One of the big-ticket issues people have with inner healing as a Christian practice is the idea that Jesus never directly talked about inner healing, and the resulting argument is that we therefore shouldn’t need to do it. One of the problems with this idea is that the Bible does actually tell us that Jesus provides for inner healing. in places such as Isaiah 53:4 which says He bore our grief and sorrow, and Jesus himself quoted Isaiah 61 which directly refers to replacing joy for mourning and praise for heaviness/depression. Even if we ignore those plain references to healing emotional issues, Jesus did share farming and planting principles that we can apply directly to emotional issues and how they function within our soul. We are going to look at an example that aligns with what Jesus did teach, and see how the practice of inner healing can help our spiritual growth.
Hebrews 12:1 tells us, ” Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us . . . ” This passage tells us that we need to do two things, and in a specific order. The first is get rid of the things that hold us back, and the second is to run forward on the path that has already been marked out and predetermined for us. What holds us back? Primarily three things: bad mindsets and/or lies we believe, emotional wounds, and demonic influences and attachments. Obviously we change mindsets through mind-renewal (Romans 12:2) and we deal with demons by casting them out. For emotional wounds, however, we have to heal them. And to do that, it helps to understand how emotional wounds work, and how to get rid of them effectively and permanently.
Emotional wounds are a bit like planting a seed in a garden. The garden is the soil of our hearts, or in reality, they occur in the dimension of the soul, but let’s work with the gardening analogy. When we have negative emotions that we do not properly process and remove, whether through unforgiveness, fear, mindsets, demonic influence, or simply a magnitude of emotional pain, those negative emotions get trapped in our hearts and get planted in the garden there, acting like seeds. As we encounter new situations that are similar to those initial seed-events, the seeds get watered and grow. As we indulge our fears and ruminate on those negative things, we feed and water those seeds even more, eventually growing those seeds into poisonous fruit-bearing trees, what are essentially emotional strongholds in our hearts. Now, if we wanted to stop having bad fruit from all of those negative emotions, we could spend all our time cleaning up the garden of our soul and removing all of the bad fruit. And while doing this provides some measure of inner benefit, in the end it is somewhat futile if that is all one does.
Here’s why.
The fruit of an emotional problem is simply the result of ongoing care and maintenance of a poisonous tree. The poisonous tree makes all kinds of room for demons to roost in its branches and the fruit ensures that the problems continue to grow and spread gradually over time. If properly tended, the tree can exist literally forever. In order to actually deal with the problem, one has to start moving upstream from the fruit, back to the source of the problem. One might argue that chopping off the branches would stop the tree from growing fruit, but have you ever seen what happens when a tree loses its limbs? In many cases even if cut down, so long as the roots remain intact the tree will extend its roots further and the tree will grow new limbs over time. In other words, cutting down the tree still won’t solve the problem. The only real solution is to uproot it entirely.
This is where inner healing comes in. Instead of spending a lifetime dealing with the problems downstream of the actual issue, emotional healing is generally designed to uproot the issues at their inception. By doing this, the individual will stop having emotional triggers each time a new event occurs that is similar in some way to the initial one, which means they stop watering and growing that initial plant. Now, what complicates this a little is that each new event is also an opportunity to plant new poison-trees as well, so it usually takes time and energy to properly deal with the emotional roots of problems. These issues rarely appear overnight and are often the result of years of problems and ongoing reinforcement, so it is uncommon for these things to clear up in a single prayer session.
This is where a major objection to inner healing work gets raised—that Jesus completed His work on the cross once for all, and yet inner healing ministers just want to spend years and years rehashing past events that are already supposed to be cut off through the cross. And if people stopped having emotional problems upon salvation, then that argument would hold merit. What we believe is is supposed to happen and what actually happens are two different things. While certainly a one-time fix is the goal of every inner healing minister, it is simply uncommon, and thus we work with what we have and develop ways to do things faster and better over time, with the one-time-fixes all prayer-goal in mind.
In the meantime, someone seeking to get healing for their emotional problems would do well to remember that if problems weren’t created in a day, then they may not get fixed in a single inner healing session. Furthermore, in the same way that plant roots can get tangled with one another, emotional issues are often tied in with one another. Rejection from a parent may also come with guilt and shame in some way, fear of further rejection, and more. And that guilt and shame can then be linked to multiple different things, and so on. Thus, inner healing is often non-linear, sometimes meandering in ways that appear random at first, but when led by the Holy Spirit produce wonderful results.
At the end of the day, the point of inner healing isn’t to focus on problems. Well, it is, but only just long enough to heal them and provide tools for further self-healing work that the individual can do on their own. In this, it fulfills the first part of Hebrews 12:1, throwing off the hindrances and stumbling blocks that keep someone from moving forward into all God has for them. Ignoring the stumbling blocks slows someone’s forward movement. Removing them speeds it up. While it is possible to get bogged down in constant focus on emotional problems, that is addressed by renewing the mind, another aspect of the inner transformation process, and not one we are focusing on in this article. All in all, Jesus’s teachings as well as His work on the cross are congruent with the practice of inner healing, and those who make use of it, whether through any one of the myriad of modalities, methods, or practices available or on one’s own, he or she will, if applied consistently over time, experience accelerated spiritual growth, greater inner freedom and peace, and likely will find themselves growing deeper in their relationship with God. All in all, quite worth it.
If you are looking for some resources on how to get started, try the following:
- Pick up a copy of my friend Praying Medic’s book Emotional Healing in 3 Easy Steps and follow the simple instructions.
- Listen to the following prayer that deals with Healing Trauma by Jim and Pat Banks.
- Book an Emotion Code session with my friend Danielle at Risen Light Works and jump-start your inner healing process.
- Read through my blogs in the Physical and Emotional Healing category.
- Head over to my Resources page for a list of other inner healing ministers, books and resources.
- For a deeper dive into inner healing, pick up a copy of my book Broken To Whole, and read my blogs titled An Introduction to Soul Fragmentation and The Solar System Model of Understanding Fragmentation and Dissociation.
