when I was about to elevate my new friend to megastar status he spoilt it with his next e-mail: Tomorrow I go to Monterey to see my friend Phillip, a Marriage, Family, Child Counselor like myself. He is currently running two recovery groups, plus his individual counseling, plus working out at the gym three days a week, plus attending conferences and driving all over the place. Phillip will be 90 in June. What a role model for a guy 20 years his junior. Black American missionary to Liberia, Eliza George, was forced by her mission to retire at age 65. Undeterred, she raised her own support and continued independently for the best part of three more decades. ‘I want to go to the mission field as soon as I can,’ announced an enthusiastic teenager on the day of her baptism. She made it – as a seventy-one-year-old widow. In Papua New Guinea, Guatemala, Thailand, Burma and Communist Russia, Margaret Cole squeezed more excitement into a few years than most people ever see. Cam Townsend, founder of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, flew to Moscow and began learning Russian to assist in Bible translation work in the Caucasus. The nation was still under the iron grip of Communism and he was seventy-two. At that same age of seventy-two, Maude Cary accepted her missionary society’s plea ‘to open the city of El Haheb [in Morocco] to resident missionary work.’ Evelyn Brand came to India as a young missionary. After her husband’s death she pressed on, living on a pittance, caring for villagers scattered over five mountain ranges. At age seventy-five, Granny, as she was now known, had grown too old for such arduous work. Having fallen and broken her hip, she had to be carried down the mountain by stretcher, then driven 150 bone-jarring miles to the nearest hospital. By the time her son – a brilliant medical missionary – finally arrived, she was walking with two canes and managing to ride a pony to outlying villages. The skilled doctor mustered all his persuasive powers to lovingly convince his ageing mother that she ‘presented a constant medical hazard,’ riding horseback to such remote, rugged mountains with her paralyzed legs and deficient sense of balance. Brushing aside his pleas, Granny toiled for eighteen more years, despite being ravaged by tropical diseases and suffering concussions and fractures from falls off her pony. She was ninety-three when she reluctantly exchanged her horse for a stretcher; continuing her work by being carried from village to village by devoted Indians for her two remaining years. In modern China the seventy-year-old wife of a persecuted pastor travels extensively distributing Bibles at great risk. In another part of the nation a ninety-year-old prayerfully studies a map, wondering where to lug her next bundle of Bibles. She hugs her books, rejoicing that the Tiananmen Square massacre increased not just the danger but the demand. Think of it this way: if growing old is as bad as is sometimes claimed, how come so many people do it? I don’t care if you’re so long in the tooth you’ve blown your entire savings on toothpaste; so out of touch that you’re fazed by newfangled things like the King James Bible; so old your grandchildren are in nursing homes; so frail you have to rest up to watch television: God can still use you. Of course, if you’ve already passed eighty-five, I can’t promise you’ll write 8,000 songs. You might, like Fanny at that age, have to settle for only 250 hymns a year. If you’re ninety-one and still don’t know what you’ll do when you grow up, throw a party. If you’re ninety-five, it’s time to go to Bible School. That’s what David Sizer did. The last I heard, he was 101, still preaching in a prison and five retirement centers every week. Dr. Bernhard Johnson tells of a tiny Negro in Brazil aged 105 who had led hundreds to the Lord. Uninspired? A further detail should cure that. He did not know the Lord until he turned 103. So if you’ve graduated from make-up to poly-filler, hang on to your dentures, it’s ministry time. In Christ, Invincible You’re fruit growing sweeter, Wine gaining value. Not milk turning sour Or cardboard caving, Colors fading, Under the weight of time. You ’re concrete drying stronger, Trees growing higher, Dawn glowing brighter. If you found this webpage while reading about God’s love for you, you can return to the beginning of that page here You are God’s Favorite or you can pick up where you left off here: God Loves You !

Forgiven but Not Healed?   When “Forgiveness” Does Not Bring Healing     My mission is to comfort hurting people and most certainly not to send anyone on a guilt trip about the vexed issue of forgiving people. If you feel you cannot forgive or that you have forgiven and that it has not helped you find peace, I’m here to encourage you.   Forgiving an enemy is a prolonged adventure; a bold experiment in Christlikeness, like a pioneer exploring uncharted realms. The adventurer typically feels iced over by the solitude of the journey and yet the heart-warming reality is that no-one commencing this pilgrimage wanders alone but enters into intimate union with the One who suffered unspeakable agony to secure the forgiveness of his enemies in the hope that his love would transform them into people of honor.   When people who have been deeply hurt assure me that they have fully forgiven, I have my doubts. It’s not that for a moment I question their sincerity. The dilemma plaguing us all is that full forgiveness is such a long, complicated journey to Christlikeness and fulfillment. The inevitable consequence is that after making highly commendable progress we humans typically presume we have finally arrived when we have still have even further to go. Whenever I remind people of this it is not as a putdown but as a source of hope; like telling someone recovering from years of illness who thinks he has reached peak health that he can look forward to eventually feeling even better.   Just because you do not feel angry or bitter towards someone does not mean you are enjoying the benefits of forgiving the person. For example, I point out elsewhere that if someone stole money from you without you realizing it, you might not have the slightest ill-feeling towards him, but you have not even begun forgiving him for his crime. Or how could you claim to have fully forgiven someone who stole $10,000 from you if you refused to admit to yourself that so much money was involved and you forgave him only for stealing $500?   So forgiveness has nothing to do with living in a fantasy world of trying to convince yourself that what happened was not so terrible after all. It is  not  saying, “What you did does not matter” or “It wasn’t your fault,” or “You couldn’t help it,” or “There were extenuating circumstances.”   Full forgiveness is about facing the cold, hard facts. It cannot commence until fully admitting to yourself the gravity of the offense. But many of us don’t want to go there. We fear that it would be too painful and/or if we fully admitted to ourselves the magnitude of the offense we would find it too hard to forgive.   One would be advised to put it far less bluntly, but for a Christian, forgiving someone is, in effect, telling the person:   “Your crimes against me are so atrocious and the punishment you deserve is so horrific that I find it almost inconceivable that my debt to divine justice is overwhelmingly greater. Nevertheless, I stand appalled at Jesus’ chilling revelation that this is so. [In Jesus’ parable, our debt to divine justice is more than half a million times greater than what the person who mistreated us owes us.]   In the parable in Matthew 18:21-35, there were probably 6,000 denarii to each of the 10,000 talents the servant owed. That's 600,000 times more than the 100 denarii his fellow servant owed. R. T. France (The Gospel According to Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1985) points out that a talent was the highest unit of currency and 10,000 was the highest Greek number. Jesus chose the largest easily-describable sum of money to portray an almost unimaginably large debt. Telling the story today, we would probably say one billion dollars.     When my eyes can eventually pierce the murk of my hypocrisy and the shock finally wears off, I know I will spend eternity basking in the extravagance of God’s love in bearing in his very person the full devastating magnitude of the punishment my sins deserve. Let me celebrate my undeserved pardon – the ecstasy of my escape from the endless horror my sins deserve – by forgiving you as freely and fully as I have been forgiven.”   Those last words are critical to our whole capacity to forgive: “ . . . as freely and fully as I have been forgiven.” This, of course, is very scriptural:   Ephesians 4:32  Be kind and compassionate to one another,  forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you .   Colossians 3:13  Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another.  Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (Emphasis mine.).   I am reminded of this Scripture:   1 John 4:19  We love because he first loved us.   What inspires and empowers Christians to love and forgive is the thrilling awareness of how stupendously God loves and forgives them. Should, however, you have difficulty grasping the full extent to which God freely and fully forgives, holding nothing against you, it will markedly sap your motivation. If you lack this certainty, fire yourself up by reading  Forgiving Yourself Made Easy: Wondrous Peace for the Guilt-Ridden Conscience  and the pages it leads to. When you are hard on yourself or you imagine God is hard on you, it is not easy to be soft towards others.   The alternative reason for lacking motivation to forgive someone, however, is to be so drunk with pride and hypocrisy as to imagine that our sin against God is more excusable and worthy of forgiveness than that person’s hideous sin against us. This delusion is terrifyingly serious because the same Jesus who was so tender with those crushed by awareness of their sinfulness, raged in fury at those who considered themselves better than other people.   Suppose Jerry explodes in anger in front of you, spewing out venom about this “rich guy” who had cheated him out of $2,800. Jerry insists that this “no-good scum” should be thrown in jail. He is adamant about involving the police and doing everything in his power to destroy the man’s reputation.   What Jerry does not realize is that this “rich guy” is a close friend of yours who had suffered financial reversal after financial reversal and then fell into devastatingly serious debt over medical expenses trying to keep alive his dying child. Things grew increasingly desperate until, seeing no alternative, he turned to loan sharks. Had you known, you would have given him money but he already owed you much and he was just too embarrassed to ask for even more. Things continued to deteriorate until finally the loan shark’s thugs, after mercilessly beating him, gave him twenty-four hours to come up with the money before they finished him off.   Fifteen years ago, Jerry used to work for you and had embezzled you out of $125,000 before you finally discovered it. Petrified of the long jail term he faced, Jerry begged you not to go to the police; promising to pay you in full, but you knew his promise was empty words. Having gambled away the entire sum, there was no way he could pay you back. Seeing the terror and desperation on his face, you relented and not only kept quiet about his crime but totally released him from the debt. Jerry overcame his gambling problem and went on to become a highly respected businessman, with no one but you knowing his sordid past.   This is how it is with us (Matthew 18:22-35). We have been grievously sinned against and cannot conceive of any pressures that could have forced anyone to act so atrociously. Nevertheless, no matter how ignorant we might be of the inner turmoil affecting the person who hurt us, he/she was still wrong and fully deserves punishment. Our shame, however, is that we have been faking our respectability for so long that we have ended up believing our own hypocrisy and actually think ourselves better than the person who so seriously wronged us. We are so self-obsessed that we are acutely aware of how deeply we have been hurt and remain oblivious to how much more than that our sins have devastated God; betraying his trust, offending his holiness and sending his tender heart – sensitized to inconceivable extremes by infinite love – reeling in agony.   We find all the excuses in the world for our inexcusable acts. We are brilliant at minimizing our own wrongdoing and seeing with 20/20 accuracy the gravity of what we have suffered. Yes, the Holy One loves us despite us being so despicable, but he is Judge of the entire world and it is required of any judge to be totally impartial. God would have to be corrupt to love you without caring about how you treat those who have hurt you. To be righteous, the Judge of all humanity must be as merciful toward them as he has been towards you.   Hypocrisy is having the audacity to want the Holy Judge to defile himself with double standards. It is expecting God to treat our enemies by a different standard to how he treats us. Our hypocrisy, however, will never turn God into a hypocrite.   I have seen resentment written this way: re-sent-ment. To send back what was sent to you makes you as guilty as the other person, thus rendering you worthy of the same divine judgment.   In the enormity of his love, the Judge has made it possible by Christ’s sacrifice for us to choose whether we will be judged by grace or by what our sins deserve. We choose how our eternal fate is determined by deciding whether we will treat our enemies by grace or by what their sins deserve.   Matthew 6:14-15  For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.   Matthew 7:2  For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.   Luke 6:37  Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.   James 2:13   . . . judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. . . .   Justice   Justice demands “an eye for an eye.” Unforgiveness tells the offender, “I refuse to release you from your debt to justice.” In fact, when we don’t forgive we become so obsessed with the payment that we condemn ourselves to misery, effectively telling ourselves, “I refuse to be happy until I see that person pay in full.” In effect, we keep endlessly tormenting ourselves with the thought, “He/she owes me . . . He/she owes me . . . He/she owes me . . .” And what buries us even deeper into infuriating hopelessness and despondency is the nagging awareness that it is like demanding blood from a stone. Even if the offender desperately wanted to put things right, there is usually nothing he/she can do to adequately compensate us for what we have suffered.   Our fixation on what we are owed, keeps us feeling miserably deprived and dependent upon the offender – feeling that unless he/she does something or something happens to him/her, we can never be happy.   Forgiveness, on the other hand, is escaping this degrading cycle of despair and dependency. Forgiveness is to be free at last; victoriously declaring, “My happiness is no longer chained to what the offender does or suffers. He/she owes me nothing. To the last drop of sweat and blood, the horrendous penalty that atrocious sin deserves has already been paid in full by Jesus’ agonizing death. Moreover, I look in breathless anticipation to the mind-bogglingly supernatural way the Almighty will turn this evil around for my good and will spend eternity lavishing me with never-ending compensations.” Instead of languishing over our relentless sense of loss, we are able to lift high our heads and celebrate the victory. Feeling enriched, this new attitude transforms us, empowering us with all that it takes to truly move on with life and become the spiritual high achievers we are divinely destined to be.   The Quest for Matchless Beauty   I’ve heard “experts” hoping to coax people to forgive by claiming that forgiveness is not for the offender’s sake but for one’s own sake. But how could people with such a mean-spirited, self-centered attitude that they need such motivation ever hope to escape the mud of self-preoccupation enough to stop wallowing in their own problems?   It is true that bitterness makes ugly and undesirable someone who would otherwise be attractive. And it is true that a bitter person usually hurts himself significantly more than the one who is not forgiven. Nevertheless, forgiving others ushers in far loftier things than that.   Of all the benefits of forgiveness, the greatest is in becoming more like Christ – and Christ was never self-seeking. If “What’s in it for me?” was never a consideration for Jesus, no one can claim to be his follower without longing to be equally uncontaminated by such a mindset. With the greatest of all forgivers as our Inspiration and Empowerment we must seek to rid ourselves of such ugliness.   Godliness is its own reward. What greater honor can there possibly be than to grow more like God? Weep for those who, like a moth with a suicidal attraction to fire, know no better than to crave what is fake and superficial. Fleeting human fame and fleshly beauty are as tacky wrapping paper concealing maggots, relative to the never-ending beauty and grace of Christlikeness.   Forgiving our enemies walks hand in hand with healing from the inner wounds those enemies inflicted. Nevertheless, there is more to healing than just forgiving. Just as we can unknowingly side-step full forgiveness by living in denial of the real magnitude of the offence, so inner healing eludes those refusing to face full-on the ghosts and the pain of the past.   By putting us on the same side as God, forgiving others releases the Healing Lord deep into our hurting pasts – provided we trust him enough to invite him in. No matter how much he longs to help, a surgeon respects people by not operating on them without their consent. Likewise, our Soul Surgeon respects us by mustering the divine power required to restrain his supernaturally intense yearning to help; forcing himself to wait until we are finally agree to yield to his healing intervention.   No matter how much I forgive someone for physically wounding me, I will continue to be in pain until the wound heals. Forgiving someone is no excuse for not seeing a doctor. So it is with inner wounds: forgiving someone is no excuse for not seeing a counselor.   Above all, we must remember that as essential as forgiveness is for healing, the goal of forgiveness is not healing but something infinitely more precious: Christlikeness.   Easier Than it Seems?   Years of supporting people as they resolve painful issues has taught me that forgiveness is often more complex than I had imagined. Nevertheless, it would be doing you a grave disservice to overemphasize the complexities.   If mistakenly supposing we have arrived will stop us from progressing, we can be equally hindered by overestimating the distance to go. We can wrongly think the journey is so daunting that we give up.   The reality is that we can fairly easily keep progressing on the road to full forgiveness. For example, even if our heart is not in it, we can force ourselves to “pray for those who mistreat us” (Luke 6:28) whenever the memory of their misdeeds afflict us. Even if we do nothing else, this brings God into the frame and will slowly soften us.   Unbelievable?   To all but the most spiritually experienced readers, the truth I am about to expound will seem so off the planet that I am reluctant to touch it, lest in the eyes of many it undermines the credibility of this entire webpage. That would be a tragedy because those most likely to be incredulous are the very people who most need the rest of this webpage. Nevertheless, you have a right to know the truth of God’s Word, no matter how impossible it might seem.   Take a long, hard look at the following Scripture, asking yourself if you can truly believe the words, “all things:”   Romans 8:28  And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.   Does the Almighty really have the power to do that?   Is there really truth in the oft-repeated observation that whatever does not kill us makes us stronger?   Consider Joseph: sold into slavery by his brothers, then betrayed by Potiphar’s wife and incarcerated as a rapist, then forgotten by the court official whose dream he had kindly interpreted. All those acts of treachery might have seemed one meaningless disaster after another and yet he held on, forgiving his brothers and others until he could triumphantly tell them, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good . . .” (Genesis 50:20).   Yes, there was evil in the hearts of those who mistreated Joseph, and the Holy One has no partnership with evil. Nevertheless, the All-Powerful One who tells us to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21) never asks of us what he does not do himself. In the lives of those who love him by totally defeats evil by turning it into good.   Remember the book of Esther in which Haman plotted the destruction of all Jews and yet it ended with their enemies being wiped out everywhere from India to Egypt (Esther 8:9 ff).   Can you truly believe Jesus?   Matthew 5:9-11   Blessed  are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.  Blessed  are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed  are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.   Luke 6:22-23   Blessed  are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. . . . (Emphasis mine.)   The apostle Paul reeled under more cruelty than perhaps a hundred average people put together would suffer in a lifetime. Was Paul delusional when, in the very letter in which he listed all his whipping, stonings and so on, (2 Corinthians 11:23-28) he wrote the following?   2 Corinthians 4:17  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.   Was James for real?   James 1:2-3  Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.   What about Peter?   