- Whether it's our sin, or
whether it's our woundedness, we wanna hide even from
the eyes of the one who's gonna look
with complete mercy. - [Announcer] Can't
you just feel it? The conflict is becoming
apparent in our culture. It reminds me of those
words of John Paul II. We're now living in
the final confrontation between the gospel
and the anti-gospel, between the church
and the anti-church, between Christ and
the Antichrist. And if we don't choose
to know God's word, to believe God's word
and follow God's word, we're gonna be a sitting duck for all kinds of confusion,
all kinds of disorder. Those are really
important choices that
people have to make. And these choices are difficult. Who am I gonna marry? What kind of life
am I gonna live? How am I gonna raise my kids? What am I gonna do with my time,
my talent, and my treasure? I have to make a choice today. Jesus says to each one of us, I came that you might have
life, and have it to the full. The question is, do we want it? - Welcome, friends, to another
week of The Choices We Face. I'm Peter Herbeck. We're here again today
with Dr. Bob Schuchts. If you didn't have a chance
to tune in last week, Bob was our guest, and he
shared the amazing testimony of how God worked in healing
him and healing his entire family, a family that was
very broken, very wounded, for really quite a long time,
but God in his faithfulness brought them to wholeness
and healing and restoration. Bob is the founder of the John
Paul II Center for Healing, and he's the author
of some very, I think very important
books on healing, as well as I think a leader in the
Catholic church in America in leading people,
both clergy and laity, to help them encounter
the healing power of God, the healing power
of the Holy Spirit, and to come into a greater
wholeness in their life. And much of what we're
gonna talk about today is coming from a foundational
book that Bob wrote called Be Healed: A
Guide to Encountering the Powerful Love of
Jesus in Your Life. It's a fantastic book. I'll say more about
this in a minute. And then his most recent
book called Real Suffering: Finding Hope and Healing
in the Trials of Life. I know there's many of
you who are listening. You're experiencing
physical, emotional, or spiritual suffering
of some kind. This book will
speak right to it. It's really excellent. So, welcome back, Bob. - Thank you. - It's good to see
you, brother, yeah. I'm just so excited
that you're here again, you're gonna talk about
this material today, because a friend of
mine, a priest you know, Father Steve Mattsen,
gave me this book, and I had it in my
shelf for a while, and then I took it to Costa
Rica when my wife and I went down to stay with
some friends, and I got up every morning about quarter
to six, everybody's still sleeping, and I went down to
the beach and planted a chair right there on the shoreline,
and I spent two hours a day for five straight days
going through this book, and it was transformational
for my life. It was really powerful. There's a lot of deep insight
there, and really helped me kinda lay hold of things
that were surfacing in me that I didn't
quite understand, that I was trying to, you
know, kind of push away. I didn't wanna have
to deal with 'em. So, thank you for
writing the book, and thank you for being here. I'm hoping today you
can give us some insight into the fundamentals
that are there. - Okay. First of all, just to
give you a little history of the book, I was writing,
about 35 years ago, I was writing a book,
and a woman came along I had never met and spoke
and said, you're writing that for yourself, and God didn't
ask you to write that. And I was just dumbfounded. I was writing a
textbook for marriage and family, actually,
just dumbfounded. So I was really reluctant
to pick up a pen or you know, the keyboard
or whatever, to write again. So it was actually
35 years later that God clearly
spoke again and said, it's time to write, and
Be Healed was that book. And, you know, your story
is so encouraging to me, because I said Lord, I don't
wanna write a book for me. I wanna write a book that
you're gonna communicate in, that you're gonna
touch people in, that you're gonna
heal people in. And so, as you share those
stories, it just confirms that desire and the prayer. - Yeah, the Lord heard
your prayer, I think. Yeah, yeah. - Basically, I start the book with a quote from
Pope Benedict XVI, and it's about the power
of Jesus's gaze to heal us. And I start with the story
