Allowing Healing to Flow from our Wounds

"Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed." (Isaiah 53:4–5)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Thank you for listening to an audio resource from Stanwich Church, located in Greenwich in Stanford, Connecticut. The vision of Stanwich Church is to know Christ and make him known.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

The Old Testament lesson for today is from Isaiah chapter 53, verses 1 through 12. This can be found on page 729 of your Pew Bible. The prophetic words of this text find healing and restoration in the sacrifice of Jesus as he carried the burden of our sin on the cross. A reading from Isaiah chapter 53, beginning with the first verse. And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no former majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. And we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted. Yet he opened not his mouth. Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that before it shears is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death. Although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days, the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors. May God add his blessing to the reading of his holy word.

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Well, good morning, Stanwich Church. It's good to be with you. Chuck mentioned that we've known each other over 40 years. I wish that's because we met in kindergarten. But we met in college. And I was thinking about it this morning, Chuck. We could not have scripted our lives when we were young college students. And what's more, the people that went to college with us would have never scripted our lives the way they've turned out. And that's all I'm gonna say about that, because I don't want to tell your stories on your pastor, because I know he has more on me. So anyhow, it's great to be with you. And uh, Wanda, you'll you'll get to meet my wife. She'll be with you, I believe, in two weeks. And uh and so, in fact, she'll be coming in, she's coming in from the airport from Cincinnati uh even as we speak. All right. Well, while Wanda and I were uh still in seminary, uh, we started ministry at a church in Stratford, Connecticut. So this is not far from where I had my beginning in ministry. And uh it's while we were in Stratford that we had an encounter with the Holy Spirit that dramatically changed our lives. And we began to see God uh save people and heal people and set people free. And when I finished seminary, we started to look for a place where we could go and plant the church. And so I began to call leaders, and in our denomination, we have regional leaders, they're called district superintendents, and I called district superintendents all over the nation. And uh in and I was young, I was in my early 20s, I was so excited about God, and I remember calling them saying, Hey, my name's Ron Walborn, I just graduated from seminary. I want to come to your district and plant the church where we preach the kingdom, heal the sick, cast out demons, and maybe even raise the dead. Now, I want you to imagine what a zeal without wisdom 20-year-old Ron Walborn must have sounded like to these seasoned leaders, okay? And most of them were very kind, they were very generous. Oh, send your resume, we'll put it right on top, you know. Uh, but there was one guy from the Midwest that let me have it. He said, Young man, you will never come to my district, you will never come to my city, and what's more, I'm gonna call all the other leaders and warn them about your dangerous charismaniac theology. And he hung up the phone on me. Now, to be honest, I just moved on to the next phone call. I didn't really think about it that much. Well, fast forward about 20, 25 years, and I'm now the professor of pastoral theology at Nyack College, and I get a call from the district superintendent from that region, the new district superintendent, and he asked me to come to their district and do a conference on healing. And so when I'm flying into that city uh a few weeks later, I remember this phone call, and I start to laugh. And I confess I had an imaginary conversation in my head with that old leader, taunting him that I was coming to his city to do a conference on healing. Well, that night, uh, before the conference began, we had a prayer time. And in a time of just waiting on the Lord, Jesus showed up and whispered something in my ear. He said, Ron, healing flows out of my wounds, what flows out of yours. And in that moment, I was forced to admit that there was anger and bitterness flowing out of my wounds, that there was a fleshly revenge seeping out of an old wound that I hadn't thought about in nearly 20 years. And in that moment, the Lord began to show me some truth out of Isaiah 53 that I'm going to share with you today. He shared with me five healing truths about how to make sure healing flows out of our wounds and not bitterness, anger, judgment, revenge. You see, the wounds of Jesus were the wounds of a life of service and ministry. They were not just physical stripes from the torture of his crucifixion. No, they were emotional wounds as well: rejection, abandonment, loneliness, loss, all the things that those of us who choose to follow Jesus will also experience. In fact, Jesus warned us, he said, as the master, so shall the servant be. So we're not going to escape those wounds. But the question is, while Jesus