If you want to receive emotional healing from God and come into an area of wholeness, you must realize that healing is a process and allow the Lord to deal with you and your problems in His own way and in His own time. Your part is to cooperate with Him in whatever area He chooses to start dealing with you first.
You may want to work on one thing, and God may want to start with something else. If you pursue your own agenda, you will soon learn there is no anointing for that problem. The grace of God is not there to deliver you outside of His timing.
I tell people in my seminars, “Being convicted by the message you hear in this meeting doesn't mean you are to go out and set up some kind of ten-point plan for dealing with that situation. First you must pray and ask God to begin to work in that area of your life. Then you must cooperate with Him as He does it.”
As God deals with each of us in one specific area at a time, it may take anywhere from one hour to several years. In my own case, the Lord dealt with me for one solid year to get me to understand He loves me.
I will never forget it. I needed that foundation in my life. I desperately needed to know how much God loved me personally, not just when I had done what I thought I was supposed to do, but all the time — whether I “deserved” His love or not.
I needed to know God loved me unconditionally and His love was not something I could buy with works or good behavior.
As part of the process, I began to get up every morning saying, “God loves me!” Even when I did something wrong, I would say, “God loves me!” When I would have trials or problems, I would say it, again and again: “God loves me!” Every time Satan tried to steal my assurance of that love, I would say it over and over: “God loves me! He loves me!”
I would read books about God's unconditional, unending love. I dwelled on it continually until I had that foundational truth firmly imbedded in my mind and heart: “God loves me!” Through the process of continual study and meditation in this area, I became rooted and grounded in God's love as the Apostle Paul encourages us to do in Ephesians 3.
One of our problems is that in our modern, instantaneous society we tend to jump from one thing to another. We have come to expect everything to be quick and easy. We won't stick with a problem until we see a breakthrough and know that we have victory in that area.
The Lord is not like that. He never gets in a hurry, and He never quits. He will deal with us about one particular thing, and then He will let us rest for a while — but not too long. Soon He will come back and begin to work on something else. He will continue until, one by one, our knots are all untied.
It sometimes seems you are not making any progress because the Lord is untying your knots one at a time. It may be hard, and it make take time, but if you will “stick with the program,” sooner or later you will see the victory and experience the freedom you have wanted so long.
In some things I experienced freedom in a few months or a year, but there was one area in my life which took fourteen long years to overcome. Now you may not be as stubborn and hard-headed as I was, so it may not take you that long to break the stronghold holding you in bondage. The important thing to remember is: no matter how long it takes, never give up, and never quit — keep at it!
Keep Pressing On
The main thing God asks or requires we do to bring about the answer to our problems is to believe and keep pressing on. Study the Word of God and spend time with Him.
What else can we do?
Just because we have a knot in our life does not mean we are able to untie it ourselves. Some knots are harder than others to untie. In fact, if we are not careful we can even make them worse than they were. So often in our own efforts to untangle our knots all we do is make matters worse.
At one time in my life I became so entangled in my problems and my futile efforts to untangle them I was no good to myself or anybody else.
But once I learned to let the Lord handle the problems and just cooperate with Him, things began to work much better. Now I am free in Jesus and am able to help others who are as bound and tangled as I was.
Problems People Manifest
There are people who have been severely damaged emotionally. I have a feeling that most of us at one time have been or will be part of that group in one way or another, so let's look at some of these problems.
Some people experience feelings of unworthiness. They have a shame-based self-hatred, a sense of self-rejection, an inner voice that tells them they are no good, that something is wrong with them.
For years I walked around with the nagging thought, “What's wrong with me?”
Isn't it strange that when we are born again, the first thing the Lord wants to give us is His righteousness through His blood so we can stop asking what's wrong with us and start confessing what's right with us now that we are in Christ?
Other people become perfectionists. They are always trying to prove their worth and gain love and acceptance through performance. These people always struggle to do a little bit better in the hope that someone will love and accept them more.
Still others are supersensitive. Do you recall what the Apostle Paul says about love in 1 Corinthians 13:5 … it is not touchy. …
Are you “touchy”? Would you like to be delivered from supersensitivity? If so, part of the answer is to face the fact that if you are touchy, the problem is not with those who constantly offend you or hurt your feelings, but it is with you and your super-sensitive nature. Being secure will heal you from being touchy.
One of the things that helped me in this area was a simple statement made to me years ago by a lady who was reading a book on this subject. She told me, “You know, the book I'm reading says that 95 percent of the time when people hurt your feelings, they didn't intend to do so.”
That means that if you get your feelings hurt easily, it's because you choose to. The good news is that you can also choose not to.
I really encourage you to lay aside supersensitivity. You will feel so much better about yourself and others.
