Therapy & Theology: The Daily Cure for a Heavy Heart

hi i'm lisa turkurst welcome to therapy and theology with my good friends and ministry partners joel mutamale he's the director of theological research at proverbs 31 ministries and my personal counselor jim cress welcome you guys i know today we have a very important topic to cover we've been in a series on forgiveness because we are celebrating the release of the book that i've written for giving what you can't forget and i know both of us uh all together we've spent countless hours working on forgiveness both joel you and i have worked on it in the studying of god's word and really seeking to understand what god's word does and does not say about what forgiveness is and what forgiveness is not so we already had a session on that if you missed that we'll put a link so you can go back and listen to that one but you don't have to stop today's in order to uh get into this topic you can dive right in and go back and listen to the previous episode after this episode and jim you and i have spent many hours working on forgiveness from a counseling therapeutic standpoint i so appreciate both of you adding your voices to this important discussion today we're going to be talking about the cure for a heavy heart i think all of us well i don't want to put this on you i'm just going to give you an opportunity okay right i'm going to give you an opportunity to say we can all do it at the same time okay if you have ever had one of those times in your life where it's not that there's something big and traumatic happening in the moment but you wake up on what could be a really good day but you feel like there is this unexplainable heaviness in your heart so raise your hand if you've ever been there i got two yeah yeah for sure me too me too right yes and um i think that there are many contributing factors when someone has a heavy heart i know for me my natural bent is i'm a peacemaker and when there are situations in my life that i feel like i can't get to that place of peace then it just creates a lot of heaviness and it feels like a constant distraction to me all day um and so sometimes i can point directly to the reason why i'm feeling this heaviness other times i can't other times i wake up and i feel heavy and i i'm not even exactly sure why it's there but when we're studying forgiveness one place in the bible that i found to be so interesting is when jesus told the disciples let me tell you how to pray like this has been how you should pray and in matthew chapter six we find the recording of what jesus then said starting in verse nine this is then how you should pray our father in heaven hallowed be your name your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one four if you forgive other people when they sin against you your heavenly father will also forgive you but if you do not forgive others their sins your father will not forgive your sins and as i read that i'm struck by a couple of things number one if i was given the task by god to write one succinct prayer that for all time would teach people how to pray i'm not sure that i would have thought to write it so brilliantly like jesus wrote it right and i'm afraid that if i was given the task i was not thank goodness but if i was given this task i probably would not have fought to put in confession and forgiveness and make that the bulk of the focus of the prayer and so because jesus did if you count up the words there are the majority of the words in this prayer that jesus says this is then how you should pray they're dedicated to confession forgiveness deliverance from the evil one and then a warning on forgiveness and there's not a real clear break like was that last little part part of the prayer or was he just giving a commentary to me that's kind of an irrelevant question because it's all right there together and it's all still in the words of jesus and so i feel like so much when jesus was teaching us to pray is focused on confession and forgiveness there must be a reason for that and as i decided to start implementing confession and forgiveness as a more daily routine it started to lift some of the heaviness in my heart and i started to think to myself wow i've never been taught this before i've never been taught that the daily cure for heaviness in our heart is confession and forgiveness what are your thoughts there's a lot uh there's a lot i think one very personally just the last couple weeks i had a friend who is walking through a really difficult season in their marriage been married seven years got three kids um and he found out some things that uh he was uh horrified um at and his wife and and him they're working through the realities of forgiveness betrayal trust rebuilding and it was really interesting my friend said just other day he called and said i realized that there were a lot of things i had been doing that i wasn't aware of until my wife made me aware of it and i find myself during the day randomly where those things will just pop into my mind and when they pop into my mind i stop what i do i just go to her and i just confess that i say i'm so sorry for being short with you or and and then she responds in this awkward am i supposed to say something bad because we're just you know making dinner making lunch um but he used that exact same phrase lisa he said it took a heaviness from my heart off and it replaced it with a sense of being able to really connect