had healing flow out of his wounds, what flows out of ours? And the truth is, I don't think there's such a thing as an unwounded healer. We are all wounded healers. And I believe it's the plan of Jesus to make sure that those areas of your life and my life that bear the most brokenness become the most fruitful for his healing. And so how do we do that? I want to give you five healing truths. The first one is this: if we're going to make sure healing flows from our wounds, we've got to be honest about our wounds. In Isaiah 53, it says of Jesus that he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised, he was rejected, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering. And what that shows me is Jesus refused to hide his wounds. In fact, inspired Scripture, hundreds of years before the wounds were inflicted, prophesied the wounds that would be inflicted. And so Jesus was a man of integrity and honesty, and he was a man of vulnerability, and so he doesn't hide anything. He shows it for all to see. In fact, literally he is known as the way, the truth, and the life. And so Jesus is a man of truth and honesty, and it's the way that healing flows. There's an author by the name of John Bradshaw, and he says this you are only as sick as the secrets you keep. And I believe that what the Lord is after is what the psalmist understood in Psalm 51, when David was repenting for his sin with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah, he cries out and he says, God, I now see that you desire truth, you desire integrity, you desire honesty in the innermost being. And healing is not going to flow until we get honest. You see, getting honest with ourselves and others is always necessary for real healing to flow. Years ago, when I was in my second church out in California, I was an associate pastor, and the senior pastor was one of my mentors. His name was Terry Wardle. And Terry went through a season of emotional brokenness and had a mental nervous breakdown, spent three months in a hospital. But God did an incredible work of restoration in his life. And when he returned to the pulpit, his first sermon back was titled, We Are Gonna Become a Place Where It Is Okay Not to Be Okay. And as he preached that sermon with tears, all of a sudden I'm in the front row, I'm the associate pastor, and he's preaching this sermon. We're going to become a place where it's okay not to be okay. And you could hear people beginning to weep. And all of a sudden a woman begins to sob loudly, and I start looking for the users because I'm the associate pastor. I'm in charge of crowd control here. And uh I'm getting ready to have them, you know, move her elsewhere. And Terry says, no, no, no, leave her alone. Because she's just expressing what we're all feeling right now. Well, that just turned it up even more. And then the woman next to me, my wife, started sobbing, and I thought, okay, this is not okay. Because if she lets them know she's not okay, they're gonna know she's not okay because I'm not okay, and it's not okay for me to not be okay because I'm the pastor. Well, I want you to know that that opened up a season of honesty and vulnerability, and the Holy Spirit moved into that church and began to bring healing in great ways. And so honesty is the first step. The second thing I see in this passage is we've got to learn to grieve our losses. You see, grieving goes beyond just being honest. Now it brings it up and out and lets God process it with us in a way that brings his healing. And we see this in Isaiah 53. Jesus took up our infirmities, and more than that, he carried our sorrows. He was acquainted with grief. And so when Jesus is grieving, he's grieving on our behalf. He is mourning, the biblical word is lament. He is bringing these things into the out and the open. To grieve or to mourn means to express sorrow. It means that you bring out what is tearing you up on the inside so that you bring it into the light of God, so that God can bring healing to it. And in the process of doing that, we see Jesus modeling it again and again in his life. When he was rejected by those he came to, he wept over Jerusalem. Jerusalem, I wanted to draw you to myself, but you would not have it. And Jesus modeled grieving all through his life because he understood that blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. There's a healing that flows in the grieving process. Several years ago, I was in upstate New York and I was preaching on uh at a conference on lamentations, on dealing with loss in your life. And it was around this subject. And at the end I gave an invitation, and there was an older couple that were weeping hard, and they made their way to the front. Now I say older, they were in their 60s. I actually think that's pretty young now. Um but Juan and I were a little bit younger than them, and we made our way over to them, and uh they were a retired pastoral couple, we found out after they were able to talk. And we found out that what they were weeping over was a loss that they experienced more than 40 years before. In their first church, uh, this woman was pregnant with their first child, and she lost that baby in the middle of her pregnancy. And the women of the church were very kind, they came over, they brought food, they were very understanding. Um, it was on a Thursday, and as they were leaving, they said, Oh, but you will be in church on Sunday, right? Because no one can play the piano like you. And