We may not be so interested in finding healing with our trauma and/or emotional wounds, but the Lord is set on bringing us into full healing.
Our focus is often on what we can do “for” the Lord as believers in Christ, rather than walking the road of growth, healing and deliverance in the Lord.
There was a season I walked through while serving overseas in East Asia where the Lord was uprooting my belief system that His heart was all about my service to Him. I wanted God to approve of me, to accept and love me. My choices as a result of what I wanted and didn’t know I already had, was trying to please Him through serving Him.
When God was calling us back to the States my mind could not wrap around why He would do that. How was I supposed to continue serving Him? How was I going to gain more of His affection and love if I was no longer living a life I felt was truly surrendered to Him?
In this season I was struggling with ministry burnout really bad.
As I was grappling with these questions I started to hear the Lord tell me that He was looking at the condition of my heart and soul, not my service to Him. He could see the wounds and trauma I was living out of, which also dictated my subconscious hold of unhealthy ways of thinking and lies.
Yes, I did well in my service to Him, but because God truly cares about us and how we are doing in all areas of our lives, emotionally, physically and spiritually, He had to share with me more of His nature and my identity in Him.
God revealed to me that I was serving Him with wrong motives. I should not have been trying to win His love and affection as my motivation to serve Him. I already had that. My motive to serve Him should come from a heart that loves Him. And yes, I loved Him when I served Him abroad, but there were other wrong motives that competed for the right motive.
Today, I still see others serving the Lord out of a heart that isn’t fully pure in their motives. Oftentimes it is just a lack of growth and maturity in the Lord. Those who are busy for the Lord and cannot find time to rest and sit still with Him are the ones that are walking in the same thinking error that I did (and still work against).
If this describes you and you feel a pressure to show up all of the time at every opportunity to do “for the Lord” instead of living out of a knowing that He loves and cares and has accepted you already, then you will run into burnout over and over again.
You might also be living out of a “works based” theology unknowingly.
There is nothing we can do to earn what has freely been given us by His grace. Nothing. That is why it is called “saved by grace” so no one can boast in the good they do for God.
Learning to serve the Lord out of a heart that loves Him alone, with no twisted motives hidden elsewhere within, can change your life. You choose to do the things for Him that He actually leads you to do. Your relationship deepens because you are aware that you did not have to check all the boxes first in order for Him to answer and speak to you. Your relationship now has no room to be transactional with God, because you serve and obey out of love for Him rather than out of what you can get from Him. It is a true relationship you now have.
The Pharisees and Sadducees were guilty of doing “for God” rather than learning to have a relationship with God. Their religion and traditions were their gods, because their hearts and motives were not pure. And it was the disciples who realized that God just wanted their hearts.
Here is a litmus test of sorts for you. If you come to the end of the month completely exhausted from all the “doing” you are doing, and your unwillingness to say no to things is robbing you from more of a healthier schedule, then seek your heart to understand why you cannot say no. Perhaps your god is also religion and good works only, or maybe you fear displeasing others and their approval has become that god. Or, like me, you are trying to gain something from the Lord that you already have, spinning your wheels without realizing that He has not placed that burden on you, but your skewed belief system has.
Build on your relationship with Jesus. Make it about that relationship and do what you can to always keep it first in your life. If that means cutting out some activities or finding small moments here and there to interact with Him, then make that effort.
Relationship with Him is what Jesus came to save us for.