Praying for the Brokenhearted - Kathy Riggs

Luke 4:18  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

Have you suffered some heartbreaking experiences in your life? Jesus has come to heal your broken heart. He has provided for you and He is able and willing to meet your need. I would like to share a link with you where sister Kathy Riggs ( I have come to appreciate her through the blog talk radio ministry with John McTernan ) shares a message of healing for those with broken and shattered hearts. In the video she prays for the Lord to heal the broken in heart.  Please take the time to watch this video.

Kathy Riggs - Healing for the Brokenhearted

Healing is from The Lord....

Psalm 46:10 
Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

picture from coffee4thesoul.wordpress.com

Be Still And Know ( author unknown )

More Sharing ServicesShare|Share on facebookShare on myspaceShare on googleShare on twitter

Be still and know that I am God
Be still and know that I am God
Be still and know that I am God

I am the Lord that healeth thee
I am the Lord that healeth thee
I am the Lord that healeth thee

In Thee, O Lord, do I put my trust
In Thee, O Lord, do I put my trust
In Thee, O Lord, do I put my trust

Luke 4:18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

Exodus 15:26  And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee.

Forgiveness - Sunday Sermon

Sunday Sermon Review September 23,2012
(from my home church that I attend regularly)
How Many Times Should I Forgive?
( I would like to encourage everyone reading this to also check out my blogpost that I wrote June 28 titled "Forgiving the hard stuff, Justice and Healing".) link here

 http://sharingthefaith-northernsparrow.blogspot.ca/2012/06/forgiveness.html

The service began with the singing of several newer songs and also  the song When I Survery the Wondrous Cross / O the Wonderful Cross.
We are continuing on in our book of Matthew series. The sermon today was based on Matthew 18: 21-35.
The youth pastor  - Kellin  was our speaker today.
Kellin began his message with sharing his excitement of worshipping together this morning. He did a recap of the last couple of Sundays of how we come to the Lord as a child with childlike faith. And confronting a fellow believer is done as a rescue mission with the goal being restoration.
This all ties in with today's message of forgiveness.

Here is more of what Pastor Kellin preached on forgiveness:
Forgiveness is hard.
In the Scripture passage, Peter comes to Jesus with the question -  Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Kellin pointed out that in context this is referring to the people within our closest circles of relationships.  People closest to us will hurt us the most when they sin against us. We need to be forgiving toward everyone inside and outside of our circles.
Peter thought that 7 was the perfect holy number so 7 times would surely be sufficient. Jesus responds  Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
Jesus was teaching us not to take revenge but rather forgive whenever someone wrongs us time and time again. Extending forgiveness is hard. Jesus went to the cross and paid our debt there that we never could pay ourselves.
Continuing on in the passage, Kellin now explained the depth of the debt the servant owed to his master Matthew 18:24-27 And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents.
 But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made.
  The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.
  Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt.
How much is 10,000 talents in today's money? - 1 talent equals 15 years of wages so 10,000 talents = 150,000 years of wages. That would be the equivalent of $6 Billion in todays world. So we see it was an unpayable amount of debt. The Master cancelled this amount of debt that his servant owed him.
Now this man ( whose 6 billion dollar ) debt has been cancelled goes out and sees his fellow servant who owes him Verse 28 But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: This would equal about 1/2 year of wages so about $16,000. This is a debt that actually could be paid.  Though the first man had been forgiven a huge debt he was unable to forgive his fellowman a much smaller debt and threw the man in prison. Verse 30 - 35  And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt.  So when his fellowservants saw what was done, they were very sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done.  Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me:  Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.
Application:
When we cannot forgive it leaves people questioning our Christianity.
Forgiveness cost us. By choosing to forgive we take revenge off the table.
Forgiveness does not mean we forget nor does it mean that the wrong we have suffered it not serious or real. It also does not mean that there are no consequences to the one who has offended us and whom we are now forgiving.
We find freedom when we let them off "our hook." We give it over to God and allow Him to deal with the situation.
Scars will remain. Forgiving is a process, a journey. It is not instantaneous but rather a continual laying it down before the Lord. The pain and hurt can and will resurface. Continually give your hurt feelings over to God. We do not want to carry the burden of our hurt anymore.
We have all been forgiven a magnitude of debt. Christ paid the debt that we could never pay.
Be merciful as your Heavenly Father is merciful.
The service closed with the Lord's Prayer.

The closing song was "Amazing Grace - my Chains are gone".
 

Miracles of God in our Lives!!

Psalm 106:8  Nevertheless he saved them for his name's sake, that he might make his mighty power to be known.
Many times as I have read my Bible, I have been wowed by the fact that God does things in order to make His great Name known. It is His will that we become familiar with how great and awesome He is, that He does mightly things for the glory of His Name. It pleases the Lord that we exalt Him in our daily life. He is active and present in our life everyday and we would see Him act if we would only want to live that close in relationship with Him.
Ezekiel 36:22 Therefore say unto the house of Israel, thus saith the Lord God; I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name's sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye went.
So the first reason that God actively works among us is to make His Great Name known but there is another reason that I would also like to mention. The second reason is that He acts on our behalf. He sees us in our situation and the need that we are in and He comes to our aid. We find ourselves in a situation and we see no relief or way to get out of our mess. And at just such a time, when we are at the end of ourselves, we find that the Lord has been waiting for us to get to the point that we will cry out to Him.
Psalm 76: 7-9 says  - You, Yourself, are to be feared;
And who may stand in Your presence
When once You are angry?
⁸ You caused judgment to be heard from heaven;
The earth feared and was still,
⁹ When God arose to judgment,
To deliver all the oppressed of the earth.

