I know some of you have really been hurt in church, and it's happened to a lot of us. It's one thing to talk about unity and to go through the theology of it. It's another thing to deal with it, to deal with the practical aspects. So I want to give you two practical steps to heal church hurt.

00:00 INTRO
01:39 SEEING PEOPLE AS JESUS SEES THEM
02:54 HOW TO LOVE THOSE WHO HURT YOU
6:17 THE HEALING PROCESS
8:11 PRAYER

Two things that God showed me through pain, through experience, that I hope you can use in your life.

I'm going to share with you a deeply personal story, and I'm going to withhold all the details. And I'm changing the name. I had someone that very, uh, precious to me. A friend that I've known almost my whole life. We were very close. And this friend did something. It was like the ultimate betrayal. It was just unimaginable. At first I was just so hurt. And then I became angry.

Oh, so mad. I was so angry. And the anger just started chewing at me. Every time I thought about it, I got more and more angry, and the anger turned into rage. This went on for, like, 10 days. I couldn't. How can I forgive this person?

SEEING PEOPLE AS JESUS SEES THEM

. So I asked him one day, as I was struggling to forgive. And I was trying, but I asked the Lord, I said, when you look at Bob, Jesus, what do you see?
What Jesus showed me was that the day that Bob did the thing that he did was one of the worst days of his life. And that he was stressed out beyond belief. He was literally out of his mind. What he did is so outrageously wrong. It's inexcusable. It can only be forgiven.

I felt the pain that my friend was going through that day when he did this horrible thing. And my heart went out to him.

And when I felt his pain. I wanted to forgive, and in my heart, I did. But my head wasn't having any part of that. Every time I turned around for the next several days, all I could think about was what he did. And then the anger would start up again.

HOW TO LOVE THOSE WHO HURT YOU
And so I'm fighting this battle, you know, my head, my heart, my head, my heart. You've never been there, right? So I read a book several years ago, um, called Five Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman. The core revelation in that book to me is not the love languages, which that's important, but the core revelation in there is that there was a woman whose husband was, um, just outrageously abusive.
The wife believed that if she could just somehow love this man, that she believed that God's love would change him. But the problem was, she didn't love him. Not anymore. Not after all he'd done to her.

And so she made a choice, and then she started doing acts of love, small things over a period of time. And eventually what happened is her. Her heart came back to love for this man. And then he began to change. And the result was that their marriage was restored.

Love is a choice that must be followed by actions. Like faith, without works love is dead. I was deciding, yes, I'm going to love. But I wasn't doing anything about it. So God told me, take steps. So since then, I've taken steps. And as I did that, I did break free. I have a great relationship with Bob today.

THE HEALING PROCESS
First is ask Jesus how he sees them. And as he shows you the worth that he placed in that person. They may be hiding it really well, but it's there.

And as he does that, and as you decide to love them, or to, in many cases, it's going to be decide to forgive them, um, and then you take active steps toward doing that, your love for that person will be restored.

PRAYER

This audio used with permission of Harbour Church South Florida