1 Peter 4:12-14  Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.   You are far too precious to God for him to let your suffering be a useless waste. As extreme conditions turn carbon into diamonds, the Almighty applies his astounding abilities to ensure the extremes you have suffered produce things of immense value in your life.   What would you be willing to go through in order to be able to “live happily ever after” [about fifty years, max] in marital bliss? If you cannot imagine being with God as better that the best marriage, the problem is not with God but with your imagination and your lack of intimacy with him. How much would you endure to gain a billion dollars? How much would you sacrifice for the sake of a loved one? We should love God even more, not merely because the Bible tells us to (Mark 12:30; Luke 14:26) but because no one else is as lovable, nor loves us nor has done anywhere near as much for us.   If women by the millions consider it worth the agony of childbirth to hold a baby who ends up growing and leaving home; if adventurers endure astounding hardship and suffering for the fleeting honor of being acclaimed a great achiever and hero; if athletes embrace years of pain and sacrifice because they believe Olympic gold makes it all worthwhile, how many years of joy and worldwide honor would it take to make it worth what you have suffered at the hands of some heartless person? A thousand? Then thousand? Well a hundred thousand years make not the slightest dent in eternity and a great forgiver is acclaimed a spiritual hero worthy of endless honor not only by contemporaries but by every generation, and not just by humans but by angels and God himself.   What made the great apostle so sure that eternal glory “far outweighs” the worst injustices anyone can suffer in a lifetime? He unravels the mystery in that same letter: he was granted a glimpse of heaven (2 Corinthians 12).   If we suffer with the Lord of glory, not only shall we live for all eternity with the most exciting Person in the entire universe, the glorious King of kings, we shall  reign  with him. Who can conceive of the breath-taking implications hidden in that word “reign”?     The Bible regards King Balak hiring Balaam to curse the Israelites as a grave threat to the nation. We must not get sidetracked by delving into a discussion of the supernatural power of certain blessings and curses. I’ll simply point out that God takes this incident with extreme seriousness, with not just four chapters devoted to detailing the events but the Almighty refers to it at least eight more times throughout his Word (Numbers 31:14-16; Deuteronomy 23:4-5; Joshua 24:9-10; Nehemiah 13:2; Micah 6:5; 2 Peter 2:15; Jude 1:11; Revelation 2:14). Some people’s blessings and curses have little effect but Balaam’s were very different.   Numbers 22:6  Now come and put a curse on these people, because they are too powerful for me. Perhaps then I will be able to defeat them and drive them out of the country. For I know that those you bless are blessed, and those you curse are cursed.   That might boggle your mind but let’s just accept it for now and zero in on what this historic event has to teach us that is of vital importance to our current discussion.   Balaam was hired to spiritually cripple the nation. It would have given the Moabites military preeminence, allowing them to slaughter countless thousands of Israelites. And even without the military implications, the spiritual nature of the curse could have devastated the entire nation for generations. But God turned this evil plot on its head so that the nation ended up blessed and empowered. Here’s a condensed version:   Numbers 23:7-8,10-12,20-24;  Then Balaam uttered his oracle: “Balak brought me from Aram, the king of Moab from the eastern mountains. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘curse Jacob for me; come, denounce Israel.’   How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce those whom the LORD has not denounced? . . . Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the fourth part of Israel? [i.e. they will be fruitful and multiply.] Let me die the death of the righteous [i.e. the Israelites] , and may my end be like theirs!”   Balak said to Balaam, “What have you done to me? I brought you to curse my enemies, but you have done nothing but bless them!”   He answered, “Must I not speak what the LORD puts in my mouth?  . . . I have received a command to bless; he has blessed, and I cannot change it. No misfortune is seen in Jacob, no misery observed in Israel. The LORD their God is with them; the shout of the King is among them. God brought them out of Egypt; they have the strength of a wild ox. There is no sorcery against Jacob, no divination against Israel. It will now be said of Jacob and of Israel, ‘See what God has done!’ The people rise like a lioness; they rouse themselves like a lion that does not rest till he devours his prey and drinks the blood of his victims.”   Numbers 24:10  Then Balak’s anger burned against Balaam. He struck his hands together and said to him, “I summoned you to curse my enemies, but you have blessed them these three times. . . .”   The malicious attack they had no control over could do nothing but prosper them. Nevertheless, disaster rained upon the Israelites. What hurt them horrifically – 24,000 ended up dead – was being seduced into sin by Balaam’s cunning scheme to use pagan women to get Israelites to  willingly  corrupt themselves (Numbers 25:1-9; 31:14-16; Revelation 2:14).   I didn’t want us side-tracked because what God wants to reveal to us by this incident is not the power of curses but that God protects his people. Us refusing to be Godlike is the only thing that can stymie God’s plans to turn vicious attacks into blessing.   Yes, in the short-term it often seems that evil triumphs but, with God on our side, our enemies can ultimately only end up blessing us, just like dumping repulsive manure on flower beds causes them to bloom like never before. The only one who can end up permanently hurting us is ourselves, by refusing to act according to God’s ways.   For years I kept telling a dear friend of mine that all the appalling sex abuse she had suffered from her neighbor as a child and all the deeply scarring parental abuse inflicted on her and the horror upon horror she suffered as an adult would end up achieving so much good in her life that the rewards would not only totally eclipse her decades of agony but so greatly outweigh them that she would consider it well worth all her suffering. I told her it would make her a woman of deep compassion and wisdom, empowering her to be used of God to transform the lives of countless people to whom the average Christian acts as a Job’s comforter, merely adding to their torment. There will be people praising and honoring both her and God for all eternity for all the good flowing from her intense suffering. I said all the decades of beastly cruelty inflicted on her would end up strengthening her and deepening her walk with God so immensely that she would end up forever praising God for it all.   For years she kept thinking I was crazy to say that. Now, however, she is indeed beginning to see so much good flowing from all the atrocities she had suffered that the rewards and joyous fulfillment I assured her would be hers are no longer some far-fetched theory but a fact of life.   If we are called to follow the One who prayed, “Father, forgive them,” while they drove nails through his hands and feet, let’s remember that Jesus’ journey took him to such victory, glory, honor and rich, eternal fellowship with us that it was for the  joy  that it would produce that Jesus endured his betrayal and torture (Hebrews 12:2).   Sadly, despite paying lip service to “in all things God works for the good of those who love him . . .” few of us believe God’s determination to devote his infinite power to transforming every attack against us, his beloved, into something that ends up richly blessing us. To our puny minds it seems impossible that good could eventuate from the evil we have suffered. So rather than believe God, we think it really must be impossible. But it isn’t. The only thing that can stop this inevitability is if we sabotage God’s plans to bless us by refusing to do things God’s way, such as refusing to forgive those who have hurt us.   God’s truth is so astounding that it rattles us to the core and few of us can muster the faith to believe it until we eventually begin to see it unfolding in our lives. Nevertheless, if you keep on with God, here is the truth that will eventually be worked out in everyone’s life:   Wait long enough for God to do his work and you will discover that the greatest hurt anyone can cause merely ends up furthering your own good. In the final analysis, it is only the hurt you cause yourself by not forgiving that ends up hurting you.   Fitting the Pieces   God’s blessings flow into our lives at the rate that we let them flow out to our enemies. Unforgiveness is a dead weight keeping us from the heights at which we would otherwise soar.   Overcoming evil with good, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek and blessing those who curse us is spiritual heroism. It is taking up our cross and following Jesus on the road to glory; remembering that it was for the  joy  set before him our crucified Lord endured (Hebrews 12:1-2). Forgiving is the way of joy because it is the way of love – not the fickle, flimsy puff of emotion that inflates hopes and fizzles into disappointment, but anyone taking this journey is bathed in the indestructible dependability of love that is tougher than diamonds and gentler than the sweetest caress; the unwaning, inexhaustible, supernaturally powered love of the Eternal Lord whose tenderness is as boundless as his faithfulness.   Forgiveness is a spiritual pilgrimage crammed with so many unexpected twists and turns and traps that we can’t make it without divine guidance and empowering. This webpage has touched on just a few of the complications, and the links below reveal still others and provide considerable help.     It hurts to forgive. It hurts even more not to forgive. And pain is so intensely personal that it is isolating. How many people have snapped at someone claiming to know how a hurting person feels? And yet, with God, the tables are turned. Superficial friends share superficial feelings; deep friends share their deepest feelings. This is why the apostle Paul yearned for the privilege of knowing intimately the most exciting Person in the universe and “the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10).   No matter how impossible and lonely the adventure of forgiveness can feel, the all-knowing Lord truly understands, the God of love feels your pain as his very own, the God of infinite wisdom is eager to guide, and the all-powerful One is keen to place the humanly impossible within your grasp. All he asks is that we not assume we have already arrived or that we know it all but that we keep seeking him so that we might not just share his joy and revel in the intimacy of companionship with the most beautiful and exciting Person in the universe but that we might end up more like him.

You are loved!   Knowing God’s love for you     When it comes to describing God’s unfathomable love, even the Bible admits defeat. God’s love for you extends far beyond the bounds of human comprehension. Yet through a spiritual miracle you can gain personal insight into the incomprehensible.     I can easily believe that the atom-holding, earth-spinning, galaxy-sustaining, life-giving Source of everything wonderful can do whatever he likes. Even the devil believes God’s power. My difficulty is believing that God’s special love for me makes him long to use that power on my behalf. Few of us doubt that God can do amazing things. The weak link in our faith is believing that he would do such things for ordinary, inconsequential you and me. We suspect we are not sufficiently special in the Almighty’s eyes to warrant such attention. Oh yes, ‘God loves everyone,’ but we have a hunch that by the time that love reaches us it has spread pretty thin. I’m just one of millions. Why would God want to focus his omnipotence on me? If we could grasp the enormity of God’s love for us, our faith would sky-rocket. Pray for a revelation. (Ephesians 3:17-19 highlights the necessity of such prayer. ‘I pray that you . . . may have power . . . to . . . know this love that surpasses knowledge . . .’) Awareness of how much we are loved is forever slipping from our consciousness. Partially in sight for a few days, it begins to fade again. The following suggestions might help. When we let God down – even if we really foul things up – picture the proudest father the world has seen. The baby screams, dribbles and soils itself, yet Dad still glows with pride. God is like that. A woman e-mailed me complaining that the above paragraph does not apply to people like her. She was guilty not of some embarrassing slip, like I had in mind, but of a prolonged moral fall. But Helen had chosen the wrong person to complain to. I knew the full story so completely that she is my trusted ministry partner. Helen had struggled to truly repent, being reluctant to let go of that enticing sin. But I know the depth of repentance that Helen finally found. I know the love and humility and brutal honesty that drives her to confess to more and more people just how depraved she had been. She does not glory in her past like some mistakenly seem to, but she ruthlessly exposes her failure in order to inspire others to grasp the same cleansing and forgiveness she has found. And is God proud of this Christian who fell so hard? Absolutely. Proud of her fall? No. Proud of how she grasped God’s hand of forgiveness. When you feel like a tiny blob in the seething mass of humanity, see the shepherd of a hundred sheep frantically searching for one. If he can be personally concerned for one, the omnipotent Shepherd of our souls can love all humanity and still be devoted to you. In the beautiful words of Isaiah, ‘As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you’ (Isaiah 62:5). When you feel you can do nothing right, picture a child, paintbrush in hand, gleaming with excitement. Enveloping her hand is the gentle hand of the world’s greatest artist. ‘And what shall we put in this corner?’ asks the man, as his skill and the girl’s imagination merge into one. See the artist’s smile and the child’s delight as together they create stunning beauty. Under God’s guiding hand, your possibilities are mind-boggling. No matter how you feel, you are the focus of God’s attention; doted on as though you are the only friend God has. If ever a man wanted to shower his bride with love, or his son with gifts, God longs to lavish you with his extravagance. Expect great things from God. Anything less is an insult to your almighty Savior. With your Lord impossibilities are playthings. Let faith mushroom by seizing the fact that the Omnipotent Lord is powerful enough to use you – over-riding your every inadequacy - and loving enough to want to. Everything God touches is destined for glory. Even now, you are God’s ‘filthy rags to heavenly riches’ success story. Do I need a flock of angels on my roof, or an all expense paid trip to heaven and back before I will accept that God thinks I am important to him? Christ’s shed blood proves God’s pledge of total commitment to me. Am I to pronounce that sacrifice inadequate and demand additional proof? Must God send a bolt of spiritual electricity through me before I’ll believe he wants to bless me? In his grace God might send me some special confirmation of his love, as he has done for thousands, but to so focus on this possibility as to not believe unless he does it, is the height of impertinence. If every non-Christian on this planet had amazing (though phony) spiritual encounters and every Christian received divine visitations everyday, and I alone in all humanity experienced nothing, it could never diminish the infinitude of God’s devotion to me. If in his wisdom God decides to cut me off from such experiences in order to toughen my faith – that essential ingredient of spiritual life, more valuable than earth’s treasures – it is yet another demonstration of his love. Faith in the unchangeable character of God is the only bedrock upon which a person’s spiritual life can be founded. We have no need for God to write in the sky because he has written in a book. And Jesus taught that people who fail to believe the Bible would not believe even if they experienced the ultimate miracle of someone they knew returning from the dead and speaking to them (Luke 16:27-31). I dare not slacken my quest for a deeper spiritual experience. I will welcome any manifestation of the Spirit of God in my life and not proudly assume I don’t need it, but if God decides not to use such means to prop up my spiritual life, it merely proves the depth of his confidence in me. He obviously believes I have the grit to tough it out by raw faith. Our life needs not spectacular confirmation but spectacular commitment. What more could the One who died for you do to prove his love? Let’s not slander the Holy One by imagining infinite love is so fickle that it fluctuates according to a person’s physical attractiveness, popularity or talent. Whenever we eat, a child smiles at us, or we find shelter from the blazing sun or biting cold, we are experiencing God’s provision. Each day we receive literally millions of love gifts from God, and yet our hard heart and dull mind rarely overflows with awe at each expression of God’s personal love for us. If we could only open our eyes and begin to each day notice just a few of God’s innumerable love gifts to us, our enjoyment of life and awareness of how special we are to God would rocket heavenwards, bursting through the clouds into endless sunshine. Suppose a man gives the love of his life a beautiful engagement ring. She is so thrilled she can barely contain her joy and thankfulness and love for the man who would express his devotion in such a romantic way. Later, the man comes into great wealth. Remembering how much that gift meant to his darling, he decides to give her fifty carefully selected rings every day for the rest of her life. Each day’s gift of rings would soon begin to mean less and less to her. As time wears on, she could walk past her daily pile of rings, wondering if her husband really loves her. That’s like what has happened to us. Our Lord has been so extravagant in his display of love to us that we have become jaded to the real significance of the gifts he showers on us. When you snuggle into bed, hear a bird chirp, see a fluffy cloud, do you marvel at God’s love gifts to you? When, like the most faithful servant, a clock wakes you at just the right time; when you switch on a light that would have astonished everyone who was ever born until relatively recently; and when you look in a small mirror that King Solomon would have paid a fortune to own, does your heart skip a beat at the lengths your Father in heaven goes to say ‘I love you’? Or, like the worst spoilt child, do you just complain about how much your brothers and sister get? By making you feel as if God loves you less than certain other Christians, it seems as if Satan is attacking your self-esteem, but he isn’t. He is attacking the integrity of God. He is hissing that God’s love is so inadequate that it is only people who have certain qualities whom God can love or be gracious to. That’s a lie! God’s love toward you is perfect. God is for you. He’s cheering you on. He’s on your side! In this world, success is often relative – the closer the relative, the higher you go. Don’t decry the system: remember who you call Father. Christian, you are the focus of divine love; filled with the majesty of Almighty God; spiritually enthroned with Christ in his heavenly palace; granted the highest level of access to the greatest Person, and the holiest place. You are the work of divine hands, made perfect in Christ Jesus. And enshrined within your being resides the infinite power of the sovereign Lord. Top fashion model Claudia Schiffer has been nominated the most beautiful woman in the world. Yet as a teenager, she concluded from her lack of popularity at school that she was not beautiful. We make a similar mistake in assuming that if we are not popular with people, we lack what it takes to make it in a big way with God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Enjoying God’s love   To God, You Are Special   Reasons why God favors no one over you   God as Mother and the Dadda You Always Needed   Feminine aspects of God and touching insights into his love   You Can Find Love  God, the Perfect Partner you long for   God’s Tender Love   Heart-warming insights into the love of God   How Much Does God Love Me? Receive Your Personal Revelation of God’s Love   Many deeply moving pages about God’s love

The Miracle     Everyone knows you could walk down church aisles all your life without ever marrying. Yet, tragically, countless thousands have walked down a church aisle and falsely assumed that made them born again. Like marriage, it is a relationship, not a ritual, that counts. Spiritual rebirth results from a life-changing union between two persons. You can mumble the sinner's prayer, the saints' prayer, any prayer you like; you can join the best church, get wet, slurp communion, look more godly than an archangel, and have not a throb of spiritual life. The problem is that two people could seem identical and be as spiritually different as life and death. Your act can be so good that you even convince yourself, and remain unaware that your life has missed an entire dimension. If so, you could now be on the brink of the most exciting discovery a human can ever experience. To double check whether you are one of the vast number who have missed this spiritual transformation, I beg you to read  You can find love ,  a fascinating webpage that could prove the most exciting read in your entire life.