There are many stories in the Bible where God does great things that are humanly impossible. We can think of how the young boy David killed the giant Goliath. We think of Gideon and how he got victory with just 300 men in a battle against those much mightier or how God rained down bread (called manna) for the travelling Israelites. We can think of the stories of Samson or Esther - great Bible stories that show how God does what seems humanly impossible. Of course in the New Testament there are also the stories where Jesus changed water into wine, He healed people who were sick - the lepers, the crippled, those who could not speak and those who were possessed by demons, and others were raised from the dead. In many of these Bible stories I have mentioned, God was exalted and glorified and people were helped. These two concepts are found together quite frequently.
It would be encouraging to hear more testimonies today of how God met a need , a seemingly impossible situation turned by the direct touch of the Lord's hand. I invite you to share your stories in the comment section here. It would be glorifying to the Lord to tell of His great help and kindness to us.
A Couple of Stories from me: There would be many stories that I could tell but I will share two.
When my twin boys were about six months old ( they are 20 now so its been a few years), my younger twin developed croup. I can't tell you a lot about croup, but it is very frightening as the child struggles immensely, is very frightened and is almost unable to breathe as he gasps for air. My son was hospitalized and put into a contained crib tent where cool humid air was constantly being filtered into it. This was supposed to relieve the croup so that my son would be able to breathe until the virus passed. Days went by and there was no improvement to his condition. The doctors were at their wits end, not knowing anymore what to do to help my son. We invited our Pastor Al to come to the hospital to pray over our son. My husband stayed in the hospital that night by our son's side and as I drove back home to care for our other twin son, I just broke down and cried out to the Lord for His intervention. I still know exactly where I was on the highway when this happened. I went home and the very next day, the doctors decided to remove the humidity tent and see what would happen as nothing they had done so far had helped. As soon as the tent was removed from my son's crib, he began to breathe with ease - and he was ready to come home again after a very short time. I know for a fact that somehow, God healed my son when that humidity tent was removed. The Lord inspired the doctors to make that bold choice the very morning after our Pastor prayed and I had my moments of surrender on the highway. Praise the Lord for that healing!
The second story I will share happened just very recently. My husband and I have a very small farm here growing canola and wheat. It has been incredibley dry here all summer. We had frost, hail and a dust storm hit our crop as well as a real lack of rain.  The canola crop looked poor all summer and produced only half as much as we would expect on a normal year. No surprise there -But to our surprise when we combined the wheat, it was not a poor crop at all. The wheat produced what is a known as bumper crop - above the average of a good year. My husband was seriously shocked by the amount of grain he hauled off that field. It is a miracle from the Lord that in the midst of the drought, the hail, the frost etc, the crop was greater than what we see on a good crop year. Praise God for all that wheat but more importantly Praise God that He can make wheat grow without what we consider necessary for growth. He did it with His own Mighty Hand!!
That is just a taste of how I have seen the Lord work - there is so much more to share. As I said earlier, please feel free to share a story of how the Lord has worked in your life. God Bless.

Jesus Healed Many at Sunset

Luke 4:40-41 says:  Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them.
And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God. And he rebuking them suffered them not to speak: for they knew that he was Christ.



I took this picture of the sunset this evening. Even in this late hour, Jesus is ready and willing to heal us - healing in our physical body and also our spiritual inner soul.

Forgiving the hard stuff - Justice and Healing

Proverbs 15:13  A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.

The topic of forgiveness probably raises more questions than answers. There are two sides to the coin of forgiveness. That is, on one side we need to be forgiven of  the wrongs that we have done and on the other side is that we need to forgive those who have done wrong to us. Jesus commanded us to forgive as He has forgiven us. Matthew 6: 14-15 says  For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:  But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. In this post I want to focus on forgiving others.

What is forgiveness really and what does it look like? If we were to honestly share about life, we would probably all say that we have been able to forgive many people for small offenses and hurts over the years and we do not even think about those issues any more. BUT most likely many of us also have had one or more big things that have happened to us, some one has seriously hurt, betrayed and offended us, a "dealbreaker" type of offense, and that is the where the question of forgiveness becomes the issue. As much as we would like to be able to live life again as if this event had never happened, we cannot and because we know we will never be able to entirely get beyond it, we feel like forgiveness is incomplete.
 