um and i think that there's a beauty there that takes place with confession that jesus is trying to teach us and he gets that a couple quick notes about this why is it that jesus you brought this up so brilliantly why use these words why these sentences why this structure one of the things that i love about the lord's prayer is that the lord says all the things that he has enacted in his earthly ministry wow so think about that that the lord is saying um give us our daily bread well jesus himself gave daily bread you know he says forgive us our debts as we've also forgiven our debtors jesus knows he's coming to the cross where he is going to do that judicial declaring of um of of people being uh free of their guilt lead us onto temptation but deliver us from evil jesus is the one who delivered the people of israel the people of god from a greater enemy than pharaoh in egypt which is what they would have thought when they're saying delivers from you they're thinking in the red sea they're thinking this is our past story and this is what jesus is doing and then how would the people who are hearing this how what are they thinking of when they hear something like debts i think sometimes we miss this but the majority of the hearers of that time are people who are borrowing not lending they are steeped in debt they are steeped in the reality that some cases they can't pay this back and jesus is giving them a model um for this extravagant forgiveness that is modeled by jesus himself and he's going to show that in the cross coming up and jim i know you and i have talked about we think it's interesting that when forgiveness is mentioned here the weight of the offense is referred to as a debt well and we have referenced now many times in these series of podcasts and videos that one of the words afiami in greek means to cancel the debt and as we've talked a lot about fact at impact fact this is what you did but how much is the debt credit card companies do it all the time if they were to write off debt or they're trying to assess you where are you with your credit score how much is the debt so what's the weights of five dollar debt or a five million dollar debt but the the weightiness of what is the debt that you as we go to forgive and sometimes that just takes time for me to even be in touch with well how how how big is this for me how much has this bothered me what is the size of the debt and i think as we assess the hurt that we've been through yeah um and so much of the reason why we even bring up the topic of forgiveness is it's attached to something has happened somebody has done something that has caused us pain and because of that there was an emotional maybe even a financial maybe even a physical cost but regardless there was a cost somebody did something that cost us a lot and i think when you and i have talked jim about we make the decision to forgive for the facts of what happened then we also have to walk through the process of forgiveness to better assess and understand how to forgive the impact not just the facts of what happened originally but the impact of what the effect has been what the cost has been to us because of the action so we can forgive the action but the process of forgiveness is going to be a much longer process because sometimes we don't even know the full impact of how this is going to affect us or what this will cost us i mean it leaks into our life for years and years and years to come and so it's important to recognize when we become aware oh there's actually more debt here or oh there's actually a bigger cost here than what i realized or oh i'm now having emotions that are a direct tie back to the original event that hurt me but now these emotions have leaked into my life and they're affecting me today this could have happened the facts could have happened years and years and years ago but the impact is still affecting me so it's important to understand we forgive for the fact and then we go through the process of forgiveness and that process may take years and years and years the process of forgiving the impact as we become aware of the emotional cost that this has had to us just because we now have to forgive the impact that doesn't negate the original decision to forgive the original decision to forgive is there and it's secure but forgiving the impact happens over time and it's it's a decision and a process i like both of those and it's like calling the forgiveness adjuster everybody's had a car wreck first thing you do call the insurance they're going to send an adjuster you go to the body shop and they're going to give an estimate of what the damage is help they're going to look under the car damage to the chassis everybody that's driven a car knows this or hail damage or something on a house the adjuster comes out and says what is the extent i don't know a couple of whole no you need a whole new roof so that forgiveness adjuster as we do this work i especially have been able to do that uh with people in counseling is let's just stop and look at the impact and i even say naming not blaming we're not here to do blame work of people blame is often an attempt to discharge pain and discomfort but it's to say what has this cost me and to go back to another thing you said a moment ago remember as you land your plane of harm on a person's runway that runway was built before you and so we always want to assess the the post-traumatic stress part that you are