Healing–seeing our need, embracing the cure

We have already seen, this week, the importance of reconciling our view of reality with God’s view of life. If we are to ever have a hope of becoming whole people, we must see the world through the eyes of the soul rather than with the blinded eyes of our broken desires.

Likewise, once we open ourselves to the reality that the only way to view life appropriately is to change the lens through which we see it, we must then recognize the source of this transformation. The source of our change, our healing, is God himself. What life and the law of God demonstrate to us clearly, as does the news each day, is that we are indeed broken. Our brokenness, once recognized, serves to remind us that the remedy lies outside of ourselves.

Few have captured the nature of our brokenness so vividly as John Donne (the 17th Century poet). In his remarkable work, Sonnet 14/Batter My Heart, Donne demonstrates the depth of our human frailty, and the severity of our need for God to intervene in our lives. Donne shows us what takes place in the heart of a person who recognizes both the need for change, and the inability to change oneself. At this juncture, Donne himself found, the heart must cry out to God for an “intervention”. His words follow,

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurped town to another due,
Labor to admit You, but oh! To no end;

Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived and proved weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto Your enemy.

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to You, imprison me, for I

Except You enthrall me, never shall be free
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

What we see here in Donne’s sonnet is a man crying out to God for healing. With abandon, he is calling upon God to address his dilemma. Though his love for God tugs at him daily, he cannot seem to escape the grip of improper living because of his marriage to ways which are in direct opposition to God’s purposes in his life. What Donne has found is that as he has taken detours away from God’s paths, those routes have led him toward things which, though pleasurable for the moment, became habits, which became addictions, which became enslavements, which ultimately brought imprisonment to his soul.

The lock of destructive patterns in our lives can become so strong that it begins to feel like a “knot” or a “marriage”. Such a knot, Donne realizes, must be undone, divorced. At all costs, we must reject a view and pattern of life which blinds us from a clear view of the brilliance of the divine life. Only God can free us from such a lock on our souls. And, like Donne, we must turn to God for the cure. We must cry out to Him that He might “ravish” us as the Lover of our souls. The word Donne used here was shocking to the reader of his day. In reality, the image is one of taking by force, rape, a conquering of another. Donne feels his need for healing is so great that he is begging his Maker to take him by force and capture him by the power of His love. This is the nature of our need. Donne is suggesting that our need for a relationship with God is so great, and that obedience to His plan so desperately needed, that we ought to allow, cry out for, the full force of God’s rapturous love to overtake us, enthrall us, and make us “chaste” unto Him and His purposes for us.

Embracing the Cure–

The need is clear, the depth of the need vivid, the nature of the need sobering, and the cure which addresses the need is plain. The cure for the heart in need of the rapturous love of God is God himself. He is at once the One who shows us just how great the need is, and the One who provides for our need. He desire is to be Emmanuel “God with us, and for us”. At the very same instant we see our need, God is there to fill us with Himself. The Good News is that God is for us and He seeks, actively, to provide for our every need. He is actually on our side.

The temptation, once we recognize how far short we fall in living up to God’s standard, is to make an attempt to earn His approval. This is an impossible feat. There has never been an individual to ever live up to the pristinely holy standard of a perfect God. The cure then is not our measure of perfection or effort, but rather, the work of God on our behalf. This is what the cross of Christ is all about. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is where the need is met fundamentally. Then as we live our lives with hearts of gratitude for God’s intervention on our behalf our focus becomes a resolved, grace-inspired, trust-oriented attempt to live as God has called us to live. This attempt is made, not because we fear His punishment, but rather, because we long to please the One who offers us life to the full, and we recognize that His ways are so much better than our own.

Healing results from a life of thankful focus and grateful obedience to the One who sets us free from all that traps us. Throughout life the traps remain and we find ourselves ensnared in them when we remove ourselves from God’s plan. The healed heart avoids paths of futility because goodness, mercy, and provision are found along the course charted by an all-knowing and loving God.

Lastly, we embrace the cure because we are assured that God himself is aiming and providing for our good. His posture to us is one of kindness. We must remember the smile of God which is upon us. He is not standing there, with a large rod of discipline in hand, just waiting for us to mess up in order that He might take joy in striking us down. He is actively seeking and providing for good in our lives. As we are reminded in the book of Jeremiah (29:11) “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope”.

The difficulty many of us have in accepting the life God offers results from a distorted view of who He is. Religion convinces us He must be a rigid rule enforcement officer ready to wack us at every wrong turn. The biblical view, however, as revealed chiefly in the person of Jesus, demonstrates that He is a God who is primarily and radically for His children. A critical step toward wholeness and healing in our lives is a rejection of this fear-based view of relating to God and an embrace of the truth revealed in the passage from Jeremiah.

I leave us with a reminder of this truth from Karl Barth’s wonderful little book, The Humanity of God. Barth writes,

God’s deity is thus no prison in which He can exist only in and for Himself. It is rather His freedom to be in and for Himself but also with and for us, to assert but also to sacrifice Himself, to be wholly exalted but also completely humble, not only almighty but also almighty mercy, not only Lord but also servant, not only judge but also Himself the judged, not only man’s eternal king but also his brother in time. And all that without in the slightest forfeiting His deity! All that, rather, in the highest proof and proclamation of His deity! He who does and manifestly can do all that, He and no other is the living God.

I pray that we all might see our need and embrace our cure,

Bruce Smith

optimuslife.org

This entry was posted on 5. December 2007 at 10:23 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.