Sometimes when you watch the news and some terrible tradegy has occured, you will hear the victim's family say - "we want justice". It is within all of us to want justice to happen - " do the crime, do the time" is how we feel. But we also know that in many cases, even though a criminal is put behind bars for life, the hearts of the victims and the victim's family remain broken and in the case where a death has occured , the life of that loved one is gone and cannot be restored no matter how many years the criminal spends behind bars. Even with a verbal apology or a financial settlement, the heart remains sad and broken. So what is the answer? Part of the answer is that God, the character of God demands justice.  As human beings, we are created in the image of God and that is part of why we want justice. Even a small child knows when "it's not fair!"  So God  is a God of justice and we can see what that justice required in that Jesus the only begotten Son of God ( the second part of the Trinity ) had to die to pay for our sin in order to redeem us to the Father.  God required that kind of a sacrifice. We see it in Hebrews 9: 22 And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.

I have heard many sermons preached on forgiveness and I believe that it has helped me to get a better understanding of what forgiveness looks like.
 First of all, it does not mean that we forget. Even God doesn't forget - He simply chooses not to remember. To place the expectation on yourself that when you forget, then you will have forgiven is just not going to work. If a life changing betrayal and offense has occured, forgetting is not about to happen.

Secondly, Time will not heal the wound that has been created. To just think that we can stuff our problems in the closet or under the rug is not going to work. I saw this happen to a friend who was abused as a child. Years later when she got the courage to confront the man who abused her, he denied all wrong doing. Nothing was done to solve the brokenness and the whole issue got stuffed away again. We wonder what the final outcome of such will be when God's books are finally opened. Sometimes we may also think that if we  busy our minds with all sorts of pleasures and do fun stuff and just not think about the problem any more, that somehow that equals forgiveness. I can tell you that also does not work either.

Thirdly, forgiveness does not mean that we are okay with what happened or that we are no longer sad or heartbroken about what happened. Nor does it mean that we are willing to allow the person who hurt us to hurt us again. It is okay to put up some boundaries and defenses in order to protect ourselves from such an offense happening again. In the old Testament in the story of Joseph, we see how he tested his brothers to see if they had changed and if they were truly repentant before he would allow his heart to be touched by them again.

 Fourthly, Forgiveness also does not mean that there should be no legal consequences for criminal actions. God has put the authorities in place for the purpose of punishing criminals. The problem is that what God counts as a sin and wrong doing is often not seen as a criminal offense in the justice system of our country. An example would be drunkenness, abortion or the breaking of the marriage covenant through an affair etc.

Fifth,  there is no point in waiting for the person who offended you come to make things right - to start treating you better or to apologize in such a way that it seems sincere enough that you feel better. The offender is not capable of realizing the degree of hurt that he/she has afflicted on you. The offense or betrayal that has occured is bigger than words. It will take consistant heartfelt restoration work on the part of the offender for you to ever begin to trust again and to start feeling better.  We know from the story of Zacchaeus that he offered to pay back 4 times what he had stolen from people. In Luke 19:8 Zacchaeus says - if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.

 If something life changing has occured, only God's Hand can heal.
I believe forgiveness is a decision that I make. A decision  that I personally will not punish the person who betrayed or offended me nor will I pay him/her back for what was done.  I will leave all that to God.  Vengeance is mine says the Lord, I will repay. I decide that I will allow God to be in control of the justice part of what has happened. I come to the realization that it is not my place to do what God says is His part to play. I decide that I will choose to treat that person with kindness knowing that it is to God that account must be given. God is the only One who truely knows all the details of the situation. He is a God of holiness and righteousness and He alone knows what is just, right and fair. With my limited understanding, I am not able to determine the appropriate consequences to make a just and fair call. To get to this place in one's heart after a serious hurt has occured is a process and it takes time to work these thoughts through our minds and get God's perspective on the situation. It is very freeing to realize that God will deal with the persons who hurt us. God will do it in His own time. We do not know if it will happen here on the earth or if it will have eternal consequences but we leave that determination entirely in God's control. We must entrust ourselves to Him and believe that He is faithful to do what His Word declares.
Romans 12: 18-20 is a very important passage to remember:
¹⁸ If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.
¹⁹ Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
²⁰ Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

Once we have come to the realization, that God will do the justice part, then we can begin to focus on HEALING. The Lord Jesus is the healer of our broken hearts. Psalm 147:3  He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. He will fill the emptyness with His love and care. The more we are hurting and reaching out to Him, the more He is reaching down to meet our needs. In His love, He is longing to be involved in our healing.  Daily, moment by moment, we can keep bringing our brokenness before Him and the healing we experience in this way is a direct miracle from the Hand of God!  In Luke 4:18, Jesus says   The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised

It seems to me that many times the Christian community and churches will put a huge focus on restoring the person who has commited the offense and will leave the victims to suffer and get through their brokenness more or less on their own. Somehow they think that if the offender ( whether it be through alcholism, drugs, sexual problems, money issues etc)  they think that if the offender just doesn't offend again, then the problems have been dealt with. I do not agree with this. The hurts that have occured to the victims and other family members is huge and much more compassion needs to be displayed towards the victims and family members.

There is so much more that could be written regarding forgiveness. If anyone reading this has a good insight to add or a comment, please feel free to leave your comments. May God's healing touch be real in your life as you experience the healing touch of the Master's Hand!  For further study on forgiveness, I recommend the teaching by James MacDonald from Walk in the Word ministries.