hurting a person and that can open up old unhealed wounds or maybe scars that have healed it's often a buy one get two or three free wow yeah well i think we also need to incorporate the awareness here that jesus intended for this to be a daily prayer when he says give us today our daily bread joel would you agree that that's an indication that this is not just something we forgive a few times in our life for the really hard and horrific stuff but what this seems to indicate as i was studying it because i needed this i started to realize wow forgiveness and confession are supposed to be part of my daily routine and it has not been part of my daily routine and i wonder if because confession and forgiveness has not been part of my daily routine that that's why i'm carrying this heaviness in my heart and the way we get into an issue is often a clue of how we can get out of it so if i got into this realizing like wow i really haven't been incorporating confession and forgiveness on a daily basis then maybe by realizing that i can implement including confession and forgiveness and it has started to lift the heaviness out of my heart yeah i think um is it saying wash rinse repeat is that right from the shampoo bottle yes washington shampoo bottle i am so impressed that you just pulled that out from somewhere like typically it's sports analogies and i'm having to nod my head like sure it goes right over the shampoo we were making progress here wash rinse repeat i have got that i've got it um and i think we what we want for forgiveness is to be a one-and-done wouldn't that be nice be nice wouldn't that be nice and this is what you're talking about is the fact the impact this consequence a couple things that i think is is instructive of what jesus says here when he says give us this daily bread i want to think of the israelites and the deep story that they have where they recollect the story i just think of the israelites kind of like us with campfires we sit around a camp you're gonna tell stories we tell stories of our families things that we love they're all instructing us in some way and when jesus says give us this our daily bread for the israelites the people of god they're thinking of the manna in the wilderness and lisa you taught this once and it was so profound i remembered as she speaks listening to uh one of your teachings and i don't know how i'd have not thought but it was just so brilliant you talked about the necessity for the mana to be on a daily basis and as i think about the necessity for the mana to be on a daily basis it brings us to the realization that if that mana could have sustained multiple days it would have put the people in a position where they could have stopped trusting god and begin to trust in themselves and the necessity of a dailiness of prayer a necessity of of looking to the lord on a daily basis it's actually forming our hearts it's creating us to be a type of people that recognize our limits that realize that we are in deep need of a great god who is good and gracious and who can and does save us and that is the exact same thing that happens with the very next phrase of the idea of forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors because it is an ongoing action and we are incapable i just believe we're incapable of doing this to the fullest degree aside from the power and the presence of the spirit so here's um a moment where i can practice confession okay so i'm just going to confess you know this is documented for time in the morning yes it is but here's what i want to confess i find it much harder to forgive sometimes even impossible to forgive when my view of the situation is that i'm the saint and they are the center sure and i think it's so important to recognize before jesus says that we should also forgive people who have created emotional physical spiritual whatever the debt is people have hurt us so now they have created a debt for us before we forgive other people that we recognize our need to receive forgiveness from god which helps me remember the same grace that i desperately need is the grace that i should be all the more eager to give and grace is not giving someone else permission to continue to hurt you grace is recognizing that you're human i'm human you hurt me because someone else has hurt you so you are carrying burdens of hurt and while i may not be able to have compassion on you because you've hurt me so much that would that would be hard to just muster up compassion for the person that hurt you but i can have compassion on the hurt you must have suffered that led you to making some of the decisions that you've made against me and i don't even have to know what hurt they have suffered but i can always assume rightly most of the time we say don't assume things but it's not a far stretch for me to remind myself that person has suffered hurt because every person has suffered hurt and it's from their own places of hurt that they would then do something that would cause hurt to me but it's so important first that i recognize god i need your forgiveness because if if i am hesitant to recognize that i need god's forgiveness or i only think that i need this much forgiveness from god if i only think i need this much forgiveness from god then i just let that little tiny bit of forgiveness flow to me and i have very little forgiveness to then let flow through me but when i throw my arms open wide and say god i need abundant