you will be in church because no one can teach your Sunday school class, and that young pastor's wife realized she had two days to grieve the loss of that child. And so she dried her tears and she went right back into ministry. Well, within a few months, the depression and the anxiety and the panic attacks began to emerge, and for 40 years she had suffered under the weight of that trauma because of a loss that she had not grieved appropriately. And so that week at that conference, we helped them mourn that little one. In fact, they named that child for the first time in 40 years. And we had a little service and she released a helium balloon, and I watched as the peace of God came over her and we stayed in touch with that couple, and the depression and the anxiety and the panic attacks stopped. Why? Because there's healing in the grieving process. And so we get honest, we grieve. The third thing I see in this passage is we've got to learn to submit to the Father's will. We've got to learn to submit. In the text, it's very clear it was the Lord's will to crush him and to cause him to suffer. Uh, we see again and again that Jesus is trusting his father, submitting to his father's will, saying, Father, not my will, but your will be done, even in the garden before he goes to the cross. Friends, I tell you, none of us like to submit to somebody else's will. And if you are not convinced that your God is for you and he is good and he loves you and he can be trusted, it will be hard to submit. But if we refuse to submit to the will of our Heavenly Father, we're in for trouble. Because bitterness and anger is going to begin to flow. Because, friends, it's not a matter of if we're going to be wounded. It's just how often and how deep and when it's going to happen. And so we've got to learn to begin to say, God, I will trust you that you are good, and all that you do is good, and you are a good God. And so, Father, I will not run away from this. I will trust you. And you learn to submit to his will. I'm reminded of the story of Job in the Old Testament. You remember Job, he had lost everything. He lost his money, he lost his career, he lost his family. And in the middle of all this loss, there's this incredible picture of Job. I picture him on his knees with his arms outstretched, and he says, Though you slay me, yet will I trust you. And when he gets to that place of submission to the Lord's will, of trust in the goodness of God, that's when the miraculous restoration of his life begins. And so it's in honesty, it's in grieving, it's in learning to submit to the Father's will that our wounds begin to flow with healing instead of anger and bitterness. Well, the fourth thing I see in this passage is this we've got to learn to forgive before our wounders ask. You see in the text that it says that Jesus, it's prophesying, Jesus, my righteous servant, will justify many. He will bear their iniquities, as he said on the cross, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing. Even before anyone was asking, Jesus was forgiving. Jesus lived a life of preemptive forgiveness. And when we learn that preemptive forgiveness sets us free, I believe we'll begin to embrace it more and more. Somebody said to me once that for unforgiveness is the poison we ingest, hoping it will hurt someone else, but it only makes us sick and it only hurts us. And so I believe unforgiveness is one of the biggest blocks to healing in our lives. We've got to learn to forgive before our wounders even ask. One of the greatest stories of forgiveness I've ever heard comes from a friend of mine named James Ryle. James was the pastor of the Boulder, Colorado Vineyard. That's the church where Bill McCartney attended, and it was out of that church that they birthed the Promise Keepers Movement. And James and I got to know each other by speaking at conferences together, and we played golf a few times, and he told me this story about the first church that he ever pastored. He was a young man and he was an associate on Staffatist Church, and the senior pastor was a tyrant. He ruled the church with an iron fist, and it was his way or the highway, and he was a hard man. And James said he did everything he could to survive there. He made it about two years and finally he could take it no more. He resigned. They moved to another church about a hundred miles away. And a few months after they had gone to the new ministry, uh, it came out that this former pastor had just been indicted for embezzling money from the church. And then it came out that he had been committing adultery with multiple women in the church. And James was venting. He was angry and he was venting to his wife, and he said, I knew there was sin behind it. I knew there was something going on. You know, I should have spotted it sooner. And all of a sudden he noticed his wife was weeping. And he said, Her name was Belinda. He said, Why are you crying? She said, James, I'm crying because for two years he tried to have an affair with me. And it never happened, but I knew I couldn't tell you because I was afraid you would kill him. And James says, You're right, I'm gonna kill him. Now remember, James is from Texas, they do things a little differently down there. So he literally loaded his deer rifle and drove to that town with every intention of killing that pastor. He even had it planned as to where he was gonna lie and wait for this guy. But he decided that before he shot him, he should