The Path to Healing For Abuse Survivors   A Brief & Helpful Overview   The following is about you, the reader. It is what  you  will one day be able to say about  yourself,  as you keep prayerfully reading the links listed at the end of this webpage. It will seem to you a hopelessly impossible dream. Nevertheless, it is exactly where you are headed. It matters not that it is utterly beyond your ability to think this way. You will make it because you are loved by the God who is so powerful that he made the entire universe. Progress will most likely seem so slow as to be imperceptible, but as you persist, you will gradually realize that you are moving forward. Our inadequacy is irrelevant. All that matters is that God delights in doing the impossible.     You are slowly leaving tragedy behind and are on a path specially made by God for you. Your destination is not marred by human hands. It is the work of the miracle-working God of perfection, for whom nothing is impossible. Where you are headed is still out of sight and is nothing like anywhere you have ever been before. All these things make it seem utterly unbelievable. All you need do, however, is keep walking and you will one day reach it. You are actually much closer than you think. Wonderful things have already been happening to you but you will only fully realize what has happened when you arrive. You will then be able to say:   I’m a new person. The effects of the past have vanished. My whole life sparkles with pristine innocence. I’m in awe as I examine myself and see only dazzling purity and perfection. I’m so free I could turn cartwheels in sheer joy.   It sounds insanely egotistical to think that the Holy Lord sees me as the purest of virgins, exquisitely virtuous and as perfect as Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, it is a sober truth that leaves me flabbergasted. Regardless of the way I once saw myself, and no matter what has been done to me and what I in turn have done, I am totally innocent, utterly guiltless, morally perfect.   Despite having been accused in the past of awful things and having at times been overwhelmed with guilt feelings, I can in all humility revel in the knowledge that I am the ultimate in moral perfection. The most precious miracle the Son of God ever did has made me spiritually united to the God of perfection. This breath-taking event means that no baby, no virgin, no saint, no angel, not even the Lord himself could be any more holy than the person I now am. I am overawed to realize that in the eyes of God himself, I am breathtakingly attractive. No fairy tale is this amazing.   As carefully explained and confirmed in a link below, this is no harebrained escape from reality, but rock solid Bible truth. One of the many proofs that it is real is the way it has turned my whole life around.   The virtue and honor that now are mine have nothing to do with how I have lived. It is not the result of me doing any good, nor avoiding any sin. I am pure and holy solely because of Jesus. The Son of God, hating my sin, yet longing for the very best for me, was driven by a passionate yearning to make me spotless. Sparing no cost, he swapped places with me, trading his purity for my sin, taking all my sin upon himself on the cross, so that I could have all of his purity and lift my head high.   It is as though in the dim, almost-forgotten past, I was once afflicted with a disease that riddled all my skin with hideous blotches and blemishes. This made me an outcast, forced to rummage through trash for food. My hair became matted, my fingernails dirty and broken and I had only the filthiest, most disgusting rags to wear. I was filled with shame, wanting only to run and hide like a cockroach, but having nowhere to hide. Then, to my utter amazement, the eternal Son of God fell in love with me and wanted to make me his bride and his princess. I was scared. So many people have hurt me and let me down. He claimed to be utterly different to anyone I had ever met, but could I really trust him? Eventually I let him beautify me. Instantly, I found myself washed clean and dressed in the most extravagantly expensive, exquisite bridal gown and jewelry. I glanced in the mirror and could not believe my eyes. I beamed as I gazed in awe at complexion so fresh and flawless that it would be the envy of anyone in the world. Having felt certain that I had been ruined for life, the sight was breathtaking. I looked at my shiny hair and perfect fingernails. He had made me stunningly beautiful. Then the glorious Son of God honored me, not only in the eyes of those who had despised me but in the eyes of the entire universe, by marrying me.   Christ loved me, not because I was originally desirable but because of his miraculous ability to make anyone desirable, no matter how ugly and evil that person once was.       Vengeance   Those who have ill-treated me deserve an eternity in hell. They have sinned not only against morality, but against me and against God himself. In his overwhelming love for me, the Lord is justifiably furious about what they did to me. He has declared them guilty and has sentenced them to eternal destruction.   Nevertheless, though it is now like a nearly-forgotten dream, the truth is that I who am now so pure, was once wicked and so evil that I, like they, had deserved hell. My sins, though different to theirs, were as equally repulsive in the eyes of the holy Lord, and I was as worthy of eternal condemnation. This, of course, is no longer true of me. I am so free from every stain from my past that it is as if the former me were not me, but a completely different person. With all the shame of my past removed, I can look at my past and freely admit the guilt of that person who once bore my name but is no longer me.   To my utter surprise, admitting my former failures has been the most liberating experience I've ever known. Having mistakenly imagined that any admission of my former depravity would be my final devastation, I had desperately fought such an admission for years, only to now discover it is actually my key to freedom!   I had been so harassed by guilt feelings over things that were not even my fault that I barely had time to consider completely different sins that were my own doing. Having admitted to myself and to God that I, like everyone else on this planet, have been utterly depraved and deserve an eternity of hell, the Holy Lord completely pardoned me and made me divine royalty. What makes this so liberating is that there is now no truth that I will ever have to run from. The searchlight and the microscope can be applied to my life and nothing can ever be found that could make me more worthy of hell than I have already confessed to being and have already received forgiveness from. I’m free!   I had not deserved to be forgiven, but Jesus still forgave me. He did it not because of my goodness but because of his goodness. He has exalted me and made me godlike. Now he asks me to display the godlike virtue he has given me, by acting like him. He simply asks that I treat others as he has treated me, by forgiving those who do not deserve forgiveness – forgiving them not because of their goodness but as a manifestation of the goodness that is now in me because the Holy Lord placed it there when he made me pure.   Like those who have sinned against me, I had once sinned against God, abusing his kindness, violating his mercy. My sins stripped naked the holy Son of God and nailed him to the cross. For my sins he was humiliated and his innocence violated. For me he let himself be made a plaything to be gawked at, jeered at, spat on. For me he chose to be reviled and defiled, his holy person desecrated with vile, inhuman, despicable acts. For me he was tortured to death, and his body ripped open.   It cost Jesus the agony of crucifixion to secure my forgiveness, so it will not be painless for me to follow his courageous lead and forgive those who have sinned against me, but this is the path to Christlikeness. And, as an unexpected bonus, it is also the path to healing.       The Merry-go-round from Hell   I had not realized until I let go, that to hold on to resentment is to hold on to the pain of the past. To let go of my yearning for revenge is to let go of the ghosts of the past. Having released my stranglehold on resentment, my hand is now free to take Jesus’ hand and, with all the confidence and security he alone offers, let him lead me to a brand new life.   I have discovered that pain and resentment are hideous parasites that feed not only off me but off each other. My pain increased my resentment of God and/or those who mistreated me, which increased my pain, which increased my resentment, which increased my pain . . . I found myself on a frighteningly out of control merry-go-round that was anything but merry.   Now that I am free, I sense that firing my resentment were ugly and needless insecurities. Lurking below my consciousness was the fear that, at most, Jesus could only forgive minor sins. I did not realize that what drove my addiction to thinking evil of certain people was that the more I focused on their evil, the more my own sins seemed sufficiently minor to warrant God's forgiveness. But even then, guilt drove me to fear that the supposed smallness of my sins was not enough and that God would not forgive and forget my past. So half of me wanted to get my revenge on God and reject him before he rejected me and to despise him so as to convince myself that losing him was not such a devastating loss.   Now I see it was all needless pain. God really does forgive the worst sins. So I had no need to keep forcing myself to believe my sins were minor. If God freely forgives the worse sins, the extent of my past sins suddenly becomes a non-issue. It makes no difference, so I’m no longer inwardly compelled to make my sins seem small and the sins of some other people seem so unforgivable. I can forget all the oppressive mental gymnastics and get on with enjoying life.   With this resolved, my unconscious need to resent God and resent certain people, fizzled. The habit was still hard to break, but the guilt driving it was gone – as long as I kept my eyes on Jesus and his love for me. Whenever I let doubts about God’s love and forgiveness creep back, the horror merry-go-round begins again, but when I recall what Jesus has done for me, reality returns and all is well. So to enjoy my new life I need to keep pushing past distractions and doubts, and fix my eyes firmly fixed on Jesus and all that he has done for me. This can be a real battle at times, but whenever I do it, everything falls into place.   I laugh to remember that I used to think God was being unfair by asking me to be like him and forgive the unforgivable. Now that I have taken the plunge, I see that it is the only way to truly live.   Let me remind you that what you have read is what  you  will one day be able to say about  yourself,  as you keep prayerfully reading the links listed below. It does not matter that it seems to you a hopelessly impossible dream, it is exactly where you are headed because the powerful Lord of the universe wants it. Progress will most likely seem so slow as to be imperceptible, but as you persist month after month, you will gradually realize that you are moving forward. Our inadequacy is irrelevant. All that matters is that God delights in doing the impossible.     For heart-warming biblical proof of the sinlessness of everyone whose faith is in Jesus, see  Rock Solid Bible Truth.

Christians & Raw Emotions Hate & Anger at Injustice By Vicki Morris A sex abuse survivor e-mailed, fuming with anger at the injustice of her still hurting years after the abuse, while her abuser seemed happy and content. With her identity concealed and her permission obtained, here, in essence, is what she wrote: I’m sure you’ll blast me for writing this, but I’m filled with fury! Oh, I could give the “correct Christian” responses, but I value honesty. My heart’s desire is to obey and follow Christ, but I am just not ready to forgive my abuser! I’m angry – no, furious – at him! I’ve realized what an evil and horrible a man he is! He is selfish and hateful and prideful! He is a liar, a manipulator, an abuser and an emotional thief! He is awful and I’m not ready to forgive! If that makes me a bad person, then at least I’ll be an honest bad person! Now you see my black heart. I’m not proud of it, but at least I’m honest about it. Do not think that anger is wrong. Jesus got angry over how the temple of God was being abused. “In your anger do not sin,” says the Bible (Ephesians 4:26). The Psalms are filled with huge emotions, anger included. Anger is part of healing. Injustice arouses much anger. Such anger should not to be whitewashed but faced squarely and worked through until you find the peace you deserve. Maybe some get away with their crimes in this world. But this is a very brief world compared to what they face in the next. Moreover, I’m about to show that fewer escape than we suppose. You can heal. Unless abusers face what they did and repent – truly regret what they did – they spend their lives running, even if it doesn’t show. I once sat down with a man who had committed murder. He shot a man in cold blood, blowing his head off while the man was on his knees, looking into his eyes, begging for his life. He never was caught for it; never served time. There was no justice for the victim. Or so it seemed. He confided to me that the man he had killed was always with him, haunting his dreams and his waking moments; ruining his sleep and spoiling his carefree times. He took drugs to run from that man but far too soon the victim was back in his head again. Outwardly, he seemed normal and did well, but inside he was in perpetual torment. Then he suffered a serious car accident and ended up in the hospital. He got over a million dollars worth of free care at tax payers’ expense. The hospital called me, saying he was asking for me. The staff couldn’t understand and neither could his family. He was calling out to someone. “Go away! Forgive me! Leave me alone! Help me! Forgive me!” Of course, there was no way for this man to receive the dead man’s forgiveness. When I arrived he grabbed me in desperation, telling me that the man he shot was standing in his room watching him. He pleaded with me to make the victim go away. For years, everyone had thought he was prospering, but all the while he had been tormented by guilt and horror. Some abusers might not be able to connect with their conscience to feel guilt, but is that any better? Anyone unable to feel guilt is missing the opportunity to repent, thus causing his sin to consume him more than ever. Such a person has hell to face. You don’t. He isn’t getting the forgiveness of God. You are being healed. He is living without connection to his conscience, whereas you are connected to the living God. Eternal life is flowing through your veins and with God you will push through every obstacle to endless victory. Who has it the worst? Who will suffer the most? You who are getting healed? Or an abuser who is not facing reality and repenting? You have every right to be angry. Allow yourself to express those deep emotions. Pour them out to God. He is more than big enough to take them. But don’t forget the big picture. None of us deserve God’s grace, without which we would all be damned to hell with our abusers. But in the end, those who avail themselves of God’s grace win. Comments another sex abuse survivor: You are right on target when you contrast the life that abusers have to look forward to versus the life the abused has to look forward to. We who have been abused have already been through our “hell on earth”! What else is left for us? Healing. Hope. A chance to grow and to learn to connect with feelings again, both good and bad. And when the bad feelings come, we don’t have to allow them to drag us down. On the other hand, there’s no way our abusers can have peace. I don’t care how hardened their heart is. There’s no way someone can be so abusive and still be joyous and free, unless they genuinely repent. Important Related Page: Sweet Revenge! Turning Hate into Healing

Lord, Make Him Regret What He Did To Me!   A Healing Experience You are hurting. Jesus feels that pain. He, too, was cruelly treated by people who should have known better. In fact, they hypocritically claimed to be righteous, God-fearing leaders of society. Betrayed, his every right violated, his kindness and gentleness savagely abused, Christ was stripped of his clothes and every shred of dignity, publicly humiliated, and sadistically tortured to death. He, the totally innocent One, went to extremes to identify with your agony, opening the way for the supernatural comfort of God to touch you. At any moment Jesus could have called down vengeance from God upon his tormentors and stopped his agony. Amazingly, he restrained himself. He even prayed, ‘Father, forgive them.’   Although you have not suffered to the point of death like Jesus, perhaps in your agony you think that would almost be preferable to your daily torment. Perhaps you would rather it were you who had been hurt than your loved one. God, too, knows that pain. No one loves humanity like its Maker. No one is as aware of injustice as the Judge of all the world. Yet still he reaches out in love to those who crush him by hurting his loved ones.   Your loving Lord is calling you to rise to the challenge of Christlikeness. It’s a high calling; a path strewn with glory. The wonderful thing is that the Almighty not only asks you to do the impossible, he empowers you to achieve it. If you are truly born again, you already live in the realm of the impossible. It was impossible for you to be made fit for heaven. But it’s happened.   While you are hurting so deeply, to be asked to follow your Savior by forgiving, is a bitter pill. Yet it’s a pill prescribed by your loving Healer. It brings not just spiritual honor, but the healing of your hurt.   The following will help you deal with your difficult and painful trial. Reading someone else’s prayer might be unusual, but I expect you will find it therapeutic. We will call the person who has caused the heartache ‘Jim.’     Thank you, dearest Lord, that your love for me is so immense that my slightest twinge of pain touches you. It’s comforting that although Jim has hurt me more than I feel I can bear, I don’t carry that pain alone. You feel my agony. You feel it because you love me. You feel it because you know me. And you feel it because you live inside me 24 hours a day.   Thank you that now that I at last bring to you not just my pain but this whole mess, to be dealt with  your  way, you will bring comfort and healing. I’m sorry for dishonoring you, and intensifying my own pain, by not doing this earlier. If a doctor prescribed treatment to minimize pain, I’d follow his instructions to the letter, and yet the instructions of the Great Healer – that I should forgive – I have ignored. I had told myself that I was not saintly enough, and in just too much pain to forgive. I had almost convinced myself I was being humble, but I now see that thinking forgiveness is too hard for me is the equivalent of saying you don’t know what you are talking about. I’m sorry, Lord. I’ve really been messing things up lately. If you say I should forgive, then I am able to forgive. Without you it might be impossible, but I am not without you.   I also thank you that the pain I feel gives me the slightest insight into the pain I caused you, and what it cost you to forgive me. You are totally innocent and undeserving of the way I have abused your kindness over and over in my pre-Christian days and even since.   But let me be blunt. You aren’t being fair.  You wouldn’t forgive  me  if I had Jim’s attitude, so why should I forgive him? He hasn’t asked my forgiveness. He hasn’t shown the slightest regret. He won’t even admit he’s done anything wrong. You wouldn’t forgive me if I acted like that. How can you expect me to be more forgiving than you? Admittedly you didn’t strike me dead when I sinned the first time . . . or the second . . . or the hundredth . . . or the ten thousandth time. And you didn’t stop loving me. And you didn’t wait until I repented before you died for me. And you haven’t asked me to be crucified for him. Wow! To die in agony out of love for him while he’s spitting on me . . . I guess I’m getting out of this rather lightly. And my forgiveness doesn’t change the fact that it’s still up to Jim to repent or he’ll suffer eternally for his actions.   Jim does not deserve forgiveness.  He should go to hell for what he did. The sobering fact, however, is that I, too, deserve hell for my sins. It’s not fair that Jim should go unpunished, and neither is it fair that you should have suffered so that my sins could go unpunished. How dare I demand justice! If you were to execute justice in my life I’d be instantly banished to hell. I was your enemy. You should have struck me dead to spare your pain and to rid this world of a sinner. Instead, you loved me and suffered horrifically on the cross to remove my every trace of filth and shame. Instead of striking me dead, you permitted me to repeatedly hurt you, allowing me time to come to my senses, just as you let Jim do what he did, allowing him time to repent. I deserved to be treated like dirt, and instead you have made me like royalty. Ignoring the shame, closing your mind to the hurt, you have welcomed me into your very family.   I love you for going beyond what is fair.   I keep seeing myself as so much better than Jim. His sin seems so very much worse than anything I’ve ever done, but I must remember that I was on the receiving end of Jim’s sin, and I’ve never been on the receiving end of my own sin like you have. In Jesus’ parable, the debt representing my offense against you – how much my sin cost you, and how much I owe you – is a colossal sum, more than half a million times bigger than the sizable but much more manageable debt representing my enemy’s offense against me. It sure doesn’t feel that way. I must be so hardened and blinded by my sin and so self-centered that I cannot grasp how bad I have been and how much I have hurt you. It’s painful to face the truth about myself, but I want to stop running from reality. It’s scary to ask for it, but I must force myself to ask you to open my eyes to my own sinfulness, lest my sickening hypocrisy continue.   It is hypocritical to call you ‘Lord’ and disobey your commands. You’ve repeatedly said in your Word that I should forgive. I’ve rebelled against your command and then had the hide to imagine I’m so much better than Jim, who has also disobeyed you. The same God who said do not kill, steal, rape also said do not harbor unforgiveness in your heart.   I have become self-righteous, which is frightening, since to your pure eyes my ‘righteousness’ is as repulsive and useless as used toilet paper. I should sooner proudly display my own bodily filth than feel smug about any moral ‘accomplishment’ that I could rightfully call my own. Tormented by mind-numbing shame, I must trash self-righteousness and cling to Christ’s righteousness with the urgency of someone drowning in his own filth.     I realize what a dangerous situation I have been in when I recall how tender Jesus was to anyone feeling the weight of their sins and yet how strongly he condemned hypocrisy. I remember the Pharisee who thanked you that he wasn’t like the sinner next to him, and yet the sinner he despised went home forgiven, while the Pharisee left, blissfully blind to his tragic spiritual condition (Luke 18:10-14). Over and over you say in your Word that you exalt the humble but oppose the proud. I desperately need your forgiveness for my hypocrisy in considering myself morally superior to someone who has committed such gross sin as Jim.   The original sin was an attempt to ‘be as God’ (Genesis 3:5). I’m guilty of virtually the same thing; arrogantly trying to set myself up as Holy Judge in my condemnation of Jim. I’m so sorry for the way I have hurt and dishonored you; calling myself a Christian and yet acting so unlike the forgiving Christ. He wrestled in agony, saying, ‘Not my will, but yours.’ I wrestled, saying not your will, but mine. Here I am, squirming and complaining about being asked to forgive Jim, when your forgiveness of me cost Christ not just an emotional struggle, but being literally tortured to death.   I repent of hoping that I could make you – the perfect Judge – guilty of double standards. Of course, I’m not guilty of the  exact  sin Jim committed, but to hope you would punish those acting like Jim and let those committing my sins go unpunished is a disgusting attitude that should send me reeling in shame. I might as well ask you to only punish those who have different color eyes to me. I had maliciously defined sin worthy of your wrath in a way that condemned those I hate, but let me off the hook. And then I tried to make you partner in my bigotry.   In the Lord’s prayer I prayed that you forgive me ‘as’ (to the extent, or in the same manner as) I forgive others. I can’t take that back, now that I find it doesn’t suit me. As you remind us so often in your Word, you are ‘no respecter of persons.’ You don’t show favoritism. I loved you for that when it suited me. I should now honor you for it when it’s not so convenient. As usual, you are right!   But I don’t want Jim to ever repeat his offense.  It would be awful if he did to someone else what he did to me. So make him regret what he has done, and make me regret my every sin. But please be as gentle and as patient as possible in bringing us to genuine repentance. May both Jim and myself comprehend the magnitude of our sin so that we both might fully repent of every sin we have committed, and receive not just your forgiveness but the power to never act that way again. As regards the legal system getting involved and Jim being jailed, please allow only what is essential to protect other people and to bring Jim to his senses so that he might call out to you and be saved.   Your love overwhelms me. It’s exhilarating to realize that despite hurting you so much that I cannot even grasp the magnitude of what I have done, your love for me is also so vast that it defies my comprehension. And now you have honored me further by allowing me to act like God and forgive. I ask for the grace to rise to this high calling. You have trusted me to act like you. May I not let you down.   You have said, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who ill-treat you’ (Luke 6:27-28). Everyday I’m on the wonderful receiving end of that beautiful attitude as you pour your love over me. Now it’s my turn. In the precious and powerful name of Jesus, I bless Jim.   Everything within me seems to rebel against pronouncing that blessing, but I know it is an illusion. It cannot be  everything  within me that rebels because you, the forgiving God, are within me. I’m tempted to feel a hypocrite because I find it so hard to spit out words of blessing, but in reality I know that by attempting to bless Jim I’m acting less like a hypocrite than I have done for weeks. At least I’m no longer pretending to be a follower of Christ while at the same time refusing to even attempt to forgive. So I again say, bless Jim, and especially bless him with salvation that he may enjoy eternity in heaven.   You said the measure by which I give, is the measure by which I will receive (Matthew 7:2). I want to receive your blessing abundantly and ungrudgingly, so I ask your enabling to pronounce this blessing as fully and as ungrudgingly as I can.   When I put together much of the Bible’s teaching (judge not lest you be judged, give and it shall be given unto you, love your enemies, etc.) it seems your justice is such that you will treat me like I treat others. I was your enemy, so it is right for you to treat me with the kindness and generosity or the severity with which I treat my enemy. I want you to ‘forget’ the way I have hurt you, not, of course, in the sense that you lose your mental powers, but in the sense that you never again hold it against me. So that’s the way I should ‘forget’ Jim’s sin against me. It would be wonderful to have it wiped from my memory. My guess, however, is that you want me to grow more like you by handling this memory in a Christlike manner and ‘forget’ it in the sense of not holding Jim’s past actions against him.   Until he changes, I feel I should avoid putting myself in a situation where he might again harm me, unless in your loving wisdom you specifically ask me to act differently. I think I sometimes manage to hide my real motives from even myself, but you see right through me. I guess my greatest motivation is to protect myself from getting hurt. Beyond this, however, I am my brother’s keeper and I must act in love towards Jim. I don’t want him to fall into sin because of me. By making it easy for Jim to hurt me, I would be making myself available to be used as a tool of Satan to tempt Jim. For me to knowingly do this would be sinfully irresponsible. I pray, however, that Jim changes and that when he changes you give me the faith to trust him. In the meantime, I ask your help that I act as cautiously as I should, without holding any ill-feeling towards him.   I’ll try not to get hung-up about my feelings because I know the Evil One can toy with them. No matter how I feel, I ask you to treat Jim as kindly as I want you to treat me, and I refuse to give in to spiritual pride and regard myself as being better than Jim. The satanic illusion that I am morally superior is very convincing, but I take it by faith that I deserve eternity in hell. Before you saved me I was dead in my sin. No one can get deader than dead. So no one’s spiritual condition could be any worse than mine was.   I’ve stopped trying to handle this situation my way. Your loving wisdom and power and justice are far superior to anything I could dream up. I now hand this whole situation to you to deal with as you see fit. So I thank you that the healing process has begun. I can stop fretting and start celebrating. I have a spiritual enemy who will try to make things seem as if they haven’t changed, but I know things are now different because you are a prayer-answering God. I know that people on the road to physical recovery may at some stages of their healing feel worse rather than better. So I’ll do my best not to let the way I feel affect my certainty that you are healing me. I will endeavor to keep thanking you for my healing, no matter how I happen to feel at that moment, just like at times I’ve had to trust you for my salvation when I have not felt saved. You are trustworthy!   Amen. Those who forgive much are granted a unique opportunity to display Christlikeness. It is my conviction that just as martyrs are especially honored in heaven so are those who have suffered great injustice and yet have forgiven. Even if their suffering happened before they knew Christ, if their forgiveness is because of Christ, their reward is waiting for them.   Resentment is a terrifying affliction. The scariest thing about this ‘heart disease’ is that it turns a normal person into a spiritual monster. People holding a grudge are so blinded by pain and pride that they feel morally superior to others (the person they resent, if no one else). They become so infatuated with someone else’s moral failure that they lose sight of their own spiritual condition. They are tragically unaware that they have set themselves up as judge (as God, in fact) and become hypocrites. They are like people driving down a road, so intent on telling off another driver for bad driving that they take their eyes off the road and crash into another car. No one is in a more dangerous spiritual situation. They have cut themselves off from God’s forgiveness. In his mercy, God will forgive anyone who seeks forgiveness, but the tragedy is that hypocrites will never seek it. They have fooled themselves into imagining they don’t need forgiveness for their hypocritical attitude. Anyone – a serial killer, child molester, you name it – who realizes his need of forgiveness, is better off.   You can begin the healing process in your own life by opening yourself up to the divine Healer and inviting the God of all comfort into your painful situation. It could be a deeply healing experience for you to read this webpage to God as a heart-felt prayer, replacing the name of Jim with the name of the person who has hurt you, and modifying the gender, and anything else, as you feel necessary. If you can’t pray a certain part with honesty or sincerity, tell God about it and get as close to it as you can. For instance, you might pray ‘help me to be able to say so and so with sincerity,’ or ‘I don’t presently feel so and so but by an act of my will I declare so and so.’   Your loving Lord longs to wrap his arms around you and hold you close. Don’t fear the pain of forgiving the person who has hurt you. It is nothing compared to the joy of knowing God’s blessing and opening yourself up to God’s healing of your hurts.   Final Remarks   Forgiving others is a tough one, partly because it is so critical to our own emotional and spiritual well-being that our spiritual enemy strongly attacks us on this issue. I find that people who have huge difficulty forgiving others, often have difficulty forgiving themselves. The two things tend to go hand in hand. When we realize how much God has forgiven us, it is easier for us to act more Godlike and have that same forgiving attitude towards ourselves and others. For this reason, I recommend my pages about handling guilt. There’s a link at the end of this webpage.   The decision to forgive is like deciding to break a bad habit. It’s a highly significant moment, but it’s only the beginning of the end. Like other bad habits, the craving for resentment will return and each time you will again need to hand it over to the Lord and deny yourself the self-destructive pleasure of wallowing in the mud of resentment. Since the desire to harbor ill-feeling is a temptation, my webseries about overcoming temptation should encourage you. (You’ll find a link at the end of this webpage.) Each time the ugly temptation returns and you resist it, you have experienced a significant victory, which powers your spiritual growth. Growing spiritually is usually painful, but the rewards last forever.   Try repeatedly telling yourself, ‘I will not think of blue giraffes.’ Of course, the more you try, the more your mind will be filled with thoughts and images of blue giraffes. To constantly focus on forgiving is a little like that. It is likely to inflame your emotions, rather than calm them. After doing your best to forgive, instead of continuing to focus on forgiving that person, focus on loving the person. And one of the best ways to express love is to pray for the person. This brings the almighty God of love into the situation. Once he is involved, the possibilities are mind-boggling.   My friend Louise Plaskett shares some intriguing thoughts:   It’s easier to be bitter Than to feel the pain of grief It’s easier to be angry Than look for true relief It’s easier to blame someone For all the sufferings It’s easier to sit alone When imperfect grace stings But if my Lord I’d follow I’ll not seek ease, escape I’ll face myself and give to Him My pain, even for rape And when my bitter heart is healed And sweet love reigns supreme I’ll never feel rejected again My words will be pure cream For I will say as He did Forgive them, they know not And with those words will flee away My dirty bitter spot I pray my Lord this day, please wash My heart and sweeten it That praises free of bitterness Rise by Thy Holy Spirit.     There’s more:  There is another, very different side to this matter. Although warped by our own selfishness and hypocrisy, our yearning to see the execution of justice originated in the heart of God. The Lord is furious at the way you have been treated. He will avenge what you have suffered. For a moving insight into this aspect of God’s heart, see  Sweet revenge! The Execution of Justice.