forgiveness from you when god's forgiveness flows to me in such abundance that he wants to give me in full abundance his absolute forgiveness when i let it flow to me i can then let it flow through me but so much of me remembering i have done wrong too and i need god's forgiveness it it shifts my mindset from i'm the saint you're the sinner to god has simply called us all to be servants and i am not better or worse or worse or better i am simply human i'm a human who has the tendency to make mistakes and when i can remember that i need grace i can more freely give grace when i remember i need forgiveness i can more freely give forgiveness and so that's part of this process the order is important i confess and sometimes for me when i sit before the lord i will say speak to me lord yeah because i don't want to only bring my perspective to this issue like speak to me lord and help me see where maybe a word i said or a thought that i had has skewed my perception of this whole thing because more than proving that i'm right i want to improve this relationship but i often need god's help to bring to mind things that i probably wouldn't be capable of thinking of on my own and so forgiveness does all of that good work for the whole confession does all of that good work for this whole forgiveness process but also i think just for the sake of my heart not for just the sake of our relationships but for the sake of my heart when i have things that i'm carrying in my heart that i haven't confessed my god i'm carrying so much unnecessary weight and i wonder why we aren't more eager to get rid of that weight with this beautiful provision that god has given us of confession why do you think that is i think for one uh duke university did a study a number of years ago that found that the number one killer in america was unforgiveness bitterness i'm not going to do i'm not going to do what i need to do to forgive you i think in my experience and at times i know this myself by holding on to unforgiveness and a sense of justice uh knowing as i turn the page of my bible to matthew seven there's a little story about i think and there's somewhere coming up uh it's coming up about a log and in my own eye it feels good so i have this kind of self-righteousness by unforgiving i feel like it's not right but i feel like i'm getting justice now no way will i forgive you and i then may be in my anger not even aware to go vertical to say god will you forgive me so whether that's pride but i think there's a real sense of immediate justice i will not do this and that's neurochemically that's a jolt that's an upper i feel all this power it's very powerful it's toxic and deadly because it harms the container me that it's held in more than it does you that i need who i need to forgive but i think it's very functional to to not forgive yeah i think um that question specifically why it's a good question why is it that we're hesitant to it i wonder if because there at times becomes a family familiarity with that weight and even though it's crushing us like i i think of my own life my own situations at times this this is crushing me but at least i know what it is at least i can feel it at least i can you know and over time that becomes familiar to the point where if i release this weight and if i do what jesus says right and and take his yoke upon myself because his yoke is easy and his burden is like if i were to do that i still don't know how that's going to feel and i don't have any familiarity with it i don't know what that outcome is going to look at and to some degree i think it also means that i put myself in jeopardy and at risk because i don't know what the other person's response is while i bear this weight at least i'm in full control of what i'm gonna do or what i'm not going to do but the minute i i open myself up to allow this great exchange to take place there is this moment it's like a hand i'm going to give you the football illustration now it's like a handoff it's like a handoff with football i teach my sons all the time that is the most important time when you time when you do the handoff you watch the football go into other person's hand and you imagine that thing going and being caught tight because most fumbles happen in that exchange because there is this this curiosity is that person gonna grab it am i gonna release it when does that timing take place and i think there's a bit of fear that is wrapped around it i think you're right i think there is fear and i also really like what you said when we're holding on to the anger the bitterness the frustration the disappointment it does feel like i was powerless to make sure you didn't hurt me and now that you have hurt me i am not going to put myself in a position of powerlessness again so if i hold on to all of this this proof of how bad you've hurt me becomes a sense of power for me to remind you but even more so remind myself i will not let this person hurt me again and even though i'm unaware in the moment that i'm really not powerful but i'm that's potent i'm impotent there i'm lacking power it feels like all this power but in reality i'm really out of control it's far more chaos inside false power because when we're holding on to the pain the pain really i've said before when when the human heart lets hurt sit in it too long it eventually turns to hate and we can manage it with our words but the raw feelings are still pain and if we're holding on to pain pain never grows and blossoms into beauty it can only travel from pain to something else we have to turn the pain from pain to perspective perspective is where the beautiful seeds can grow new thoughts new maturity new growth but pain can't grow that pain is too toxic of a soil pain will only grow more pain is really what you're saying it's exponential too it just keeps breeding more like the root of bitterness that scripture talks about but pain will just bring more and more pain kind of like weeds do in my yard i can spend money and time you know to to try to get the grass right and in fairness in case she's watching which she will my wife would do that she loves the taking care of the yard that way but it's i do nothing for the weeds to grow it's like they're resilient so i love what you're saying that pain will just feed like weeds taking over your yard choking out the life that is there and even though we do have this false sense of power and maybe even out of fear like you said joel protection like if i hold on to this it'll protect me from that from it not happening again but what we don't realize is that it will leak out as a toxic atmosphere and affect every other relationship that we're in because hurt from one relationship doesn't sit still and only come up in that relationship it affects us and it'll start impacting every other relationship that we have and it's a false sense of power because it cannot protect us and it cannot um prevent that person from hurting us again and so but i think when we allow the confession and forgiveness process to come about just like what jesus is teaching us in this prayer i think that's where that pain can go through a process to become eventual perspective and perspective is powerful perspective is the the the maturity and the wisdom that we can bring into this dynamic that actually could help us draw better boundaries navigate future situations with this person if they never said they were sorry if they were never willing to um grow and mature in their part of what they've contributed to this relationship then perspective can help me feel empowered enough to say okay i'm going to draw a boundary here not to shut you out but to hold myself together and i think that perspective also can help us better navigate the fears because then we're bringing wisdom experiential wisdom is some of the best wisdom to bring into complicated situations to help inform us the navigation process that will be healthy i mean i speak real quick too and i know you've much to say on the very one of the greek word homologo means to say the same thing as on confession i think a lot of times in my experience i people i know or work with they will admit things to god i admit it that's not a confession to agree with say to say the same thing and then when it comes to this horizontal that's the vertical between you and god but the horizontal piece of going to a person saying this is what i did and a confession not only do i agree this is what i did a confession should never be caveated you'll catch it i did this but everything before the butt really negates what just happened so a confession should not be caveated with god but it's the home i grew up in or or you know i was upset god or or to the person you know i did this to hurt you but of course you did this and it should not be caveat i think there is my experience in the counseling world there is a massive vacuum around authentic confession both vertically to god and horizontally to each other yeah and i think in terms of our in our relationships with each other within our families within our relationships in church we have lost it seems like the discipline and the practice of mutual confession of sins because for the people of israel in the old testament this was all communal activity yeah this was we in our western culture we have individualized so much of how we look at scripture and we read it and yet there would be a time when you would go to the temple and you would be you would offer up communal confession of sin not just for yourself but for your people as a nation we see this all the way throughout the minor prophets you see um the kings of israel who'd come on behalf of the people king solomon one of the most brilliant prayers of the temple dedication and nehemiah did it when he came before king art exercise i confess my sins and the sins of my fathers and so i think what we have is when we're in the practice of confession and when we're in the practice of forgiveness like what jesus is saying this is some of the things that i'm thinking through and lisa with your example of almost like soil your heart is soil and when you allow unforgiveness to settle into that heart into that soil it actually um uh spoils that soil where fruit can't bear right it's gonna always be stained almost like cement where seeds can't even get in and if they do get in they can't flourish and i even think about like that like it takes a lot of hard work to till the ground like it is not an easy thing you know and i'm curious i just think that confession and forgiveness is an act that we participate with the lord that is actually forming our hearts and transforming us in order to be a type of people that can live in the kingdom of heaven that is coming to earth that can be a type of people that are citizens of the kingdom of heaven and i think it is as a witness to a world that is desperate to see the hope of the kingdom and so there's