of the woman at the well, and I think it's the
greatest inner healing story in the New Testament that
I'm aware of, at least, and basically patterned
the book on that story, of encountering Jesus, and
then, in that encounter, facing your brokenness, and
in facing your brokenness, opening that brokenness up so
that Jesus can heal the world. So there's three
parts of the book, encountering the powerful
love, an encounter with Jesus, facing our brokenness,
how do we walk in and look at both our sin and
our wounds, and then, how do we turn those to God
so that he can heal them? - In the story of the
woman at the well, how is that dynamic
communicated? - Yeah, again, I use a
little bit of contemplative imagination in that story, but
I picture her, first of all, she's coming in the middle of
the day as a Samaritan woman. Jews and Samaritans don't have anything to do with each other. Men and women in that culture,
and for her to be coming in the middle of the day
says there's a lot of shame, because she didn't wanna be
around the rest of the people. And I imagine Jesus
coming, sitting down, and rather than putting
anything on her, asking her for a drink of water. And there's something in
that encounter where he's just broken all the
rules, and she's treated with a value that she doesn't
feel inside of herself, which is what Jesus
does with all of us. He comes to us in the
places of our shame, and there's something about
the way that he looks at us that increases our
shame at first, because it's, I'm
not worthy of this. I'm not worthy of this
kind of intense love. And I think behind
that is our brokenness. Whether it's our sin or
whether it's our woundedness, we wanna hide even from the eyes of the one who's gonna
look with complete mercy. And so, as he looks at
her, I believe there's something that got
communicated that allowed her to trust as her
brokenness gets exposed. I mean, he went right
for it, you know? Where's your husband? I don't have a husband. You're right, you've
had five husbands, and the man you're living
with isn't your husband. Now, coming from anybody else,
that would be condemnation, but from Jesus, it's
just pure mercy, the mercy that tries to expose what's in the darkness to
bring us out into freedom. - Yeah. Well, that's so beautiful. Unfortunately, a lot of us
don't encounter God in that way. In our mind, we have a
thought about him, and so, the sense of, whether it's
self-rejection, self-hatred, whatever's going on
inside, past experience, we project onto God, and
we imagine he looks at us the way we look at us, and
we actually think that's him. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - And when he comes,
he just disarms us. - Yep. - Yeah, again, we were
talking last night about experience in prayer,
and just how disarming it is when he comes, and it's
through our imagination, but it's not imaginative. It's not make-believe. It's surprising. It's like, I couldn't
have constructed this. In contemplative prayer, he
reveals himself in a way. I think it was Saint
Therese who says, he looks at me, and I look
at him, and things change. They can't stay the same. - Yeah, I think one of the
things I picked up from the book is how the role of the Holy
Spirit in helping us both encounter Jesus, but then
there's a power of grace and his mercy at work in us to
be able to look at our wounds or to be able to experience
him in a different way. It's the Holy Spirit who
actually reveals Jesus in his truth, in his heart
to us, as opposed to just the projection of our
own imagination of
who we think he is. - Yeah, and even in
looking at our own stuff. We don't do very well in
looking at our own stuff. You know, when I try to
examine my own conscience without the Holy
Spirit, I'm shallow. - Yeah. - But he goes deeper,
and he reveals stuff that we're not even aware of
that's underneath the sin. - And so, I think a key
part that really struck me in the book, Bob, was the
idea that every one of us, because of the fall, because
of sin, at some point, we're gonna be wounded. We'll sin, and we're
also gonna be wounded. And the fundamental question is, how do we respond
to that reality? Would you say that's
kind of a fundamental? - I think that's part of it, yeah, a fundamental
piece of that is. And I was one of those
people, as we talked about in the last show, who
thought I wasn't wounded, thought I had it
together, and, you know, those were the Pharisees
of the time of Jesus, of, you know, we don't
need a physician. We've got everything. We've got all the religious