Serious, Do-It-Yourself Healing Of inner pain, anger or distress from trauma, bereavement, divorce, breakup, abuse, tragedy, etc   Compassionate Help   Whether the emotional pain be from bereavement, relationship breakup, post traumatic stress disorder, family disputes, financial disaster, or whatever, the deepest part of a person can seem incurably wounded. You, however, can be among the countless thousands who have discovered the secret to healing. If you have suffered rape or sexual interference there is a version of this page just for you: Do-It-Yourself Healing from Sexual Abuse     Few of those who are heroes in my eyes see themselves in that light. Instead, they are pounded by low self-esteem and condemn themselves mercilessly. If you have endured distress or torment for quite some time, you are most likely worthy not only of deep compassion, but deep admiration. This webpage is not about empathizing with those who are heroically battling inner pain or depression, however. I have other pages where that is the focus. This page grapples with the tough issues on which healing hinges.   Sadly, time does not heal. Time affords us opportunities to find healing, but the mere passing of time accomplishes nothing. Our bodies will heal a minor flesh wound without our conscious intervention, and so in that case it might seem that time heals. Even with the physical, however, a more serious wound will require conscious treatment to avoid dangerous complications. With inner wounds, the pain and distress will still be with you when you are a grandparent, unless you find full healing. There is no need for alarm, however. Healing is available.   Part of what makes us human is having an acute sense of right and wrong and a compelling need to apportion blame. The range of things that can trigger the blame treadmill is enormous. Examples include relationship breakup, job loss, domestic violence, financial reversal, bereavement, trauma, serious illness, birth defects, disability, natural disaster, ridicule, unpopularity, family disputes, crime, tragedy, and on and on we could go.   It turns out that the extent of your healing teeters upon where you put the blame. The usual choices end up tormenting us year after year but there is one that brings the relief we desperately need. Chances are that certain parts of the following will seem of little relevance and yet warrant more of your attention than you expect. Deep down, matters we have rarely concerned ourselves with, or seem fully resolved, are likely to at least occasionally gnaw away at us. Even after significant progress we can often find still deeper levels of peace and healing we wish we had discovered earlier. Let’s explore the common and not so common choices in a passionate search for the option that liberates us into healing and wholeness.     What Can We Do With The Blame?   1.   We could choose to heap the blame and shame upon ourselves   Note:  Most of this section is repeated in part of another of my webpages. So if you have already read  Cure for Self-Hate  feel free to skip to  the next part , but please  read the rest of this page because it has many important insights.     What torment this option brings! So many precious lives have been ruined or tragically shortened by unfounded or hideously distorted feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Young men and women of high morals can become so brainwashed into wrongly thinking themselves to be ‘trash’ that they end up needlessly cheapening themselves.   Even if you truly have acted despicably and are highly blameworthy, however, you will still need to get past this and move on. Tormenting yourself helps no one. We will briefly address those who needlessly blame themselves but further on in this webpage you will discover that even if you were as blameworthy as your worst nightmares, your hope would still be boundless. If you really are guilty of appalling atrocities, recovering from your past offenses in a morally and psychologically effective way is as important and as possible for you, as it is for the most innocent of people.   Let’s for the moment, however, look at some common reasons for people being mistakenly convinced that something is their fault.         *   Hindsight is Unrealistic   An obvious factor in self-blame is that hindsight empowers us to see with far greater clarity than was possible at the time. What is obvious afterwards, is seldom so obvious before events unfold. What at the time seemed a remote possibility looks certain after it happens. It is common when grieving the loss of a loved one, for example, to blame ourselves for things that were at the time largely beyond our control and/or ability to predict.   In real life, a person is often caught off guard and when things escalate he or she is paralyzed by shock.   If you had suffered previous traumas that had certain similarities to a later predicament, instead of those experiences making you wiser, they could actually deaden your ability to avoid the situation, due to the crippling psychological force known as learned helplessness. The tauma of having once been subjected to a situation in which resistance was useless or achieved nothing (a child being overpowered or outwitted by an adult, for example) programs us to expect that in a similar situation, resistance will again be useless. This is explained far more convincingly in a link at the end of this page, but we need to move on.        *  The Dangers of Low Self-Esteem   Another factor triggering self-blame is that it is common for people who are hurting to have been relentlessly brainwashed in their most impressionable years that they are “hopeless” or “bad” or “can’t do a thing right” or are “not as capable as their brother or sister.” These lies eventually come to be accepted as truth by the victims of these putdowns. Tragically, these lies often begin in people’s most impressionable years, breaking their self-esteem to the point where they settle for abusive partners, who further erode their self-esteem.   Once our self-image hardens, we filter all new information to conform to our self-image. So when people say positive things about us, we disbelieve them or it hardly registers with us that the words were ever spoken, whereas we latch on to every negative comment as confirmation of our mistaken beliefs about ourselves.   It is not uncommon to unconsciously surround ourselves with people who reinforce our poor self-image and to feel uncomfortable around more positive and/or well-respected or esteemed people. It is astounding, for example, how many daughters of alcoholics end up marrying alcoholics, despite promising themselves they would never do so. Even though we can only reform ourselves, never someone else, often these people marry alcoholics because they feel a strong compulsion to prove they can reform an alcoholic, since they see their father’s continued alcoholism as proof that they had failed. Of course, by entering such a marriage, they are setting themselves up for more pain and more experiences that they will mistakenly interpret as confirmation that they are “failures.”   Perhaps because he was not the first father she had known, a friend of mine regarded her step-father’s alcoholism as her mother’s responsibility and so felt no pressure to marry an alcoholic. However, her father’s actions caused her to feel unloved. This led her to marry the first man who would have her, since she presumed that no one else ever would. Her thirty-eight years of marriage were unhappy, largely because she had chosen to marry someone who was not good at communicating his love and she kept interpreting his every word and action to line up with her conviction that she was unlovable.   I know someone whose mother has the psychological disorder of narcissism and is impossible to please. It seems more than coincidence that, until my friend grew in self-esteem, she kept ending up in jobs in which the boss was a female who was as impossible to please as her mother. In one job, her boss made enemies of everyone. In another, the boss surrounded herself with women whose spirit was broken because they came from abuse backgrounds and kept putting them down. My friend was only vaguely aware that her motivation in her job choices was to prove herself capable of winning the approval of someone like her mother, since she had failed to do this as a child. She picked jobs with bosses so much like her mother, however, that no one could ever win their approval. So my friend kept being put down, with the result that all her life experiences seemed to confirm her false self-image.   The ways we can perpetuate a false self-image are almost endless, and men are just as susceptible as women. For example, I always assumed I was too undesirable for any woman to ever date me and I was never proved wrong because I was so sure that every woman would reject me that I never dared ask anyone for a date.   For someone with low self-esteem, blaming oneself can feel so right that the person might not even bother to rationally examine the matter.   Rebuilding one’s self-image can be as challenging as rebuilding a bombed house, and to break the habit of continually thinking negatively about ourselves can be as difficult as it is for a heavy smoker to quit smoking. At the end of this page is a valuable link about how to complete the challenging task, but it is best to leave it until completing this page.        *   An Attempt to Feel in Control   If the real offender were not you but someone emotionally important to you or someone you are dependent upon – a lover or family member, for example – the thought of concluding that that person is wrong or depraved can be so devastating that you find it easier to blame yourself than blame the offender. Wives who are economically and/or emotionally dependent upon an abusive husband, might rather believe it is their fault than try to cope with feeling trapped. To give another example, children desperately need the security of knowing that their parents are good, trustworthy people who will protect, comfort and nurture them. This need can be so intense that they will choose to believe they were at fault rather than face the terrifying reality that they are exposed to continual danger that is utterly beyond their control.        *   The High Status of the Offender   If an offender is someone highly respected, such as a community leader, the pressure can be immense to doubt one’s own judgment, rather than doubt the abuser’s integrity. If the person is esteemed as a spiritual authority, it might seem so unthinkable that he could be wrong that his opinions are regarded as being more trustworthy than one’s own conscience or biblical interpretation. Spiritual abuse then becomes a distinct possibility.        *   If Your Distress Originated During Childhood . . .   If you were a child when the offense occurred, additional forces come into play, although they still influence us even as adults. Children are programmed (and perhaps even have an inbuilt tendency) to respect and believe adults or much older children. Often their very survival – as well as their rapid development – hinges on it. In what only adults can recognize as a life-or-death situation, it is essential for children to obey immediately. Little children can learn and mature at the required rate only by unquestioning acceptance of what adults teach them. So when adults (or older children) do wrong, children not only lack the maturity and intellectual ability to see through the lie, they have a strong, natural urge to trust and obey.   Adults can cruelly manipulate the emotions of their victims until tender consciences are shattered by an overwhelming burden of false guilt. If an adult insists upon secrecy, it not only inflames the conviction that something shamefully wrong is occurring, it forces victims to keep their emotions dangerously bottled up.          *   Scrupulosity   No one’s conscience is perfect. Even St Paul saw his conscience as fallible (1 Corinthians 4:4). Certain medical or mental conditions and/or spiritual attacks, however, render a person’s conscience exceptionally unreliable, causing them to feel excessively condemned over minor lapses, or things they have no control over. Anxiety disorders, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, are a common example of conditions that can play havoc with a person’s conscience without the person having the slightest idea of the link.   Regardless of how justified our guilt feelings are, however, once self-blame starts, we soon find ourselves imprisoned by a guilt-ridden cycle of self-loathing that simply gets harder and harder to break free from, as the years grind on. The most saintly person on the planet has regrets, but once we view ourselves as unforgivable, motivation to keep doing the right thing usually vanishes in a swamp of hopelessness.   It is only natural to act out our self-image, no matter how contrary to reality that self-image is. Many of us are tempted to magnify our own guilt and underrate the guilt of ‘respectable’ people. The reality, however, is that – except for Jesus – the best of earth’s inhabitants has at some time or another done inexcusable things. Trying to pretend we have never done the inexcusable is like trying to ignore cancer. We can’t simply ignore reasons for blaming ourselves for at least some avoidable things we have done. We must somehow find a highly legitimate way to forgive ourselves. Keep reading, and you will find the answers you need.   We have listed powerful psychological forces that pressure us to  falsely  blame ourselves. To delve into them any further, however, would probably be counterproductive. It would most likely only cause us to shift the blame. Despite initially seeming like welcome relief, shifting the blame ends up like moving a red hot iron from burning our back to burning our stomach. What we most need – and this webpage is providing it – is an overview to see where the blame game leads.   2.   We could blame other people   The person whose action actually hurt us is the obvious target, but other possibilities are people whom we feel should have provided more protection.   Blaming people other than oneself is attractive, not only because others might undeniably deserve severe punishment, but also because blaming them sometimes seems the only way to help relieve the crushing weight of guilt (whether justified or not) upon ourselves. The problem, however, is that blaming others causes resentment and bitterness to keep infecting a hurting person’s inner wound, thus preventing healing.   It’s as though someone broke your hand. This makes you so mad that every day as you pass that person’s photo hanging on the wall, you punch it with your broken hand. The release of pent up anger might feel good, but the constant punching prolongs your agony by preventing your hand from ever healing. It turns out that a desire to see someone else suffer ends up perpetuating our own suffering.   The devastating thing is that resentment is addictive. Like a junkie, we focus so much on the temporary relief that resentment offers that we hardly realize that it inflames the downer that follows, and so the agonizing cycle continues.   To decide to make the ending of your torment dependent upon how much the offender ends up regretting what he/she did, is to decide to perpetuate your torture. It needlessly reduces your life to an on-going tragedy by permanently gluing your destiny to the person who hurt you. To make your peace and happiness dependent upon what your enemy does or what happens to him/her is to empower the person (even if he/she is now dead). It is to surrender control of your life and needlessly make yourself a victim again.   Isn’t it time to stop being your enemy’s plaything? Wouldn’t it be good to stop giving him/her control over your emotions and well-being? Don’t you long to take back that control and truly live again?   And here is another dilemma: what if what drove the offender to act so despicably is that he/she suffered enormously at the hands of someone else? For example, sex offenders often end up that way because they themselves were victims of child sex abuse. You might consider it inexcusable that anyone would end up causing someone to suffer, no matter how messed up they were by what was done to them and no matter how much they are reeling in never-ending inner pain and confusion. Nevertheless, is it right for you to consider yourself morally superior to such a person if you, too, have wanted another person to suffer as a result of what you have suffered? (In your case, the person you have wanted to suffer might be the offender, but it is still wanting someone to suffer because of what you have suffered.) Maybe you are too filled with rage to see that at present.   Despite our fanciful notions, it is unlikely that we could ever see anyone suffer so profoundly as to satisfy our lust for revenge. Moreover, as people keep discovering to their dismay, it is our pain that drives the desire for revenge and, except for Jesus, no one else’s pain can lessen our own pain. So the tragedy is that if we get stuck on the revenge path, in fifty years’ time we will still be no closer to a resolution.   I often hike in wilderness areas infested with snakes so venomous that without specialized medical treatment I might have only a couple of hours to live after being bitten. Suppose a snake bit me, then slid out of sight. I would be a fool to squander precious time angrily trying to find the snake and execute my vengeance on it. First priority must be to get medical attention.   It is critical for your own survival to focus on healing, not revenge.   Nevertheless, the offender’s actions could still be inexcusable. We are rightly infuriated at the thought of forgiving an offender, if it means what most of us think it means. Forgiveness carries no hint that the offense does not matter or it is minor, or that the victim is to blame. On the contrary, to forgive is to acknowledge that the offender is at fault. If it were not the offender’s fault, or he/she could not help it, or the offense were somehow excusable, there could be no forgiveness because there would be nothing to forgive.   For as long as we are dominated by the longing to see someone suffer, that person has succeeded in dragging us down to his despicable level. He hurt us. Now we want him to hurt. We degrade ourselves by entering the slimy world of hate. We needlessly stagger through life as a defeated person, floundering in the same moral mud in which our tormentor lives.   Regardless of how it manifests, resentment enslaves and corrupts its victims. Pathetically, people blinded by anger or hate usually feel morally superior to other people who are likewise blinded by anger or hate. Bitter people are beautiful people turned ugly. Thankfully the process is reversible, once we discover the liberating power of letting go of resentment.   