something about participating in confession participating in the act of forgiveness when it's hard that it's doing something inside of us to form us but it actually is also simultaneously is an act that's inviting other people outside to take part of the goodness that we've experienced i would say in my experience the softer my heart is the more set up it is to um have beautiful things growing in it soft hearts don't as easily break it's hard brittle hearts that are more prone to getting broken shattered yeah so how do we do this because i think we've made a strong case to do it but how do we do it and so in the book forgiving what you can't forget i decided that i needed a system i'm a real systems person and so you can convince me to do something but if i don't have a system to implement it then it probably won't get done so the best way if my heart has been hardened about something the best way for truth to break through is god's word and me getting into god's word and letting god's word get into me starts to tenderize me in a way that very few other things can and so i decided to look up some verses that dealt with relational issues or topical issues from situations that i've been through and just list out some of those verses and then in my journal i decided to take myself through this system and so maybe this will help i started to write down i wrote down these words progress suppress digress regress confess forgiveness so it's six words so first progress i read the verse and i say where am i making progress with this verse and typically i can think of some situation some relationship where i am making progress with this verse then second suppress what is a situation where i'm feeling resistant to living out this verse so then the next word i write is digress is there a situation where i'm taking steps backwards with this verse so i'm not just feeling resistant to living i'm actually doing the opposite of what this verse says and then regress where am i living in rebellion against this verse well once i take myself through those words progress suppress digress regress now i have something to confess and that flows right down that amazing down to confess yes and so then now that i've written now that i'm at the word confess i'll say now that i'm aware of some confessions i need to make as i write these out i will ask god to give me a spirit of humility in this process and then the last step is forgiveness because oftentimes as i'm confessing i'll start having something come to my mind well what wait god wait there's this person who isn't living out this verse with me and so i say okay we'll tend to that in a minute i'm going to set that on the shelf and finish my confession now the last word forgiveness where is someone not living this verse with me this is an opportunity for to for me to forgive it doesn't excuse their behavior it frees me from being hindered by unforgiveness and so once again this is just a system that works for me you guys may have your own system you may have your own system and that's great but i needed a way not just to say yeah i should confess or yeah i should be practicing daily forgiveness but if i really want to implement the daily cure for a heavy heart i take myself into god's word and i say progress suppress digress regress confess forgiveness and doing that and writing that out in my journal has really helped me to practically apply what we've been talking about and for me if i get to apply just jimbo here by himself then that leads me to wholeness just a wholeness of yes designed to be ever more moving toward wholeness when at times clear back from childhood and unforgiveness keeps me in in in a place that's very painful and a plane that's a place that's toxic and i want to embrace wholeness in my life but i love your system by the way thank you that is in the book that's in the book okay because it flows down and i just said for me so my personal application is wholeness yeah and i long for wholeness man do i long for it and once you get past the confession and forgiveness i love adding the word wholeness but now you can go right back up to the top of the chart and now i'm making progress rinse and repeat right there there you go look how you did it any last spots joel you know i just think about uh and not to get too cheesy here but since we're going with all the the the wholeness and confess i think that when you're whole and you've done this practice it puts you in a posture in a position to experience god's goodness and i really think that's what we're desperate for we want to experience the goodness of god and what if when we confess when we do acts of forgiveness that it positions us in a posture to truly experience the goodness of god holiness even seriously it's not cheesy even into that and i long for that one too that's beautiful thank you so much thank you for joining us today for this episode of therapy and theology one challenge i want to give you don't just listen and think yeah that's a good idea take what we've given you and implement it however it works in the situations in your life because we don't want to just give you the truth we want to help you know the truth so you can live the truth because we're convinced it changes everything you

Channel: Proverbs 31 Ministries with Lysa TerKeurst

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Length: 38min 21sec (2301 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020