pray about it first. True story. So he drove to the top of this hill and he had it out with God. He said, All right, God, we need to have a talk. Is there ever a time when it's okay not to forgive someone? And to his surprise, he heard God say, Yes, there is a time when it's okay not to forgive. And James got excited. He said, Well, surely this is it. When is it okay not to forgive? And the Lord says, James, it's okay not to forgive someone when they have sinned against you more than you have sinned against me. And he said, God, nobody's ever sinned against me as much as I've sinned against you. And the Lord said, Then forgive him. And James unloaded his rifle and went home. Now, friends, I don't know what would have happened had James followed through on his unforgiveness. I believe God would have probably raised someone else up to launch promise keepers, but I do know this. The promise keepers would not have been in James' destiny. His unforgiveness would have robbed him of his destiny. And friends, unforgiveness will rob you of your life, of healing, and your future. And so we've got to deal with it. Well, the final thing I see in this text to make sure healing flows from our wounds is this. We've got to learn to keep our eyes on what's to come and not on what's being done to us. Keep our eyes on what's to come and not just what's on being what's being done to us. And in the Isaiah passage, it says, He will see his offspring, and this will prosper and prolong his days. He will see what is to come and it will give him the strength to get through it. In the New Testament, in Hebrews 12, we're told that Jesus was able to endure the cross for the joy that was set before him. In other words, Jesus had a glimpse of what was to come, of where he was headed, and he learned to keep his eyes on that glory, not on just on what he was going through. Also, when he was on the cross, you'll remember he said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was actually quoting Psalm 22. Often in that era, large portions of scripture had been memorized. All they would have to do is quote the first portion of the Psalm, indicating that all of it was applicable. Well, Psalm 22 starts with brokenness, but it ends with victory. And Jesus knew that there was a victory coming. Jesus lived with a prophetic vision of his future, and that allowed him to endure the abuse and the pain and the wound. And not let that be the definition of who he was. Friends, I need you to know I work in New York City, and uh there's something irritating that happens there. If you're in New York City and you get double parked in by a car that has a diplomat license plate, they're not getting a ticket. Because foreign diplomats have this thing called diplomatic immunity. Now, I confess as a New York guy, it's kind of irritating to me, but here's the good news. You and I have been transferred into a new kingdom. And you and I have been deputized as ambassadors of the kingdom of God. And so while we may live in this world, guess what? We have a future kingdom that we have inherited. It wasn't just Jesus' intention to save you, to get you into heaven. His intention was to save you to get heaven into you. And so you bear in your body and in your life the marks of this kingdom that is here now, but it's yet to come in all of its fullness. And you know what that means? You have diplomatic immunity. No matter what the world, the flesh, or the devil throw at you, our God has you covered, and you are a citizen of a higher kingdom that has an authority that will work its way out in this world. And what that does is it allows the healing to flow from my wounds. I get my eyes on where I'm headed and not just what's being done to me, and it gives me peace. Well, those are the five things I see in this passage. Be honest about your wounds, grieve your losses, learn to submit to the Father's will, forgive before your wounders ask, and keep your eyes on what is to come, not just on what's been done to you. Let me share one last story as we close about how the Lord brought healing to me. In that season that I shared with you earlier, that our church went into this season of inner healing, uh, pretty much everyone in our church chose in, and they were going for it. Everyone except one person, me. And I decided that as the pastor, the best place to hide would be on staff. And so I was the one running all the groups and making sure all the appointments were taken care of, and I was running the church, but you know what? I never chose in. And all of my wounds and all the stuff that I had not dealt with were festering and festering. And after about a year and a half, my anger was coming up and it was getting out of control, and it was coming out in ways that were incredibly dysfunctional. And one night at dinner, uh, my three-year-old, Karis, spilled her milk and I lost it. And I went, Karis, what is wrong with you? The parental shame question. And that little three-year-old looked at me and said, What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me is I'm three and I spilled my milk. What's wrong with you, Daddy? A prophetic word from a three-year-old, okay? There's no doubt the Lord put those words. And I looked at her and I went, I'm a mess. I'm sorry. Daddy needs help. She went, You do. And I went to my elders and I said, Guys, I think I need some help. And they went, Praise the Lord. I go, Well, what do you mean, praise the Lord? They go, We've known