God, Heal My Heart

Good morning…

“This is an important one,” my intuition whispers as the message I had been working on for two hours mysteriously vanished. So, I rewrote the wisdom, as best as I could discern. Here is the “important one” well-deserving of our full attention.

“The agonizing pain of a major crisis had me writhing in anger and shame – me, the guy who had tried so hard to be a committed and loving Christian, who was so sincere about serving God and his kingdom,” writes Peter Scazzero, pastor of a large, multiracial church in Queens, New York City. “How had my best efforts landed me in such a mess?”

Peter continues: “It wasn’t until the pain exposed how much was hiding under my surface of being a “good Christian” that it hit me: whole layers of my emotional life had laid buried, untouched by God’s transforming power. I had been too busy for ‘morbid introspection,’ too consumed with building God’s work to spend time digging around in my subconscious. Yet now the pain was forcing me to face how superficially Jesus had penetrated my inner person, even though I had been a Christian for twenty years.”

Peter concludes: “That is when I discovered the radical truth that changed my life, my marriage, my ministry, and eventually the church we were privileged to serve. It was a simple truth, but somehow I missed it – and, strangely, apparently so had the vast majority of the evangelical movement I’d been a part of. This simple but profound reality, I believe, has the power to bring revolutionary change to many of those who are ready to throw in the towel on Christian faith: emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable.” (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, 11-12)

Peter is not the first to recognize that people of faith have many layers, many layers still lying untouched by God’s transforming power. Jesus replied, “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote,