1 How God Redeems our Pain Imagine looking out over the landscape of your life. As you view the story of your life, you see areas where there has been pain, and you see areas where there has been healing. Perhaps you see areas that are not healing, places that still seep with shame or resentment. You may have given up on healing; you may have settled for simply surviving. You might have areas that need healing, but because they don't bother you if you don t touch them, you do not recognize that healing is needed in those places, too. God's promise to us is for peace. Wherever we have resentment or bitterness, there we need healing. Wherever we have pain without peace, there we need healing. The Redeemer of your spirit offers to be the Redeemer of your pain. There will always be memories of pain, but God knows how to put peace there; He knows how to remove the sting and the resentment and the bitterness. The Spirit of God knows how to walk you into a place of healing. I would like to share with you four things that God has used to bring healing in my life. As I have walked through these four steps for each troubled area in the landscape of my life, I have received the wonderful gift of God's peace. I am also learning to use these four steps in my daily life as I encounter situations that are in any way painful to me. I am learning how to apply these spiritual truths as I experience even small hurts or relatively minor discomforts. Here is the question that must be asked first of all: who owns your painful memories and difficult moments? Healing cannot occur in the areas of your life that you own because you do not own healing; only God owns healing. Belonging to God is the essence of holiness; making this spot belong to Him is part of making it holy instead of vile. When God owns our troubled areas, He rules and overrules. 1. At each place of pain, drive in a stake that says, "This belongs to God." With your hands on the head of the Lamb of God, place the pain of this place upon Him, transferring all the evil and shame to Him. Recognize that He died with this burden on His shoulders and on His heart. Recognize that the stake that you are driving into this hard ground is the Cross. Every evil given to God becomes part of the Cross and is borne by Christ. It becomes part of the bitter cup that He accepted at Gethsemane.
2 When the Israelites had only bitter water, unfit for drinking, God told Moses to cast a tree into the water. After Moses threw a piece of wood into the bitter water, the water became sweet (Exodus 15:25, ESV). When we plant the tree called the Cross into our painful memories, Christ draws all the bitterness into Himself. He fully absorbs into Himself the curse of our woundings. He swallows the guilt and shame. As you see Christ on the Cross at those remembered points in your life, you see that the lacerating pain of your life has drawn its sharp claws across His back. Like a flag, the Cross stands over your memories, proclaiming the ownership of God. As you plant a wooden cross into that foul water, the bitterness is drawn out of your heart and life and into the cross of Christ. As you stand here, listen carefully: Christ says, It is finished. The punishing and paying and managing and shame are finished. Having raised the banner of the Cross over your memory, you can say to Christ: LORD, on this very ground, this soiled ground, I worship You. I worship You here that Your blood would so completely cover it and soak it that the sting of death and the stench of decay are no more. Death can sting only once. Christ takes that hit for you; on your behalf, He draws into Himself all the anguishing consequences of evil. The sting of death pierces Him, and it is only the shadow of death that passes over you. Moments in your past were painful, but they have been rendered powerless to harm you.
3 2. Consider now Christ s burial. Think of the tomb being sealed, and let all of your painful memory be buried and hidden with Christ. This will be a place of transformation--mysterious and unseen, but powerful--like the transformation of a caterpillar hidden in a cocoon, or a seed buried in the dirt. Something will happen. There will be a violent earthquake spiritually. Watch the stone being thrust aside and the forces of evil falling powerless like dead men (Matthew 28:2-4). 3. Now stand before the opened tomb. Recognize that although this had been a place of death, it is no more! The grave clothes are still there, but they are empty now. Your difficult memories are still there, but they are only empty grave clothes: they held the darkness of evil at one time but no more! Christ has taken it into Himself, swallowing the sting and the stain; these memories have been emptied of enemy power. Now they are strong evidence of a greater Power. Your transformed memories will begin to speak a different story, one of victory. The stone has been rolled away; there is light here now. 4. Right here on hard ground that has become redeemed ground, build an altar. Build an altar with stones of praise, adoration, submission, trust, worship, and yieldedness. Worship Him here. Adore Him as your Awesome God. He will inhabit your praise. Jacob was an altar-builder. (See Genesis 28.) On hard ground, in a place that knew murderous intent and deception, Jacob encountered a promise-making God. Taking a large stone, he poured oil over it. In doing so, he transformed his pillow into a pillar; he built an altar and worshiped God there. Everything changes when we build altars. It is as if worship punches a hole in our places of darkness. Light rushes in, the shadows of death flee, and Life floods in. The enemy of our souls wants to use our pain to draw us from God. When we build an altar, that same pain becomes something that draws us to God: it becomes redemptive. It s one thing to worship God in the light. That is a good thing. But when you worship God in the darkness, that is another thing entirely. When you worship God in the darkness, you defeat evil. When Paul and Silas worshiped in a dungeon, there was another earthquake, one which broke prison bars and snapped off chains. Your worship at an altar will free you from the oppression of your memories. God gave His people an awesome promise just after He gave them the Ten Commandments. He said, Wherever I cause My Name to be honored, I will come to you and bless you. This is what God said to Moses in Exodus 20:24-25, NIV:
4 Make an altar of earth for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, your sheep and goats and your cattle. Wherever I cause my name to be honored, I will come to you and bless you. If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it. God said to build altars of earth. We are to bring our dust and our dirt--our humanness--who we are and what we have. We honor God there, and He says to us, I will come to you and bless you. What an incredible promise! We are told not to try to make this altar beautiful. We are to bring our pain and our struggles to God without trying to manage them or control them, without trying to cover them up or fix them up; we just bring it as earth. When we do that, God says, I will come to you and bless you. He will create the beauty. He will Himself be the Beauty. Jacob encountered God in a place called Luz. This Hebrew word can be used to indicate deviation or crookedness. 1 After Jacob worshiped at Luz, he changed its name to Bethel, meaning house of God. When we worship God at our places of pain and when the Spirit of God covers them, even places of perversion become places into which God moves and which He uses for trustworthy purposes. On your hard ground of pain or shame, determine to worship God. He will meet you there. Ask the Holy Spirit to cover those memories; ask Him to cover it like oil flowing over a stone. When the Spirit covers, He creates. When He hovered over darkness and emptiness at the beginning of time, He created the brilliant colors and singing splendors of the universe. When He overshadowed a young woman in Nazareth named Mary, He created the miracle of the Incarnation. When you ask the Spirit to cover your painful situations, He creates new splendors and miracles: He transforms enemybuilt tombs into God-ordained wombs of beauty and glory. There is a Beauty greater than the ugliness of your past. There is a Good that is greater than the evil you have encountered. Full redemption is more than survival. It is more than a laughter that covers up the crying; it is a laughter that dissolves the crying and that fills up the deep ditches that your tears have cut, channels that have increased your capacity for joy. Full redemption means not only victory over the enemy but also a plentiful plundering of the enemy. This is spiritual warfare! This is precisely how God overcomes darkness. When God purposes to redeem, He enters the darkness, proclaims His authority, and establishes the Kingdom of Light there. We claim enemy territory by entering that territory and bringing it to submission to a new authority--by planting a Cross and building an altar. 1 from http://www.abarim-publications.com/meaning/luz.html. 5-21-13
5 When a Christian suffers, she is encountering the enemy. She can submit to the enemy there, or she can claim that area for God and advance His kingdom there. We often experience evil and say, "Let's get out of here" instead of saying, "Look! The enemy--capture him!" When we experience suffering, God is exposing the enemy. When God exposes the enemy, that creates an opportunity; that is a call to action for us. When God exposes the enemy, we are to move in for the kill, so to speak. Surround the enemy with persistent prayer; surround with praise and adoration of the true King. This is how the war is fought. We tend to think, "Oh, God, look! The enemy did that to me! Fix it. Take it away. Do something." God says, "Look! I have exposed enemy territory! Plant the Cross; built an altar. Let Me redeem it! Bring My victory here!" So now we can say, "Yes, Lord, I will enter this darkness in Your Name in order to bring light. I will stand right here on this battleground and plant Your flag to acknowledge You as Lord. I will kneel here and build an altar to worship You so that darkness is conquered." When we encounter darkness, we do not despair. Instead, prepared with spiritual armor, we are willing to enter the darkness and to be the Light. This is victory! Every place of submission to God on enemy territory is spiritual victory. Every place where there is a Cross that proclaims Christ's ownership and every place where there is an altar that expresses genuine submission, there is a place of spiritual victory. God says in Joshua 1:3-7, "I will give you every place where you set your foot.... No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you.... Be strong and very courageous." "I will give you every place where you set your foot, God says. All over your life, plant the Cross. Proclaim that each moment belongs to Him. Let the Cross be the flag of ownership, and allow Christ to absorb all the bitterness and to own the sting. Say to Him, You carry the weight of this burden. You manage this. You can use this for my good and for Your glory. I trust You. I submit to You. You rule this! Cover your life with altars. Raise up altars everywhere--altars of worship and altars of submission. Each word of praise is like another stone in the altar. As you submit to Him, you become the altar. The transforming fire of the Holy Spirit will fall upon you, meet you there, and this situation will be a place of spiritual victory. A life covered with altars becomes a life covered by the Glory of God. @Tami Myer. 2013.