I know. I used to get my feelings hurt and wounded if my husband didn't buy me a birthday present or do something else I thought he ought to do to show he loved and appreciated me. If he failed to compliment me when I thought he ought to, I got my feelings hurt.
If you walk into a room and don't get the attention you think you deserve, do you get hurt? Do you feel that others don't esteem you the way they should? If so, you need to place that problem into God's hands and let Him untie that knot of supersensitivity.
One of the things that has helped me tremendously over the past few years is learning to place myself into God's hands and let Him work out things for the best. I try to abandon myself to Him and trust Him to get me what He wants me to have.
In short, I am learning not to look to other people to meet my needs, but rather to look to the Lord to fulfill my needs as He knows best for me.
It is interesting that people who are supersensitive about what others do to them are often totally insensitive to what they do to others.
I was like that. I was supersensitive and yet hard to get along with because I was so insecure.
Many times people are supersensitive because they have been hurt in the past, and so their bruised emotions are easily pained. That's why they are so touchy.
I was that way. Like many people, because I did not get the love I needed for much of my life, I kept trying to get other people to make me happy. When I married, I became a suffocator. Because love and affection had been denied to me, I tended to suffocate anyone who showed me any fondness or attention at all.
I learned that in a marriage relationship, we must allow our partner some liberty. We must get rid of the fear of man and develop instead a reverential fear and awe of God.
Why do some of us have such a tremendous fear of what somebody else thinks of us? The reason is that we have a poor self-image. Do we become any less valuable or worthy in the eyes of God because of someone else's negative opinion of us? Of
course not, but we feel less valuable unless we are secure in who we are in Christ.
People who have a great deal of fear of others are good candidates to come under a controlling spirit. We have to be so careful in this area.
Many times people who suffer from poor self-esteem allow themselves to be controlled by someone who promises to show them love or acceptance. They allow themselves to be manipulated like a puppet on a string. They are afraid to break the string because they are fearful of losing the attention they receive from the controller. They fear loneliness.
Then there are those who, because of emotional hurts, become controllers and manipulators themselves. I was one of them.
When I got married, because of my past hurts I had a very hard time submitting to my husband in the Lord, as the Bible teaches. (Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18) I was afraid if I submitted to him and allowed him to exercise any control over me, he would hurt me.
Dave kept telling me, “Joyce, I'm not going to hurt you! Don't you understand that I love you and that the decisions I make are best for you? God has given me that job.”
But I couldn't see that for a long time. I couldn't imagine anybody caring enough for me to make decisions that would benefit me in any way. I thought if I allowed anybody to exercise any degree of control over my life, he would take advantage of me and do what was best for him, not for me. There are people who will do that, but Dave was not one of them. God is asking us to trust Him and believe that if people treat us unjustly, He will vindicate us.
When we have been hurt in the past, we tend to drag our wounds into our new relationships. One of the things God wants to do for us is help us learn to function in the new relationships we have developed, rather than ruin them because of the bad experiences we have had in the past.
Then there are the addictive behaviors: alcoholism, drug addictions, food addictions, spending addictions, and on and on.
If you suffer from any of these types of emotional illnesses, God wants to heal you. He wants to heal you from a sense of unworthiness, from shame and self-hatred and self-rejection, from addictive behaviors, from supersensitivity and fear and the labor of being a perfectionist, always trying to please God.
One time the Lord said to me, “Joyce, I'm not nearly as hard to please as people think I am.”
God does not require that you and I be perfect. If we could be perfect, it would not have been necessary for God to send Jesus, the Perfect Sacrifice, for us.
God has the marvelous ability to love us in the midst of our imperfections. He wants to heal us of our emotional fears and weaknesses and addictions. But in order for Him to do so, we must be willing to be helped.
Be Willing To Receive Help
… I am the Way. … John 14:6
Many people are hurting so badly, and they are crying out for help. The problem is, they are not willing to receive the help they need from God.
The truth is, no matter how much we may want or need help, we are never going to receive it until we are willing to do things God's way.
It is amazing how many times we want help, but we want God to do it our way. God wants us to do it His way.
In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the Way.” I received a really good understanding of that truth as I was preparing this message.
What Jesus meant when He said, “I am the Way,” is that He has a certain way of doing things, and if we will submit to His way, everything will work out for us. But so often we wrestle and struggle with Him, trying to get Him to do things our way. It just won't work.
For example, in my ministry we constantly tell people, “You have got to be in the Word of God — you have got to read and study the Bible daily.” Otherwise they won't know what God's way is and how to receive help from Him.
How many times have people stood in front of me at the altar and told me all kinds of terrible things that are going on in their lives and how badly they are hurting — and I want to help them — yet they absolutely refuse to do what they are told to do to receive the help they need.
