Hibernating Ministers III

We are still handling these bleeding and wounded ministers who have been immobilized almost to the point of emasculation by their injuries, many times injuries nobody even suspects they have.

Surprisingly, very rarely will someone who has never experienced such betrayal, abuse and slander ever notice, let alone offer a viable solution for those injuries.

‘Just forgive’ is one epithet many will throw almost unfailingly to someone with such injuries. They assume that forgiving betrayal is the same as forgiving someone who kept your debt for an extra week. They think that forgiving someone who has falsely accused you of something so gross that you could never even have imagined thinking about it is the same as forgiving someone who promised to give you a gift but forgot.

Those are in a completely different league and the level of forgiveness required can never be understood by someone who thinks forgiveness is as easy as forgiving a child who has soiled their clothes.

The forgiveness I am talking about requires healing first. It is impossible to forgive someone when at the mention of their name your brain has a spin. It is impossible to forgive someone whose sight makes your heart miss a beat or two. And it is impossible to forgive someone when the evidence of the devastation he caused you can see with closed eyes.

What do I mean? Forgiveness is not cheap. Remember that even with God it cost His only begotten Son?

Forgiveness is painful, way too painful to treat with an epithet.

Telling the hurting that forgiveness will heal the hurt at times increases the pain, breaks open the wounds that were healing.

Your cheap prescription does not offer a solution. They already know that they must forgive. That may be the reason their pain is so much. That could  be the reason they have stopped ministering. Their pain has made them think that they are beyond God’s reach because they are unable to completely forgive those who crushed them using their trust.

Only someone who has positively healed from the injury can effectively reach out to them.

David could mould the rejects who ran to him because he understood betrayal from Saul’s treatment. Eli was unable to see pain in Hannah because it was a foreign concept.

I do not mean that you cannot be able to minister to them, only that it would require special grace to be able to touch those injuries with God’s healing touch. It is important that you realize that you really will never be able to understand the pain they feel if you have never gone through it.

The first point I want to make today is that we must acknowledge that they are hurting and that the hurting is very deep.

But we must agree that only God is able to heal that pain and that the only hope we have of dealing with this is connecting the hurting to God for the healing.