practices we need. Oftentimes, the most healing
is needed in those situations. But if there was a fall, and
we believe that there was, and we know it because
our own experience of it, we live in that reality
of a fallen, broken world, then every single one
of us has brokenness. You can't live in this
world without brokenness. And so it's a matter of
whether we face it or not, and then, how do we face it? Do we face it with
self-reliance, what I call ungodly
self-reliance in the book, which is, I'm gonna take
care of all this myself. And honestly, as a therapist,
before my encounter, I was operating more that way. I've got the understanding. I've learned it in school. I can give you advice. All you need to do
is take this advice. You know, there's no
healing that happens there. There's a healing that
happens when the Holy Spirit is deep, powerful, and
real, because it gets down to the core of the brokenness,
to where it's rooted. - So, thinking about your
description of your own life, you had the wound,
your father leaving, and your brother
handled it one way. You said yesterday he
ended up giving himself over to a life of drugs and
addiction for many, many years. You became almost
like the perfect son, holding everybody together,
achieving at a very high level. And so, you both
made responses to it. Would you say you both,
as you were saying, went the way of
ungodly self-reliance? - Yes, we each did. It's all the way through
the scriptures, right? It's the Pharisees,
which is where I was, and the sinners and the
tax collectors, right? - Which was where he was. - Yeah, it's those who
were publicly broken, and those who appear
to be not broken, and Jesus is addressing
them all of the time. All of the Jesus stories,
all the Jesus parables, are addressing those two
groups, and this group, the group that I was in, thinks
we don't need any healing. This group thinks
they're beyond healing. And he meets both
of us, you know? He comes out to the
older brother in the
prodigal son story, and he goes to the prodigal,
and his love is for both. But we respond to
him very differently. - Yeah, there's two images
that I remember particularly from the book, the
concentric circles, where the central circle
is wound, the next circle is beliefs, the
next circle is vows. I found that really helpful. Can you help us
understand how that relates to leaning on
ungodly self-reliance? - All of us when we're
wounded, unless we know how to turn to God, turn
to Jesus in those wounds, we immediately
become self-reliant. And we do that in two ways. One is we form beliefs
around the experience, beliefs about ourselves. - [Peter] For example? - Beliefs like I'm
alone, there's nobody
to take care of me. I'm gonna take care of myself. And so, those beliefs
turn into vows. I'm gonna take care of myself. I'm gonna manage my own life. I'm gonna be good on my own. - I'm not gonna trust anybody. - I'm not gonna trust anybody. - Okay, yeah. - You know, if somebody's
been sexually abused, I'll never trust a man again. I'll never be vulnerable again. I won't be like my father. Those were my vows. I'll never divorce
like my father. And that seemed like
a good vow, except for it's made out of judgment,
it's made out of fear, and that vow that I
made as a 13-year-old almost created a divorce
in my life, because I was fearfully trying to avoid
the thing that had hurt me rather than walk
into it and face it, which is what I eventually
did, which saved the marriage, along
with my marriage vows. - Yeah, you were
living out of fear essentially is what
you're saying, right? And so, fear, whether
you look like you're under control or not,
fear is at the root and sort of dominating
your behavior, even though you look like
you're doing the right thing. And the self-reliance, the
ungodly self-reliance is, I'm actually living
a lie about God, because I don't believe
I have a loving Father. I don't believe there's
an answer to this. I have to secure all this. I'm alone, and even he
can't be trusted, right? - Yeah, it's the
original sin, right? - [Peter] Yeah! - Right? He can't be trusted, so
I'm gonna be like God. - Yeah, yeah, that's so good. Now, there's a few more diagrams
I wanna talk to you about, and then we're gonna take
a break, just for a minute. We'll be right back, friends. This is good stuff, and I
hope it speaks to your heart. We'll be back in just a minute. - [Announcer] Everywhere