you've needed help for a year and a half. And so we put money in the budget. We're gonna give you two options. We'll either pay for two years of counseling with a Christian therapist, or there's a 10-day conference on inner healing in Colorado. We'll send you there. It's run by a ministry called Rafa. I went, okay, two years, 10 days, I'll take the 10 days. So off I went to this inner healing conference. And there were 16 Christian leaders at this conference. And if I said some of their names, you would recognize the names, but we signed a confidentiality agreement because we were dealing with a lot of painful stuff. And at this conference, we went for it, and I was dealing with my father wounds. My dad was a pastor, I grew up as a preacher's kid. There's some ministry wounds there. And that's what I thought the primary wounding was. Well, at this conference, there was a woman, and she was the wife of a megachurch pastor, and she reminded me of my mom. And she reminded me of my mom at a younger age, like when I would have been about four or five years of age. And this woman irritated me. I mean, when she would talk, oh, it was like nails on the chalkboard. And it just was so I avoided her. For ten days, I avoided her. When we would go into the meeting room, I'd wait till she sat down, I'd sit on the other side. When we would go to lunch, I'd wait till she got her food sat down, I'd sit as far from her as I could. For 10 days, I successfully avoided her. Well, finally, on the last day, we're all giving our testimonies of what God had done. And so I'm giving my testimony. I thank God He's healed a lot of my father wound stuff. I'm so thankful for what the Lord's been doing. And as I'm giving my testimony, this woman interrupts me and she says, Well, if you're so healed, why have you avoided me all week? And I screamed at her. I said, You shut up. And in fact, I think I even cursed at her, ordained minister of the gospel that I was, okay? And I said, You shut up. And she goes, I knew it. I remind you of your mother, don't I? Well, then she stands up and she says to the counselors, I have some things to say to him. Is it okay? And they went, go right ahead. I'm like, what are you doing? Don't let that woman near me. Well, she comes right over. I'm sitting in a chair and I'm crying and I'm shaking, and she grabs me by the hands and she starts talking to me as if she's my mom. She says, Ron, I'm so sorry for the way I smothered you, for the way my care became manipulative and shame-filled. And I'm so sorry that when your brothers didn't turn out the way I wanted them to, I decided you would be my project. Well, she didn't know that I had two brothers, 14 and 15 years older than me. And that when they turned 18, they left to get away from my mom. And my mom's control and manipulation and shame went all completely directed on me. And she said, I'm so sorry that you became the object of a lot of my anger. And then she prayed this prayer, and in she said, In Jesus' name, I sever the spiritual and emotional umbilical cord with which I've kept you tied all these years. And when she said that, it was like a bleed went across the top of my head, and I saw these high-pressure hoses kind of severed, and I fell out of my seat, straight on my face, and I'm surrounded by about 20 people who are praying for me. And I'll tell you, I don't remember a thing they prayed because in that moment it was just me and God, and God was bringing healing to those wounds that I couldn't even name. And I laid there for about an hour. And after an hour, I got up and I'm standing up, and the lead therapist, she was a lady named Roujahn Morrison. She was from Georgia. She comes up to me and she goes, How y'all doing? And I said, Well, hopefully it's not y'all anymore. She said, No, I'm from the South. Y'all singular. I said, Okay, well, I I feel like God's healed me. And I feel like I've been set free. And, you know, it's really weird. I feel taller. Am I taller? And she laughed and she said, No, but it's not uncommon that people say that. Because when you get healed of childhood shame, often your childhood wounds hit you at developmental stages and they paralyze you at those stages. And she said, Today was your bar mitzvah to use a Jewish term. You're no longer a 12-year-old. You've been set free, you're now a man. And I wrote down in my Bible, May 5th, 1993, I was released from childhood shame and I became a man. And friends, you need to know that healing began to flow from those wounds. And that Jesus began to bring healing. From the deepest places of my brokenness came the greatest healing flow of Jesus. And that's not only his plan for me, that's his plan for you. Would you stand with me? If you feel so led, uh, I would encourage you just to lay your hand on your heart right now. Jesus, we come before you. And like you, Lord, we want we want to be wounded healers, Lord. We can't avoid being wounded. But Lord, we can avoid allowing your healing to flow through us. But we don't want to avoid that, Lord. We want to choose into it. And so, Jesus, we say, would you now visit us in the deepest places of our brokenness? Allow forgiveness to flow. Allow your mercy to heal. Allow your grace to reign over those darkest places. And we ask, Lord, that you would allow your healing, your grace to flow from our wounds. And we thank you, Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

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