We move from victim to victor only when we break free from resentment’s death-grip.   What the offender did could be blameworthy and deserving of the severest punishment. What you suffered must be avenged, and yet the irony is that if you seek revenge, you are keeping yourself from healing. This dilemma must be resolved, but how?   3.   We could blame God   Again, this option brings a degree of comfort, because it draws our attention away from ourselves, but it keeps the wound open and festering.   Just as by a cruel trick of the mind, innocent victims of domestic violence can  feel  justified in blaming themselves, we can feel justified in blaming God. Such feelings can be strong and yet are as tragically out of touch with reality as a dangerously skinny victim of anorexia nervosa feeling convinced that she is fat.   Here’s a tiny story to highlight in a few words the tragedy that keeps so many of us from discovering the key to healing.   A kind, soft-hearted doctor is particularly fond of a little patient of hers. All that the little child can focus on, however, is the vaccinations the doctor gave her and the painful stitches in her cuts. To her childish mind, that caring, tender-hearted doctor is not a healer but a torturer. One day the child is strolling along the sidewalk when suddenly she sees the doctor approaching. In her panic she flees across the road and is hit by a car, breaking her leg. Of course, the first on the scene is that dreaded doctor.   In time, her physical pain is overshadowed by the shame of walking with a severe limp. It scars her whole life, making her unpopular at school, later interfering with her marriage prospects, her career opportunities, her self image, and countless other aspects of her life.   All of this inflames her hatred of doctors. She spends her life avoiding them and so never discovers that simple surgery would have totally cured her limp.   Like that little child, a misunderstanding causes far too many of us to waste our lives resenting and avoiding God. What makes resentment against God so tragic is that if there truly is a caring, supernatural God, then he, like no therapist in the world, would understand and feel your pain and be able to bring you healing.   The God you thought you hated isn’t real. The real God, as contrasted with the monster your imagination might have created, is tender, compassionate, and understanding. This is not an easy concept to grasp, living as we do in a world that is violently opposed to his ways of love and justice.   Blaming God keeps you from the one Person who fully understands your anguish, who offers perfect comfort, and is able to bring supernatural healing. Resenting God is ultimately as self-destructive as suicide, and as counterproductive as a drowning person fighting off his rescuer.   Hating yourself is a dead end. Hating another person keeps you in pain. And hating God is just another variation on hating another person. In fact, resenting people can be as spiritually suicidal as resenting God. Both forms of resentment build a wall between you and your Healer.   Monkeys are easily trapped by placing food behind a small opening. When they slip their hand in and grab the food, their hand becomes a fist that is bigger than the opening. Refusing to let go, they remain firmly caught until seized by hunters.   For as long as we make a fist at someone (even at ourselves, or at God) we, too, are trapped. While we hold on to our bitterness, we are unable to leave our painful past behind and get on with life. There is just one other option. It’s now time to explore it.   4.   We could find the  ULTIMATE  scapegoat   For an adequate resolution, someone must take the blame, and yet our dilemma is that blaming keeps us bitter. It keeps us locked into the past and reliving it over and over and over. Like spitting into the wind, the blame game keeps flying back at us; soiling us and increasing our discomfort and annoyance. What we have suffered is so horrific that whoever we choose to blame can never suffer enough to bring us peace. Blaming is like a fistfight that will never end until we decide to stop the fight, and for as long as we keep fighting, we’ll keep getting still more hurt and wounded.   But the blame has to land somewhere. Something awful has occurred. For justice to be done and your honor restored, someone should suffer big-time. But who could suffer enough to bring you peace?   Were we to indulge in wishful thinking, we might say we need a willing scapegoat – someone who could miraculously absorb all blame, and suffer so horrifically and adequately for the offense as to pay the full debt to justice finally and fully extinguish all blame, rendering you fully vindicated, and spotlessly pure.   Of course, this is ridiculous. Or is it?   The term scapegoat actually comes from the Bible. I think you’ll be surprised how much insight this ancient practice gives us into the ultimate resolution of the blame dilemma we face.   Under the Old Covenant, two goats were chosen to atone for sin. These animals were, of course, utterly innocent of any human sin, and yet the sins of the entire nation were symbolically placed on them. One of them was sacrificed, paying the ultimate price for the nation’s sins – sins that were essentially average and yet in the final analysis took no less than the death penalty for the blame to be completely eliminated. One goat – called the scapegoat – stayed alive and, after the death of the other one, was allowed to escape into the desert, symbolically taking the sins away from the people, never to be seen again.   But we need more than symbols. We need the real thing.   So far, this seems irrelevant, but please stay with me for a moment until you begin to see how it could point to the answer you have been seeking. First, some background: animal sacrifices, though hopelessly inadequate to resolve our guilt problems, were divinely instituted to point prophetically to the ultimate sacrifice. The sacrifice to end all sacrifices would have to be human, since it is humans who are blameworthy. But to end all blame, the perfect sacrificial victim would, like the goats, have to be utterly blameless. Unless he had absolute moral perfection – like no other human the world has ever seen – he would be suffering merely for his own imperfections, not for what has shattered us. This ultimate sacrifice is the One of whom John the Baptist said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.’   That  two  goats were needed to atone for the nation’s sins – one dying and then the other released alive – points to the death and the subsequent resurrection of Jesus, both of which were needed to resolve utterly the guilt of humanity’s offenses. Just as Jesus rose to a new life, so he has the power to give us a new life, after fully extinguishing all blame and shame.   This remains bizarre and irrelevant to your pain  unless there actually is a supernatural God who loves you so intensely that humanity’s only true Innocent took upon himself all the blame, letting himself be tormented to death so that you could have his peace and purity and rise with him to a new life that begins here and now.   Studying ancient history at university proved to me the historical certainty of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. I went on to major in psychology and it was while studying that subject that I became convinced of the unique power of Jesus to do what psychology could never attain. So certain am I that this is the most powerful way of freeing people from serious afflictions, that instead of pursuing psychology after graduation, I determined to devote my life to helping people discover the supernatural power to heal and transform lives that only the eternal Son of God could achieve.   Jesus wants to take upon himself all the guilt, all the horror, and all the shame you have suffered or ever deserve. He wants every trace of filth to be dumped on him until it destroys him – which it did – because in destroying him, its power to touch you is also destroyed.   ‘But Jesus had nothing to do with what I suffered,’ you object, ‘He was innocent.’ Yes, Jesus was innocent. In fact, the intensity of his innocence and purity is like white that causes every other thing that we ever thought was white to show up as gray. Relative to him, the purest of virgins, or the kindest, most saintly person is sin-stained. And yet, Christ was stripped naked, publicly exposed, humiliated, savagely beaten and his body cruelly violated until finally he died. He did that for you and me.   At first thought it seems inconceivable that an innocent man allowing himself to be tortured to death could heal someone nearly two thousand years later. You deserve an explanation. There are three difficulties in trying to explain the most significant event in all human history, however.   First, explanations are lifeless. Sitting through a lecture about the psychology of being in love, for instance, is very different to being hit by a tidal wave of head-over-heels love. The realm of God consists not of talk, but power (1 Corinthians 4:20). We need a life-changing connection to the infinite power of Almighty God, not some quaint philosophy or feel-good story.   The second difficulty is that Jesus and what he has accomplished is so unique that there is nothing in our experience that can provide an adequate comparison.   Third, even a summary of an attempted explanation would be so long as to test your patience. I want to rush you to the benefits. I touch just a few highlights in  The key to supernatural healing.     The Benefits   In his cold, rational assessment of the atrocities he had committed earlier in his life, one of Christianity’s most revered holy people – the apostle Paul – concluded that he was the greatest of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). Nevertheless, he discovered the secret of a squeaky clean conscience. This rendered him spiritually invincible, in that he was resistant to temptations to judge others harshly, because he saw himself as having been equally as worthy of hell as those who tortured him and tried to kill him. He never had to try to defend his past because he knew he was as bad as anyone could get, and yet he enjoyed the wonder of knowing his conscience was as pure as crystal. What Paul enjoyed is available to everyone who realizes he/she deserves hell and that Jesus died to personally absorb all blame for the offenses that have touched us and to give us Jesus’ innocence.   Jesus always takes the side of those who refuse to look down on others, but instead focus on their own need for forgiveness. Here’s just one example. Jesus said:   Luke 18:10-14  “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”   Through Christ, anyone can be made spotlessly innocent in the eyes of humanity’s holy Judge, no matter how sordid, perverse or horrific his or her past has been. From the perspective of the perfection of God’s standards, a divinely forgiven mass murderer is infinitely more righteous than anyone who has not come to Christ for cleansing, even if that Christless person feels spotlessly clean and seems the most saintly person on the planet.   The uniqueness of Jesus and his suffering makes possible a spiritual exchange whereby he takes from you every speck of humiliation and failure and sin, and puts it on himself. In exchange you take upon yourself Christ’s moral perfection. He gets your sin and shame and God’s anger – that’s what killed him – and you get his holiness and honor and God’s smile of approval.   Reeling under the horror of something highly regrettable, it is natural to feel compelled to keep replaying the events over and over in one’s mind, endlessly interrogating oneself, trying to ascertain the extent of one’s guilt or innocence.  What if I hadn’t done that? Or what if I had done this?  Nagging doubts persist, and so the dreaded cycle grinds on and on.   The great relief that Christ brings is that he has so powerfully dealt with  real  guilt that even if people plagued with unbearable  false  guilt were actually a thousand times more evil than they imagine, Christ would still long to purify them and make them as if they had never sinned.   Irrespective of whether the guilt is real or just a nightmare, God longs for you to enjoy the exquisite peace of knowing that through spiritual union with Christ, you have the exquisitely flawless purity of God himself. One of the things that makes this purity so liberating is that we no longer have to agonize over humanly unanswerable questions, trying to determine the degree of our real or imagined guilt in past events. The matter can finally rest in peace. It was buried when Christ was buried. His death ended the matter. Whatever our share of the guilt really is (from zero to a hundred percent), Christ fully absorbed it within himself. It died when he died. Our innocence is restored the moment we trust Jesus to bring about the spiritual exchange of our imperfections for his holiness and our shame for the eternal honor that is his.   Every valid reason for questions about guilt churning through your mind was laid to rest when Jesus’ mutilated corpse was placed in the tomb. And you gain a brand new and holy life when by faith you identify with the crucified Lord who in holiness burst through the tomb to live forevermore.   The extent to which we feel the need to blame ourselves or someone else, indicates how much we are needlessly tormenting ourselves by holding on to the pain; refusing to let the supernatural God resolve the matter.   Our need to assign blame, also measures how much we have yet to fully absorb the fact that Jesus died for the sins of the entire world.   To truly believe that Jesus died for the sins of the world, is to believe he took the full blame – having paid the ultimate price of the death penalty – for every sin that has ever been committed. You will therefore believe there is no blame left over to assign to  anyone . By his horrific torture he bore full punishment for it all.   To limit our understanding of what Jesus’ suffering achieved is to strangle the source of our very life, both now and eternally. On the other hand, allowing the full implications to explode within us is the most liberating experience any human can have.   Suppose a woman let doctors treat some of her ailments but refused to let them examine the lump that will kill her if left untreated. That is like letting Jesus treat some of our problems, but insisting on dealing with the critical blame issue ourselves. In the final analysis, to stop blaming and let Jesus take all the blame is the only workable option.   Forgiving someone who has hurt us does not mean shifting blame from the other party to ourselves or trying to minimize the horrific gravity of the offense. That would not facilitate healing. Christian forgiving transfers all blame to the cross. We find it so hard to let go and entrust the blame and justice issues to Jesus. Nevertheless, our peace and healing hinges on us letting go and letting Jesus bear that blame so that it ends up dead and buried with him and you can rise with him to a new life.   Moreover, as a consequence of Christ taking our shame, we become spiritually united with Almighty God. That opens up amazing possibilities, even miracles.   By miracles I mean sudden, dramatic healing of emotional wounds, rather than a more gradual recovery. Whether it is sudden or slow, the healing is still from God and almost always the slow healing does us the most good spiritually.   If miracles could be guaranteed, they would be labeled natural events, not miracles, even though the same God is as much behind the painting of this evening’s sunset as he is behind the most spectacular, instantaneous inner healing. I cannot guarantee the speed of healing. Nevertheless, there is mind-boggling power in prayers to the God of the universe, through Jesus (the only One by whom anyone can gain access to the God of gods).   The overview so far provided is too brief to make much sense, but see if the following expresses your feelings.   Like so many other people, I’ve wrestled with the issue of blame, and nothing I’ve tried has brought me peace. I need a new approach.   I need a revelation of how real and powerful Jesus is and how him suffering undeserved pain, shame and blame can bring me supernatural healing.   Of course, God is not human, and yet having had my trust violated by a human has made it hard for me to love and trust  anyone  – even God. Cold logic might say there is no reason to fear that God might act like a sinful, fallible human, but what I’ve suffered seems so overwhelming that it clouds my perception of everything.   Living, as I do, in a world crammed with people who pretend to love, just to get their selfish way – or even well-meaning people who unintentionally end up hurting others – it is hard to believe that God is so different. If, however, he is morally perfect, and filled with genuine love untainted by the slightest trace of human selfishness, then he truly is trustworthy. If God has infinite knowledge and wisdom, he must understand me even better than I understand myself. And if he really is love – not lust – then he will be patient and understanding as I try to reach out to him.   To be healed and freed from the oppressive burden of blame, I need to stop blaming myself and/or blaming others and/or blaming God. But this seems beyond me. I need divine help. And blame must go somewhere. Grave offenses have occurred. Justice must be done.   If God is truly good and a God of justice, then satisfying the need for justice must be an even bigger issue with him than with me – and it is huge with me. At the same time, being both faultlessly good and loving, he must want offenders to change and long to forgive them. Meeting all these requirements is simply too much for any human. I need God’s help to trust him to do it – and do it well. I need to hand all blame over to Jesus, not because he deserves blame but because if he somehow died for the sins of the entire world, he must want to take this burden from me.   Every journey must start somewhere. And we can’t attempt this one alone. We need divine help. Involving God is comforting, not the slightest scary, but it can seem scary because few of us realize how gentle and understanding God is.   There’s a simple way to ease you into this. If you agree with the last section of colored text, you can turn it into a down-to-earth prayer by reading it (aloud or inwardly) to God. To make it even easier, I have made that section into a prayer by reproducing it with minor changes and a couple more thoughts. For this prayer,  click here.