we turn, there's division. Our world is fractured, broken. What's missing. - [Woman] Is God. In him, we find our rest. This life is short. The next one is forever. Choose joy, choose
peace, choose heaven. Choose God. (uplifting instrumental music) - Welcome back, friends. We're here with
Dr. Bob Schuchts. We've been walking about
some of the content of this really important book called
Be Healed that he wrote. And so, we talked about
the diagram of the circles, wounds, beliefs, and vows. When I was reading this
book, it was so helpful, 'cause I've made some of
those vows in my own life, you know, dealing with past
wounds from my own family. It's like a coping mechanism,
isn't it, Bob, in some way? - It's the way that
we rely on ourselves to make something
better, but it's pride. - It's interesting, just
as we're talking, like, honestly, lights are kinda
coming on for me a little bit to say that, well, when
we rely on ourselves, all we can do is cope; we
can't really heal, right? We protect, we cope,
but if we are vulnerable and open up and face the
pain of those wounds, and sometimes we need help,
someone to help us do that, and we open our heart to God,
God has an answer for that. So we don't have to
just cope anymore. We can actually, you know,
get healed, get free. - Get healing. - Now, there also in the
book, I think it was on page, yeah, 121, you have a
tree diagram in here. At the root of it, you have
this ungodly self-reliance. So describe what this
is for our friends. We'll be able to put a
picture up on the screen here, and what's that dynamic,
and how does it work? - Yeah. Let's start with, all the way from the beginning of the
scriptures to the end, the scripture uses the tree as an example of our
spiritual life, you know? The tree of life in the garden, and the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life in
the book of Genesis. Jesus says a good tree
cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot
bear good fruit. And so, all of us in our
life have areas of our life that are bearing good fruit,
that are good trees, and then we have other areas of our life
that are bearing bad fruit. And too often, we stop there. We go to confession
with the bad fruit. You know, we say here,
Jesus, I give you this apple. I give you this sin, right? - Okay, yeah. - And what happens
to an apple tree when you take an apple off? It grows another one. And you take another apple
off, and it grows another one. The only way to get
rid of the apples is to go down to the
roots of the tree. And the roots of the tree
are the seven deadly sins, and the core sin of pride,
which is ungodly self-reliance, and then underneath that pride
are these vows and wounds, because the vows are
what make the pride. You know, the vows
are the pride. The pride comes from the
fall, but the vows are the expression of that pride,
that ungodly self-reliance. But underneath every
sin that we have, there are areas of our life
where we've been wounded. So take my experience, you know. When I was abandoned,
when my dad left, I was in a lot of fear. I remember going to bed
at night and just thinking my dad was dead, and
just being afraid. I don't have a dad. I've gotta take care
of things myself. I've gotta take
care of my family. I've gotta take
care of everything. And that fear, which is
a wound, and that sense of abandonment gets
expressed in an inner vow. I've gotta take care
of everybody and
take care of myself. I'm gonna be responsible. And then, out of that,
the sin of pride, and then the other sins,
the sins of judgment, the sins of resentment,
and so the fruit of my tree may look like this,
and as long as I'm just addressing my sins, I'm
not getting down to my sin, which are the deadly
sins, and I'm not getting down to the areas of my heart
where the sins are driven. And so, control is
a sin, you know? Ungodly self-reliance is a sin. But where does control come? You mentioned it before. It comes out of fear. I control because I'm afraid. I'm afraid to be vulnerable. I'm afraid everything's
gonna fall apart. I'm afraid to face this
pain of being alone. And so, out of that, our coping
actually creates patterns of sin in our life, and we
keep stuck in those sins because we don't deal with
the deeper areas of our heart. - Which is why, you know,
you hear many priests say, lots of people come back
with the same sins over, and they sincerely
don't wanna do it again, or there's something
there, but they just keep repeating the same
sins over and over again. It's because they're trying
to just deal with the apple and not deal with the
