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Have you ever thought about how amazing it is that God designed our bodies to be able to heal themselves?
This thought came to mind as I was writing God is Light, Part 10. When God shines his light on us, we are healed.
Isaiah 30:26: The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the Lord binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted.
Think about every injury you’ve ever had—from the smallest paper cut to broken bones and head injuries. Now think about every illness you’ve ever had—from the common cold or flu to pneumonia and more. Think about the medical procedures you’ve had, from stitches to surgery to chemotherapy.
Now imagine that your body accumulated each one of those injuries and illnesses without healing. What would the state of your body be today? How would you feel? How would you function?
Not well. Not well at all.
But God designed our bodies to heal. And when the healing is beyond what the body can do by itself, God gave us natural and modern medicine to help us along the healing process. And occasionally, he reaches his hand down with miraculous healing.
Now think about your emotional state rather than your physical body. If God designed our bodies to heal, don’t you think he designed our emotions to heal too? The Bible tells us that our emotions can be healed. We can be restored after our heart has been broken or we have fallen into the depths.
Psalm 147:3: He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.
Psalm 103:2-5: 2 Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
3 who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
5 who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
Matthew 11:28-30: 28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Even with these promises, so many of us carry around hurts and failures and shame like we don’t have the ability to heal from them.
Hear this: God is in the business of healing. He can heal your broken heart. He can heal the deep hurt from your childhood. He can restore you from your deepest shame. You just have to let him.
But guess what. This means you might need to take out those hurts and failures and examine them. You’ll have to deal with them. You might have to feel the hurt all over again. But it’s through this pain that God can restore and heal.
If you keep everything buried inside, never being willing to deal with it, it will keep affecting your mindset and your actions. It will keep hurting you, over and over again, in ways that you might not even recognize.
There’s no shame in needing emotional healing, just like there’s no shame in needing physical healing. And just like God can heal your emotional state, he also provided us with tools and resources if that healing is too big for us to conquer on our own. He gave us counselors and therapists and friends who can talk us through the pain. More importantly, he gave us his Word that is filled with encouragement. Don’t be afraid to use these tools along with conversations with God.
If God can provide physical and emotional healing, how much more can he provide spiritual healing! We are all broken by sin. We all start out living in darkness. But he sent a light—Jesus—to bring us out of that darkness.
John 12:46: I [Jesus] have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.
Jesus paid the penalty for our sins. He bore the full weight of the consequences of sin for the whole world. Through his sacrifice, we can be healed spiritually.
1 Peter 2:24: “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.”
By trading our sins for his righteousness, Jesus restored our relationship with God. Just like our bodies can be restored through physical healing and our minds can be restored through emotional healing, our souls can be restored through spiritual healing.
What does it take to be healed spiritually?
Romans 10:9-10: 9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
Every single one of us needs spiritual healing. We need to be saved by believing in Jesus. This is one type of healing we can’t do on our own. We must seek God. We must believe in his Son. Thankfully, God has given us his Word as well as Christian leaders and friends who can help us on this journey.
What healing do you need today? Do you need physical healing? Emotional healing? Spiritual healing? Don’t be afraid to reach out for help.
If you would like prayer for healing, feel free to drop me a note. I would be honored to pray for you. Healing doesn’t always come as quickly as we would like, but it does come in God’s timing, and I’d love to be a part of your healing journey.