Do-It-Yourself Healing from Sexual Abuse   Free, Effective Therapy   Serious, Compassionate Help   Be it rape or indecent assault, child molestation or the sexual humiliation of a grandmother, the violation is one of the most devastating experiences anyone can ever suffer. The deepest part of a person seems incurably wounded. Countless thousands of survivors, however, have discovered the secret to healing.   Sexual abuse survivors are worthy not only of deep compassion but, almost without exception, they have won my admiration. They are truly survivors, and in my eyes heroes, and I am saddened that few see themselves in that light. This webpage is not about empathizing with survivors, however. I have other pages in which that is the focus. This one grapples with the tough issues on which healing hinges.   The horror of sexual abuse is that no matter how severe the physical pain, the mental torment is even worse. Even if the physical pain ended in childhood, your inner pain and distress will still be with you when you are a grandparent, unless you find full healing. Sadly, time does not heal. Time affords us opportunities to find healing, but the mere passing of time accomplishes nothing. Our bodies will heal a minor flesh wound without our conscious intervention, and so in that case it might seem that time heals. Even with the physical, however, a more serious wound will require conscious treatment to avoid dangerous complications. There is no need for alarm, however. Inner healing is available.   Part of what makes us human is having an acute sense of right and wrong and a compelling need to apportion blame. It turns out that much of your healing teeters upon where you put that blame. The usual choices end up tormenting us year after year but there is one that brings the relief we desperately need. Chances are that certain parts of the following will seem of little relevance and yet warrant more of your attention than you expect. Deep down, matters we have rarely concerned ourselves with, or seem fully resolved, are likely to at least occasionally gnaw away at us. Even after significant progress we can often find still deeper levels of peace and healing we wish we had discovered earlier. Let’s explore the options in a passionate search for the one that liberates us into healing and wholeness.       What Can We Do With The Blame?   1.   We could choose to heap the blame and shame upon ourselves   What torment this option brings! So many precious lives have been ruined or tragically shortened by unfounded or hideously distorted feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Young men and women of high morals can become so brainwashed into wrongly thinking themselves to be ‘trash’ that they end up needlessly cheapening themselves.   The origin of this tragically false image is understandable. One of the great traumas of sexual abuse is that the innocent are made to feel partners in wickedness. And if it occurred during childhood – one’s most impressionable years – the pressures are magnified even more.   Even if you truly have acted despicably and are highly blameworthy, however, you will still need to get past this and move on. Tormenting yourself helps no one. We will briefly address those who needlessly blame themselves but further on in this webpage you will discover that even if you were as blameworthy as your worst nightmares, your hope would still be boundless. If you really are guilty of appalling atrocities, recovering from your past offenses in a morally and psychologically effective way is as important and as possible for you, as it is for the most innocent of people.   Let’s for the moment, however, look at some common reasons for people being mistakenly convinced that something is their fault.         *   Hindsight is Unrealistic   An obvious factor in self-blame is that hindsight allows you to see things you might have been able to do to avoid the horrible experience. The key point, however, is that only the offender knew where this was leading. Only afterwards were you able to know how depraved the offender was. You had expected the offender to act as decently and trustworthy as most people do. You were caught off guard and when things escalated you were paralyzed by shock. If you had suffered previous abuse, instead of it making you wiser, it would actually deaden your ability to avoid the situation, due to the crippling psychological force known as learned helplessness. The trauma of having once been subjected to a situation in which resistance was useless or achieved nothing (a child being overpowered or outwitted by an adult, for example) programs us to expect that in a similar situation, resistance will again be useless. Another factor triggering self-blame is that the human body is designed to send pleasure signals to the brain in response to sexual stimulus. This is an unavoidable physiological fact and has nothing to do with morality or with secretly wanting or approving of the offense. Like the other points, this is explained far more convincingly in links at the end of this page, but we need to move on.         *  The Dangers of Low Self-Esteem   A signficant factor triggering self-blame is that it is common for people who are hurting to have been relentlessly brainwashed that they are “hopeless” or “bad” or “can’t do a thing right” or are “not as capable as their brother or sister.” These lies eventually come to be accepted as truth by the victims of these putdowns. Tragically, these often lies begin in people’s most impressionable years, breaking their self-esteem to the point where they settle for abusive partners, who further erode their self-esteem.   Once our self-image hardens, we filter all new information to conform to our self-image. So when people say positive things about us, we disbelieve them or it hardly registers with us that the words were ever spoken, whereas we latch on to every negative comment as confirmation of our mistaken beliefs about ourselves.   It is not uncommon to unconsciously surround ourselves with people who reinforce our poor self-image and to feel uncomfortable around more positive and/or well-respected or esteemed people. It is astounding, for example, how many daughters of alcoholics end up marrying alcoholics, despite promising themselves they would never do so. Even though we can only reform ourselves, never someone else, often these people marry alcoholics because they feel a strong compulsion to prove they can reform an alcoholic, since they see their father’s continued alcoholism as proof that they had failed. Of course, by entering such a marriage, they are setting themselves up for more pain and more experiences that they will mistakenly interpret as confirmation that they are “failures.”   I know someone whose mother has the psychological disorder of narcissism and is impossible to please. It seems more than coincidence that, until my friend grew in self-esteem, she kept ending up in jobs in which the boss was a female who was as impossible to please as her mother. In one job, her boss made enemies of everyone. In another, the boss surrounded herself with women whose spirit was broken because they came from abuse backgrounds and kept putting them down. My friend was only vaguely aware that her motivation in her job choices was to prove herself capable of winning the approval of someone like her mother, since she had failed to do this as a child. She picked jobs with bosses so much like her mother, however, that no one could ever win their approval. So my friend kept being put down, with the result that all her life experiences seemed to confirm her false self-image.   The ways we can perpetuate a false self-image are almost endless, and men are just as susceptible as women. For example, I always assumed I was too undesirable for any woman to ever date me and I was never proved wrong because I was so sure that every woman would reject me that I never dared ask anyone for a date.   For someone with low self-esteem, blaming oneself can feel so right that the person might not even bother to rationally examine the matter.   Rebuilding one’s self-image can be as challenging as rebuilding a bombed house, and to break the habit of continually thinking negatively about ourselves can be as difficult as it is for a heavy smoker to quit smoking. At the end of this page is a valuable link about how to complete the challenging task, but it is best to leave it until completing this page.         *   An Attempt to Feel in Control   If the real offender were not you but someone emotionally important to you or someone you are dependent upon – a lover or family member, for example – the thought of concluding that that person is wrong or depraved can be so devastating that you find it easier to blame yourself than blame the offender. Wives who are economically and/or emotionally dependent upon an abusive husband, might rather believe it is their fault than try to cope with feeling trapped. To give another example, children desperately need the security of knowing that their parents are good, trustworthy people who will protect, comfort and nurture them. This need can be so intense that they will choose to believe they were at fault rather than face the terrifying reality that they are exposed to continual danger that is utterly beyond their control.        *   The High Status of the Offender   If an offender is someone highly respected in the community leader, the pressure can be immense to doubt one’s own judgment, rather than doubt the offender’s integrity. If the person is esteemed as a spiritual authority, it might seem so unthinkable that he could be wrong that his opinions are regarded as being more trustworthy than one’s own conscience or biblical interpretation. Spiritual abuse then becomes a distinct possibility.        *   If Your Distress Originated During Childhood . . .   If you were a child when the offense occurred, additional forces come into play, although they still influence us even as adults. Children are programmed (and perhaps even have an inbuilt tendency) to respect and believe adults or much older children. Often their very survival – as well as their rapid development – hinges on it. In what only adults can recognize as a life-or-death situation, it is essential for children to obey immediately. Little children can learn and mature at the required rate only by unquestioning acceptance of what adults teach them. So when adults (or older children) do wrong, children not only lack the maturity and intellectual ability to see through the lie, they have a strong, natural urge to trust and obey.   Adults can keep cruelly manipulating the emotions of their victims until tender consciences are shattered by an overwhelming burden of false guilt. If an adult insists upon secrecy, it not only inflames the conviction that something shamefully wrong is occurring, it forces victims to keep their emotions dangerously bottled up.          *   Scrupulosity   No one’s conscience is perfect. Even St Paul saw his conscience as fallible (1 Corinthians 4:4). Certain medical or mental conditions and/or spiritual attacks, however, render a person’s conscience exceptionally unreliable, causing them to feel excessively condemned over minor lapses, or things they have no control over. Anxiety disorders, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, are a common example of conditions that can play havoc with a person’s conscience without the person having the slightest idea of the link.   Regardless of how justified our guilt feelings are, however, once self-blame starts, we soon find ourselves imprisoned by a guilt-ridden cycle of self-loathing that simply gets harder and harder to break free from, as the years grind on. The most saintly person on the planet has regrets, but once we view ourselves as unforgivable, motivation to keep doing the right thing usually vanishes in a swamp of hopelessness.   It is only natural to act out our self-image, no matter how contrary to reality that self-image is. Many of us are tempted to magnify our own guilt and underrate the guilt of ‘respectable’ people. The reality, however, is that – except for Jesus – the best of earth’s inhabitants has at some time or another done inexcusable things. Trying to pretend we have never done the inexcusable is like trying to ignore cancer. We can’t simply ignore reasons for blaming ourselves for at least some avoidable things we have done. We must somehow find a highly legitimate way to forgive ourselves. Keep reading, and you will find the answers you need.   We have listed powerful psychological forces that pressure us to  falsely  blame ourselves. To delve into them any further, however, would probably be counterproductive. It would most likely only cause us to shift the blame. Despite initially seeming like welcome relief, shifting the blame ends up like moving a red hot iron from burning our back to burning our stomach. What we most need – and this webpage is providing it – is an overview to see where the blame game leads.   2.   We could blame other people   Frankly, anyone initiating sexual interference deserves more than the full weight of the law. Some victims of sexual violation suffer physical pain and others have pleasure inflicted upon them that trigger immense psychological problems, but all of them are victims of an atrocious crime that must be fully avenged.   Since the offender is exceptionally blameworthy, he (or she) is the obvious target of our blame. Other possibilities are people whom we feel should have provided us with more protection.   Blaming people other than oneself is attractive, not only because others (especially the violator) undeniably deserve severe punishment, but also because blaming them seems the only way to help relieve the crushing weight of false guilt on us. The problem, however, is that blaming others causes resentment and bitterness to keep infecting a hurting person’s inner wound, thus preventing healing.   It’s as though someone broke your hand. This makes you so mad that every day as you pass that person’s photo hanging on the wall, you punch it with your broken hand. The release of pent up anger might feel good, but the constant punching prolongs your agony by preventing your hand from ever healing. It turns out that a desire to see someone else suffer ends up perpetuating our own suffering.   The devastating thing is that resentment is addictive. Like a junkie, we focus so much on the temporary relief that resentment offers that we hardly realize that it inflames the downer that follows, and so the agonizing cycle continues.   To decide to make the ending of your torment dependent upon how much your abuser ends up regretting what he/she did, is to decide to perpetuate your torture. It needlessly reduces your life to an on-going tragedy by permanently gluing your destiny to the person who hurt you. To make your peace and happiness dependent upon what your abuser [enemy] does or what happens to him/her is to empower your abuser (even if he/she is now dead). It is to surrender control of your life and needlessly make yourself a victim again.   Isn’t it time to stop being your abuser’s plaything? Wouldn’t it be good to stop giving him/her control over your emotions and well-being? Don’t you long to take back that control and truly live again?   And here is another dilemma: what if what drove the offender to act so despicably is that he/she suffered enormously at the hands of someone else? For example, sex offenders often end up that way because they themselves were victims of child sex abuse. You might consider it inexcusable that anyone would end up causing another person to suffer, no matter how messed up they were by what was done to them and no matter how much they are reeling in never-ending inner pain and confusion. Nevertheless, is it right for you to consider yourself morally superior to such a person if you, too, have wanted someone to suffer as a result of what you have suffered? (In your case, the person you have wanted to suffer might be the offender, but it is still wanting someone to suffer because of what you have suffered.) Maybe you are too filled with rage to see that at present.   Despite our fanciful notions, it is unlikely that we could ever see anyone suffer so profoundly as to satisfy our lust for revenge. Moreover, as people keep discovering to their dismay, it is our pain that drives the desire for revenge and, except for Jesus, no one else’s pain can lessen our own pain. So the tragedy is that if we get stuck on the revenge path, in fifty years’ time we will still be no closer to a resolution.   I often hike in wilderness areas infested with snakes so venomous that without specialized medical treatment I might have only a couple of hours to live after being bitten. Suppose a snake bit me, then slid out of sight. I would be a fool to squander precious time angrily trying to find the snake and execute my vengeance on it. First priority must be to get medical attention.   It is critical for your own survival to focus on healing, not revenge. The fact remains, however, that the offender’s actions are inexcusable.   We are rightly infuriated at the thought of forgiving an offender, if it means what most of us think it means. Forgiveness carries no hint that the offense does not matter or it is minor, or that the victim is to blame. On the contrary, to forgive is to acknowledge that the offender is at fault. If it were not the offender’s fault, or he/she could not help it, or the offence were somehow excusable, there could be no forgiveness because there would be nothing to forgive.   For as long as we are dominated by the longing to see someone suffer, that person has succeeded in dragging us down to his despicable level. He hurt us. Now we want him to hurt. We degrade ourselves by entering the slimy world of hate. We needlessly stagger through life as a defeated person, floundering in the same moral mud in which our tormentor lives. Tragically, sex offenders are often themselves abuse victims with heart-wrenching stories. They failed to resolve their anger and pain and so inflict it on others.   Regardless of how it manifests, resentment enslaves and corrupts its victims. Pathetically, people blinded by anger or hate usually feel morally superior to other people who are likewise blinded by anger or hate. Bitter people are beautiful people turned ugly. Thankfully the process is reversible, once we discover the liberating power of letting go of resentment.   We move from victim to victor only when we break free from resentment’s death-grip.   What the offender did was blameworthy and deserving of the severest punishment. What you suffered must be avenged, and yet the irony is that if you seek revenge, it keeps you from healing. This dilemma must be resolved, but how?   3.  We could blame God   Again, this option brings a degree of comfort, because it draws our attention away from ourselves, but it keeps the wound open and festering.   Just as by a cruel trick of the mind, innocent rape victims can  feel  justified in blaming themselves, we can feel justified in blaming God. Such feelings can be strong and yet are as tragically out of touch with reality as a dangerously skinny victim of anorexia nervosa feeling convinced that she is fat.   Here’s a tiny story to highlight in a few words the tragedy that keeps so many sufferers of sexual abuse from discovering the key to healing.   A kind, soft-hearted doctor is particularly fond of a little patient of hers. All that the little child can focus on, however, is the vaccinations the doctor gave her and the painful stitches in her cuts. To her childish mind, that caring, tender-hearted doctor is not a healer but a torturer. One day the child is strolling along the sidewalk when suddenly she sees the doctor approaching. In her panic she flees across the road and is hit by a car, breaking her leg. Of course, the first on the scene is that dreaded doctor.   In time, her physical pain is overshadowed by the shame of walking with a severe limp. It scars her whole life, making her unpopular at school, later interfering with her marriage prospects, her career opportunities, her self image, and countless other aspects of her life.   All of this inflames her hatred of doctors. She spends her life avoiding them and so never discovers that simple surgery would have totally cured her limp.   Like that little child, a misunderstanding causes far too many survivors of sexual abuse to waste their lives resenting and avoiding God. What makes resentment against God so tragic is that if there truly is a caring, supernatural God, then he, like no therapist in the world, would understand and feel your pain and be able to bring you healing.   