root fundamentally? - Yeah, that tree that I
mapped out was actually the tree of John, who I
talk about in the book, who had a raging
pornography addiction. And he was doing everything
he could to deal with it at that level, but it
wasn't until he got into the deep abandonment
pain in his life that he was able to
heal and get free. - Yeah, how does someone, how do you begin
to deal with that? How do you begin to
like, in your own life, how do you begin to apply
it and understand yourself? Is it something that you really gotta get help from someone
else to be able to do? - I think it's the work of the Holy Spirit in all
of our lives, you know? I didn't go looking for it,
you didn't go looking for it, when those things
started to come up. It's a matter of what do we do when it starts to
come to the surface. And I think part of it
is, for us as a church to be aware, you know? A lot of our work right
now is training priests and first of all, their
own healing process, but then training them so that
when they're in confession, or they're in pastoral
direction, that they can help, but also therapists, also people
that are in ministry of any kind, just to be able
to recognize that we are at a point in the
church of a desperate need. You know, a lot of
evidence of that. - Yeah, for sure. - Desperate need for healing. And if we don't deal
with the deeper roots and find ways to prepare
therapists, priests, spiritual directors,
ministers, lay ministers, in this kind of work,
we're gonna have a lot of hurting people that are
turning to secular sources, which is just more
self-reliance, right? When I was doing counseling
without the Holy Spirit, I was just encouraging people
to greater self-reliance. - Yeah. I'm just thinking about how
the Lord is the real Physician, he really is a physician,
that does wanna come and bring healing to us, and I think,
friends, if there's a message that I hope you can
internalize and we can all internalize more is
trusting in that reality, that he's full of love,
he's full of mercy, and he has the power to
help us get out of traps and strongholds and bondages
and habit patterns of sin that have a grip on us. - Yes, and in those places
where we've been struggling for a long time, we
don't believe that. What you just said
is totally true, and after we encounter him,
we know that to be true. But beforehand, we
don't believe it. We don't trust it. We don't believe he's
gonna come through there. And so, that hopelessness,
that unbelief, is part of the
thing that we have to deal with and that he
deals with in our lives. - You know, just a little
self-revelation here. When I was sitting on
the beach in Costa Rica and going through this
and actually looked at that particular diagram,
you know, one of the things I as a, you know, having
grown up in an alcoholic home, God did amazing things
with our family, brought lots of healing
and all the rest, but I did receive some things
in that broken situation, and I internalized things,
and one of the things I internalized in my
relationship with my dad, he was an old World
War II veteran, and he saw a lot of
negative stuff in the recon in Patton's Third Army,
was a hero on the one hand, but on the other
hand, he just saw a lot of stuff and
experienced a lot of stuff. And the way he coped
with it was drinking, and he would drink once a week
or once every couple weeks or something, and the
pain that was in him would come out at those times,
and he, like, physically, would never harm anybody,
but he would speak very negatively, and
negatively about himself. Like, even if he was alone,
you can hear him talking, and he had a lot of self-hatred
that he was dealing with, and he didn't know
how to talk about it, especially in those days, didn't
know how to talk about it. - [Bob] Yeah, where do you go? - So, I'm 60 years old,
and I can still experience, hear tapes inside myself that
actually relate to myself that way, and there's
certain kind of self-hatred. I'm trying to think,
like, why do I have this? What's going on inside me? And then to see in the
book, it was an opportunity just to understand the
dynamics that were happening in my own life and a
dimension of un-freedom that was present
there, and I could feel the Holy Spirit saying,
look, I wanna help you. Go down this road. You know, this'll help you. And one of the great
insights in the book was that under self-hatred
is pride, that it drives it, that that's one of
the seven deadly sins that is working in my life,