I ask them, “Are you in the Word?”
“Well, not really.”
“Do you go to church?”
“No, I don't always get there.”
“How often do you go to spiritual meetings like this one?”
“Every now and then, maybe once a year.”
“Do you listen to teaching tapes?”
“Oh, I have four or five, but I've never listened to them.”
It is not always like that, but it is usually just a hit or miss situation. The point is that too often people are trying to find some other way to get help rather than by doing things God's way.
The Bible plainly teaches that if we will learn and act on the Word, God will bless our lives.
Let me give you an example. The Bible teaches that we are to live in harmony and peace with others and to forgive those who have done us wrong. If we refuse to do that, what hope do we have of receiving what we need?
If we don't do what we can do, then God won't do what we can't do. If we will do what we can do, God will do what we can't do. It's just that simple.
I realize that one reason we don't always do what we are told to do in the Word of God is because it is hard to act on the Word sometimes instead of acting according to our feelings.
I remember how difficult it was for me the first time the Lord told me I had to go to my husband and tell him I was sorry for being rebellious against him. I thought I would die on the spot! My flesh screamed and ranted and raved. Because of the way I had been mistreated in my younger days, I had a hard time submitting to anyone, especially men. I thought since I finally had some control over my life I wasn't about to “bow my knee” to anybody! I wasn't about to show what was, to me at least, a “sign of weakness.”
Now I realize the Lord was asking me to show meekness, strength under control,1 and not weakness, submission to domination.
The world will tell us that if we humble ourselves, apologize for our wrongs, and do the things necessary for peace, we are being weak and letting others walk all over us. But God says it is meekness not weakness. Whenever God looks for someone to use, He always looks for a meek person. Only a meek person will consistently obey God.
The Bible says that Moses was the meekest man on the face of the earth when God called him to do the job He had set aside for him. (Num. 12:3.) All we have to do today is what Moses had to do — obey.
Obey the Word
But be doers of the Word [obey the message], and not merely listeners to it, betraying yourselves [into deception by reasoning contrary to the Truth]. James 1:22
I recall a woman who attended one of my seminars. She had a lot of emotional wounds that had left her insecure and fearful. She desperately wanted to be free, but nothing seemed to work for her.
At the conclusion of the seminar she told me that she now understood why she had never experienced any progress. She said, “Joyce, I sat with a group of ladies who all had a lot of the same problems in the past that I did. They also had emotional problems but step by step God had been delivering them. As I listened to them, I heard them say, ‘God led me to do this, and I did it. Then He led me to another thing, and I did it.’ I realized as I sat there that God had also told me to do the same things He told them to do. The only difference was they did what He said to do, and I didn't.”
To receive from God what He has promised us in His Word, we must obey the Word. Yes, we must receive the Word, but then we must become doers of the Word and not hearers only.
We need to go to Bible study and church to hear the Word, but we also need to go out into the world and put that Word into practice in our daily lives. There will be times when doing what the Word says is not easy, times when we don't feel like doing what it tells us to do.
Obeying the Word requires consistency and diligence. It can't be hit or miss. We can't just do it for a while to see if it works. There must be a dedication and commitment to do the Word whatever the outcome.
; I have been dealing with this issue for a long, long time, and believe me when I say those who do things God's way get the victory!
“Yes,” you may say, “but I have been doing the Word for a long time, and I still don't have the victory!”
Then do it some more. Nobody knows exactly how long it is going to take for the Word to begin to work in his life. But I assure you that if you keep at it, sooner or later it will work.
God's way works! And there is no other way that does.
I know it is often a struggle to “keep on keeping on” — especially when it seems that nothing is happening. I know it's a fight. I know Satan tries to keep you out of the Word, and once you do get into the Word, he tries everything in his power to keep you from putting the Word into practice in your life. I also know that once you do start putting the Word into practice, he does everything he can to make you think it won't work.
That's why you must keep at it. Ask God to help by giving you a desire to get into His Word and to do it no matter how hard it is or how long it takes to produce any results in your life.
Do You Want To Get Well?
There was a certain man there who had suffered with a deep-seated and lingering disorder for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus noticed him lying there [helpless], knowing that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, Do you want to become well? [Are you really in earnest about getting well?] John 5:5,6
Isn't this an amazing question for Jesus to ask this poor man who had been sick for thirty-eight long years: “Do you really want to become well?”
That is the Lord's question to you as you read these words right now: “Do you really want to become well?”
Do you know there are people who really don't want to get well? They just want to talk about their problem. Are you one of those people? Do you really want to get well or do you just want to talk about your problem?
Sometimes people get addicted to having a problem. It becomes their identity, their life. It defines everything they think and say and do. All their being is centered around it.