The God you thought you hated isn’t real. The real God, as contrasted with the monster your imagination might have created, is tender, compassionate, and understanding. This is not an easy concept to grasp, living as we do in a world that is violently opposed to his ways of love and justice.   Blaming God keeps you from the one Person who fully understands your anguish, who offers perfect comfort, and is able to bring supernatural healing. Resenting God is ultimately as self-destructive as suicide, and as counterproductive as a drowning person fighting off his rescuer.   Hating yourself is a dead end. Hating another person keeps you in pain. And hating God is just another variation on hating another person. In fact, resenting people can be as spiritually suicidal as resenting God. Both forms of resentment build a wall between you and your Healer.   Monkeys are easily trapped by placing food behind a small opening. When they slip their hand in and grab the food, their hand becomes a fist that is bigger than the opening. Refusing to let go, they remain firmly caught until seized by hunters.   For as long as we make a fist at someone (even at ourselves, or at God) we, too, are trapped. While we hold on to our bitterness, we are unable to leave our painful past behind and get on with life. There is just one other option. It’s now time to explore it.   3.   We could find the  ULTIMATE  scapegoat   For an adequate resolution, someone must take the blame, and yet our dilemma is that blaming keeps us bitter. It keeps us locked into the past and reliving it over and over and over. Like spitting into the wind, the blame game keeps flying back at us; soiling us and increasing our discomfort and annoyance. What we have suffered is so horrific that whoever we choose to blame can never suffer enough to bring us peace. Blaming is like a fistfight that will never end until we decide to stop the fight, and for as long as we keep fighting, we’ll keep getting still more hurt and wounded.   But the blame has to land somewhere. A grave offense has occurred. For justice to be done and your honor restored, someone should suffer big-time. But who could suffer enough to bring you peace?   Were we to indulge in wishful thinking, we might say we need a willing scapegoat – someone who could miraculously absorb all blame, and suffer so horrifically and adequately for the offense as to pay the full debt to justice finally and fully extinguish all blame, rendering you fully vindicated, and spotlessly pure.   Of course, this is ridiculous. Or is it?   The term scapegoat actually comes from the Bible. I think you’ll be surprised how much insight this ancient practice gives us into the ultimate resolution of the blame dilemma we face.   Under the Old Covenant, two goats were chosen to atone for sin. These animals were, of course, utterly innocent of any human sin, and yet the sins of the entire nation were symbolically placed on them. One of them was sacrificed, paying the ultimate price for the nation’s sins – sins that were essentially average and yet in the final analysis took no less than the death penalty for the blame to be completely eliminated. One goat – called the scapegoat – stayed alive and, after the death of the other one, was allowed to escape into the desert, symbolically taking the sins away from the people, never to be seen again.   But we need more than symbols. We need the real thing.   So far, this seems irrelevant, but please stay with me for a moment until you begin to see how it could point to the answer you have been seeking. First, some background: animal sacrifices, though hopelessly inadequate to resolve our guilt problems, were divinely instituted to point prophetically to the ultimate sacrifice. The sacrifice to end all sacrifices would have to be human, since it is humans who are blameworthy. But to end all blame, the perfect sacrificial victim would, like the goats, have to be utterly blameless. Unless he had absolute moral perfection – like no other human the world has ever seen – he would be suffering merely for his own imperfections, not for what has shattered us. This ultimate sacrifice is the One of whom John the Baptist said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.’   That  two  goats were needed to atone for the nation’s sins – one dying and then the other released alive – points to the death and the subsequent resurrection of Jesus, both of which were needed to resolve utterly the guilt of humanity’s offenses. Just as Jesus rose to a new life, so he has the power to give us a new life, after fully extinguishing all blame and shame.   This remains bizarre and irrelevant to your pain  unless there actually is a supernatural God who loves you so intensely that humanity’s only true Innocent took upon himself all the blame, letting himself be stripped naked and abused to death so that you could have his peace and purity and rise with him to a new life that begins here and now.   Studying ancient history at university proved to me the historical certainty of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. I went on to major in psychology and it was while studying that subject that I became convinced of the unique power of Jesus to do what psychology could never attain. So certain am I that this is the most powerful way of freeing people from serious afflictions, that instead of pursuing psychology after graduation, I determined to devote my life to helping people discover the supernatural power to heal and transform lives that only the eternal Son of God could achieve.   Jesus wants to take upon himself all the guilt, all the horror, and all the shame of your abuse. He wants every trace of filth to be dumped on him until it destroys him – which it did – because in destroying him, its power to touch you is also destroyed.   ‘But Jesus had nothing to do with what I suffered,’ you object, ‘He was innocent.’ Yes, Jesus was innocent. In fact, the intensity of his innocence and purity is like white that causes every other thing that we ever thought was white to show up as gray. Relative to him, the purest of virgins, or the kindest, most saintly person is sin-stained. And yet, Christ was stripped naked, publicly exposed, humiliated, savagely beaten and his body cruelly violated until finally he died. He did that for you and me.   At first thought it seems inconceivable that an innocent man allowing himself to be tortured to death could heal someone nearly two thousand years later. You deserve an explanation. There are three difficulties in trying to explain the most significant event in all human history, however.   First, explanations are lifeless. Sitting through a lecture about the psychology of being in love, for instance, is very different to being hit by a tidal wave of head-over-heels love. The realm of God consists not of talk, but power (1 Corinthians 4:20). We need a life-changing connection to the infinite power of Almighty God, not some quaint philosophy or feel-good story.   The second difficulty is that Jesus and what he has accomplished is so unique that there is nothing in our experience that can provide an adequate comparison.   Third, even a summary of an attempted explanation would be so long as to test your patience. I want to rush you to the benefits. I touch just a few highlights in  The key to supernatural healing.       The benefits   In his cold, rational assessment of the atrocities he had committed earlier in his life, one of Christianity’s most revered holy people – the apostle Paul – concluded that he was the greatest of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). Nevertheless, he discovered the secret of a squeaky clean conscience. This rendered him spiritually invincible, in that he was resistant to temptations to judge others harshly, because he saw himself as having been equally as worthy of hell as those who tortured him and tried to kill him. He never had to try to defend his past because he knew he was as bad as anyone could get, and yet he enjoyed the wonder of knowing his conscience was as pure as crystal. What Paul enjoyed is available to everyone who realizes he/she deserves hell and that Jesus died to personally absorb all blame for the offenses that have touched us and to give us Jesus’ innocence.   Jesus always takes the side of those who refuse to look down on others, but instead focus on their own need for forgiveness. Here’s just one example. Jesus said:   Luke 18:10-14  “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”   Through Christ, anyone can be made a chaste virgin, no matter how sordid, perverse or horrific his or her past has been. From the perspective of the perfection of God’s standards, a divinely forgiven prostitute is infinitely purer than anyone who has not come to Christ for cleansing, even if that Christless person feels spotlessly clean and is the purest virgin who has never even heard of sex.   The uniqueness of Jesus and his suffering makes possible a spiritual exchange whereby he takes from you every speck of humiliation and failure and sin, and puts it on himself. In exchange you take upon yourself Christ’s moral perfection. He gets your sin and shame and God’s anger – that’s what killed him – and you get his holiness and honor and God’s smile of approval.   Even without being subjected to deliberate emotional torture, the trauma of sexual molestation is so horrific as to grossly distort one’s self-image, often making a person feel more morally debased than other people. Reeling under the horror of what has happened, it is natural to feel compelled to keep replaying the events over and over in one’s mind, endlessly interrogating oneself, trying to ascertain the extent of one’s guilt or innocence.  What if I hadn’t done that? Or what if I had done this?  Nagging doubts persist, and so the dreaded cycle grinds on and on.   The great relief that Christ brings is that he has so powerfully dealt with  real  guilt that even if people plagued with unbearable  false  guilt were actually a thousand times more evil than they imagine, Christ would still long to purify them and make them as if they had never sinned.   Irrespective of whether the guilt is real or just a nightmare, God longs for you to enjoy the exquisite peace of knowing that through spiritual union with Christ, you have the exquisitely flawless purity of God himself. One of the things that makes this purity so liberating is that we no longer have to agonize over humanly unanswerable questions, trying to determine the degree of our real or imagined guilt in past events. The matter can finally rest in peace. It was buried when Christ was buried. His death ended the matter. Whatever our share of the guilt really is (from zero to a hundred percent), Christ fully absorbed it within himself. It died when he died. Our innocence is restored the moment we trust Jesus to bring about the spiritual exchange of our imperfections for his holiness and our shame for the eternal honor that is his.   Every valid reason for questions about guilt churning through your mind was laid to rest when Jesus’ mutilated corpse was placed in the tomb. And you gain a brand new and holy life when by faith you identify with the crucified Lord who in holiness burst through the tomb to live forevermore.   The extent to which we feel the need to blame ourselves or someone else, indicates how much we are needlessly tormenting ourselves by holding on to the pain; refusing to let the supernatural God resolve the matter.   Our need to assign blame, also measures how much we have yet to fully absorb the fact that Jesus died for the sins of the entire world.   To truly believe that Jesus died for the sins of the world, is to believe he took the full blame – having paid the ultimate price of the death penalty – for every sin that has ever been committed. You will therefore believe there is no blame left over to assign to  anyone . By his horrific torture he bore full punishment for it all.   To limit our understanding of what Jesus’ suffering achieved is to strangle the source of our very life, both now and eternally. On the other hand, allowing the full implications to explode within us is the most liberating experience any human can have.   Suppose a woman let doctors treat some of her ailments but refused to let them examine the lump that will kill her if left untreated. That is like letting Jesus treat some of our problems, but insisting on dealing with the critical blame issue ourselves. In the final analysis, to stop blaming and let Jesus take all the blame is the only workable option.   Forgiving someone who has hurt us does not mean shifting blame from the other party to ourselves or trying to minimize the horrific gravity of the offense. That would not facilitate healing. Christian forgiving transfers all blame to the cross. We find it so hard to let go and entrust the blame and justice issues to Jesus. Nevertheless, our peace and healing hinges on us letting go and letting Jesus bear that blame so that it ends up dead and buried with him and you can rise with him to a new life.   Moreover, as a consequence of Christ taking our shame, we become spiritually united with Almighty God. That opens up amazing possibilities, even miracles.   By miracles I mean sudden, dramatic healing of the wounds of sexual abuse, rather than a more gradual recovery. Whether it is sudden or slow, the healing is still from God and almost always the slow healing does us the most good spiritually.   If miracles could be guaranteed, they would be labeled natural events, not miracles, even though the same God is as much behind the painting of this evening’s sunset as he is behind the most spectacular, instantaneous healing of the wounds of sexual abuse. I cannot guarantee the speed of healing. Nevertheless, there is mind-boggling power in prayers to the God of the universe, through Jesus (the only One by whom anyone can gain access to the God of gods).   The overview so far provided is too brief to make much sense, but see if the following expresses your feelings.   Like so many other people, I’ve wrestled with the issue of blame, and nothing I’ve tried has brought me peace. I need a new approach.   I need a revelation of how real and powerful Jesus is and how his undeserved abuse can bring me supernatural healing.   Of course, God is not human, and yet having had my trust violated by a human has made it hard for me to love and trust  anyone  – even God. Cold logic might say there is no reason to fear that God might act like a sinful, fallible human, but what I’ve suffered seems so overwhelming that it clouds my perception of everything.   Living, as I do, in a world crammed with people who pretend to love, just to get their selfish way – or even well-meaning people who unintentionally end up hurting others – it is hard to believe that God is so different. If, however, he is morally perfect, and filled with genuine love untainted by the slightest trace of human selfishness, then he truly is trustworthy. If God has infinite knowledge and wisdom, he must understand me even better than I understand myself. And if he really is love – not lust – then he will be patient and understanding as I try to reach out to him.   To be healed and freed from the oppressive burden of blame, I need to stop blaming myself and/or blaming others and/or blaming God. But this seems beyond me. I need divine help. And blame must go somewhere. Grave offenses have occurred. Justice must be done.   If God is truly good and a God of justice, then satisfying the need for justice must be an even bigger issue with him than with me – and it is huge with me. At the same time, being both faultlessly good and loving, he must want offenders to change and long to forgive them. Meeting all these requirements is simply too much for any human. I need God’s help to trust him to do it – and do it well. I need to hand all blame over to Jesus, not because he deserves blame but because if he somehow died for the sins of the entire world, he must want to take this burden from me.   Every journey must start somewhere. And we can’t attempt this one alone. We need divine help. Involving God is comforting, not the slightest scary, but it can seem scary because few of us realize how gentle and understanding God is.   There’s a simple way to ease you into this. If you agree with the last section of colored text, you can turn it into a down-to-earth prayer by reading it (aloud or inwardly) to God. To make it even easier, I have made that section into a prayer by reproducing it with minor changes and a couple more thoughts. For this prayer,  click here.

The Key to Supernatural Healing   Why Jesus’ Suffering can Transform Your Life   A brief overview   Everything hinges on who that man on the cross really was. Jesus was not merely a unique miracle-worker and healer, an exceptionally good person, and an outstanding religious teacher. He is the eternal Son of God through whom and for whom everything in existence was made. As the rightful owner of every molecule in our bodies and everything we have ever used and abused, he is the Judge of all humanity. It is to him that you must one day give account for your every action.   The holy Lord yearns to destroy every source of evil like that which has caused you pain. A huge obstacle must first be dealt with, however. That’s where Jesus fits in. We rarely stop to consider that every human has in some way or another contributed to the evil on this planet. We have each lied, cheated, gossiped, stolen, or in some way hurt someone and thus added to human suffering. We want to draw a line as to what degree of inflicted suffering is excusable, and of course most of us carefully construct our artificial line so that we stand on the acceptable side of the divide. The holy Lord, however, cannot be partner to such hypocrisy. The Judge of all the world must be absolutely fair. The sober fact is that the very people whom God passionately loves – you and me – have contributed to the evil and suffering that God loathes with a fury that only Almighty God can contain. Jesus came to earth to resolve this gigantic dilemma.   John the Baptist, the prophet sent by God to herald the coming of Jesus, announced that Jesus is ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’   Jesus is so powerful and unique that embodied in him is the solution to every instance of evil ever committed, including everything associated with your abuse. The Ruler of the universe became human to deal with human sin. He come to earth specifically to die as a sacrificial lamb for every sin ever committed on this planet. He bore in his own person sin’s full penalty in order to gain the legal and moral right to remove every guilty stain from anyone who seeks cleansing through him. That way, when he next visits this planet he can physically destroy every trace of evil without that action requiring our own destruction. So completely did Jesus absorb within his mangled body the full impact of sin’s consequences that not a speck remained. The power of God then re-entered his corpse and he triumphantly rose bodily from the dead to live forever as your heavenly helper.   What Jesus did was without precedent and will never be repeated. No analogy is therefore adequate, and the following is far from perfect, but it might help.   Like a computer that has lost its connection to its server and the outside world, we have lost our connection with God. Like that computer, we can still function a little, but so much has been lost. For all eternity Jesus has been uniquely connected to God as a pure conductor of holy power. He offered himself so that through his own person you could be connected with God. While remaining united with God, he reached out to you and took upon himself humanity’s impurity. As usual, the infinitely high-voltage power of Almighty God surged through him, but this time, because he was no longer a pure conductor of such power, it killed him. Yet by his sacrificial act he become a safe connector for anyone willing to let go of their ineffective ways of coping with pain and, spiritually speaking, reach out and touch Jesus. The moment you do, you are suddenly connected to unlimited supernatural power. You spiritually light up. Because it is spiritual, not mental or emotional or physical, you may not feel it, but something of profound significance takes place in the deepest and most important part of you. If you have not had this, the greatest of all experiences, or would like a deeper understanding of what Christ achieved by dying in your place, I urge you to read  You Can Find Love .   A full explanation as to why and how the violation of Jesus’ innocent body brings you healing is long and complicated. Nevertheless, just as you can trust your doctor when she prescribes medication, even though you have little idea of how it works, so you can trust Jesus.     Back