and that's true, you know? And so, I don't like, there's
a part of me, and hearing that tape, I think about
myself in a particular way. I don't like certain things
about how God made me, or I wanna be different, and I'm not thankful for
who God made me to be. And friends, I don't
know if there's anybody out there who experiences
anything like that. - Or, everybody. - Or everybody at
some level, right? And it's really good to see it. So I think it really is
the case that I at times in my life was repenting
about certain apples, you know, like what grew out
of that ungodly self-reliance or believing the tapes that
were going on inside my head. Like, well, I can't
argue against this. This is kind of who I am. And so you're in a
position of bondage rather than a
position of freedom. - Yeah, those are your beliefs, and we act out of our beliefs. And you know, if
you look at that, you took the sin of pride
and the wound of rejection. And so, what happens to
the wound of rejection? It becomes self-rejection. And so, over and over and
over again, you're reliving this wound of rejection by
your own self-rejection, and you're hating
yourself, which is pride. - [Peter] Yeah. - And then, we stay
in that prison. And I'm saying you, but that's all of our story, at some level. - Yeah. - The way we manifest
that is very different. We put on lots of faces to
the world and say, I'm okay, but underneath, we're not okay. Underneath, we're
broken, underneath. Jesus says I came for those who are sick, not for
those who are well. And at one point, when
I was in my pride, it was like, well,
Jesus, I want you, so maybe I need to
get sick to do that. Well, I was already sick. - And I think part
of the pride too is, well, I don't
need a physician. - That's right. - I'm good, I'm good, you know? - That's right. - Yeah, I got a little struggle here and there, but I'm good. That's, so many of us guys
do that kind of thing. - [Bob] Guys especially. - So many brothers are
listening out there, and some of this was touched
on because the Holy Spirit is coming close to your heart,
and he wants to heal you, 'cause he loves you, and
he wants us to be free, to be set free, to
receive his love, to live in his love, so we
can give away his love, so. - Yeah, and we have conferences
all over the country if people that are interested
in finding out more. - Where should they go to
find out more about it? - John Paul II Healing
Center website, www.jpiihealingcenter.org. - Brothers and sisters, I've
met so many people who have been touched by this ministry
in a very profound way. And Bob, I just wanna
thank you for the heroic work you're doing and
the way that you just are a servant and instrument
of God's grace at this really important time in
the life of the church, so. - Thank you, Peter. - [Peter] So glad
you're able to come. - It was great,
Peter, thank you. - God bless. Friends, I also wanna
remind you of a booklet that Ralph just wrote called
Mary's Mission, Our Response. There's maybe the freest
human being that ever lived who really knew the love of
the God deep in her heart, and the Lord wants
you to know that love. And you can get this
booklet on our website at renewalministries.net. You can just click on the icon,
and we'll send it out free, just for the asking. So, until next week,
this is Peter Herbeck and Dr. Bob Schuchts
saying, let's all go after the freedom of the
sons and daughters of God. Let's seek the Lord. Let's hunger after
him and thirst, and welcome his saving grace
and healing in our lives. God bless you,
see you next week. - [Ralph] At times of
great crisis for the church and for humanity, God has
sent a very special Messenger. When the New World was not
responding to the gospel, he sent Mary at Guadalupe. When atheism was aggressively
growing in Europe, he sent Mary at Lourdes, and the
living waters began to flow. When perhaps the greatest
crisis began to unfold, the domination of the world
by an atheistic materialism, which is still growing,
he sent Mary at Fatima. The world is again
in danger, the church is again confused, and she
is here again to help us. I've written a
booklet about her, her role, and her mission today. We'd like to give it to you at
no cost, just for the asking. Go to our website,
renewalministries.net, and we'll send it
right off to you. (steady piano music) ♪ Is great to the heavens ♪ ♪ And thy faithfulness ♪ ♪ Thy faithfulness
to the clouds ♪ ♪ Be exalted ♪ ♪ Be exalted ♪ ♪ Oh God ♪ ♪ Oh God ♪ ♪ Above all ♪ ♪ All ♪ (shutter snaps)
