Time can’t do it. Nor is the answer just to “forgive and forget.” It actually isn’t possible to forget the deep hurts we’ve gone through!

The wound needs to be healed.

Do you ever find yourself reacting in ways that hurt yourself or other people? You don’t want to, but it’s like you can’t control how you react. At Elijah House, we call that “bad fruit.” It is the evidence of a heart wound.

The same thing happened with the apostle Paul, one of the most zealous men of God in the Bible. He writes in Romans 7, “The thing I want to do I can’t seem to do! And the thing I don’t want to do is the very thing I do! Oh, wretched man that I am—who is going to deliver me from this body of death?”

Even Paul dealt with a heart wound that pushed him to respond in ways he didn’t want to.

Time can’t do it. Nor is the answer just to “forgive and forget.” It actually isn’t possible to forget the deep hurts we’ve gone through!

The wound needs to be healed.

Do you ever find yourself reacting in ways that hurt yourself or other people? You don’t want to, but it’s like you can’t control how you react. At Elijah House, we call that “bad fruit.” It is the evidence of a heart wound.

The same thing happened with the apostle Paul, one of the most zealous men of God in the Bible. He writes in Romans 7, “The thing I want to do I can’t seem to do! And the thing I don’t want to do is the very thing I do! Oh, wretched man that I am—who is going to deliver me from this body of death?”

Even Paul dealt with a heart wound that pushed him to respond in ways he didn’t want to.

We don’t know who we are! And we don’t know who we’re supposed to be. God created us with gifts and a calling, and these things were established before the foundation of the world—yet it is possible we have never really seen who we are. Because we learned at an early age to believe lies about who God created us to be.  

Healing the heart doesn’t happen through psychology, psychiatry, or any other kind of mental reasoning. Self-help books and articles, counseling, therapy—these things can be helpful when it comes to coping with heart wounds, but they do not actually heal the issue that caused the wound.

As long as we have an unhealed wound, we (and probably the people around us!) will continue to suffer. The wounded place in our heart needs to be sanctified. That is, it needs to be made holy through Jesus’ work on the cross.