Spiritual Healing

Weeds

Sometimes I like to randomly post on Facebook a true confession. It’s just a weird little quirk of mine, I think it dates back to my childhood in the catholic church.  Here are a few of my recent true confessions:

“confession time: I just hit the 'buy' button on grey shellac nail polish to go with my Easter outfit.”

“True Confessions; I've had "I Love You Like a Love Song" by Selena Gomez in my head all evening. Sometimes I'm such a teenage girl!”

Tonight I want to make a confession to you guys, but you have to promise not to hold it against me. I got married at 18 for a reason. Not the reason you are thinking of. I got married to change my maiden name. It was pretty much the worst last name you could think of. My last name was “Klapp”. Which, if you didn’t know it, was the street name for gonorrhea.

My poor dad taught high school biology for years. One day one of his students raised his hand in front of the whole class and asked him..

“Mr. Klapp, are you a disease?”

The reality is that we all have a disease. It’s an incurable disease; doctors have no antidote. It’s highly contagious, in fact everyone has it to some degree, there’s no vaccine. As this disease progresses, it will eventually annihilate your system. This disease always ends in death. Some die quickly, others take years.

You are probably looking around the room thinking, “I don’t feel like I’m sick. My friends don’t look sick!”

We are all suffering from a disease called sin. Sadly a lot of people don’t even realize they are infected, but regardless of your understanding, the wages of sin are death. That’s a Biblical fact. Life lived apart from God equals death apart from God. Death apart from God equals hell.

This disease, Sin, destroys our relationship with God. Isaiah 1:15 paints this picture for us. “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you, even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood; Wash and make yourself clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong, learn to do right!”

This verse tells us very clearly that sin in our lives will cause God to turn away from our prayers. Hopefully you have all made the choice to accept Christ as your savior. A miraculous thing happened in your life the moment you did. As we read on in Isaiah, we can see what Christ did for us with this sin issue.

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”

Isaiah 1:18

God is a reasonable God. He did not want to condemn and destroy His people. In His perfection, in His love for us, Jesus covered our sins. He was the blood atonement – the only cure for our sin problem. We were spiritually diseased and dying, but Jesus made a way to restore us, to heal us spiritually.

When we accept Jesus and His restorative work in our lives, we are made new, whole again. We’ve experienced spiritual healing, God sees us as He sees Jesus; sanctified. Sanctified is another $10,000 Bible word - it means made holy. Sanctification is the process of being made holy.

Sanctification is an incredible miracle especially because it works in three ways; past present and future.

Sanctification works in the past because it covers what you already have done. When you accept Christ, you are instantly sanctified, meaning if you died in that moment, you are seen as perfect and sinless, because Christ’s blood covers you. All your old stuff (skeletons in the closet) is covered by Christ’s sacrifice. You have been sanctified.

Sanctification is also present tense, meaning it’s happening right now. You and I are being sanctified. It is a daily process. Each day we make choices towards or against Christ. We choose to swim upstream (towards God) or float downstream (away from Him) every day. When we choose God, when we make an effort to grow in our relationship, we are becoming more like Him. We are being sanctified. You will never ‘arrive’ at sanctification in your own strength. But that brings us to the last stage of sanctification, the future stage; you will be sanctified.

One day you will pass away or be raptured. I will too, it’s kind of a bummer if you are super attached to this life. But as Christians, we know that this life is just the preface in a really good book. Our real future is with Jesus in heaven. So that day, when you will die or be raptured and stand before God. He will look at you and see Jesus. In that moment, you will be sanctified, made perfectly holy before God. (I am really looking forward to that moment because I am generally a mess!) You will be sanctified – future tense.

So we will be sanctified. What do we do in the meantime, now that we know that we have received this spiritual healing from Jesus? How does that change our today?

Let’s concentrate on that ‘present’ stage of sanctification, since that’s where most of us are at in our walk with Him. How do we live holy lives in a fallen, sinful world?

Isaiah tells us that God wants us to repent, to put aside evil, to strive to do what is right and obey His word. The sad truth is, when we cling own rebellious ways, we will be destroyed.

Leviticus 19:2 tells us “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” This is a pretty high standard, right? Have you achieved holiness yet? I certainly have not.

We can only be holy when we depend on God to make us holy. Further on in the book of Leviticus God promises multiple times to make us holy. The thing is that we need to surrender to the process.

We started this message with true confessions. I have another one for you.

I’ve had a rough week. I’ve been stressed out this week. Things have just been coming at me really fast, I have a lot of important deadlines and a lot of people counting on me. Can anyone relate?

I’ve shared before that worry and anxiety are pet sins of mine.. Meaning sins that I pick back up frequently and easily, comfort sins if you will. We all have pet sins. For some of you it’s eating, or pornography, or cutting, or anger. Anxiety is my sin of choice.

So on Monday morning my quiet time was about weeds of sin in our hearts and allowing the Father to pull them. I was very discouraged while reading it, asking God, “Why are we pulling these same weeds? My particularly stubborn weeds of anxiety, fear, and self-reliance. I have struggled with this sin for decades now, when will I be free of it?”

And then Holy Spirit reminded me that a prize garden needs to be weeded daily. The thing about weeds is that they are prolific; they grow quickly and spread rapidly. We need to daily allow the Master Gardener to come in to our heart and pull weeds. It can be an uncomfortable process, especially the larger we’ve allowed the weeds to grow, the deeper the root system is. If the Gardener hasn’t been allowed in the garden in a while, imagine how overgrown it would be? What a process to right the situation!!

The truth is that you and I cannot successfully navigate righteousness on our own. We need the daily tending of the Gardener, of God. We must allow Him to till our hearts each day to keep us on the right track. And yes, you will get tired of the same weeds growing back again, but picture His patience and faithfulness as He tends to your heart each day. The more attune to His weeding you are, the quicker you will spot those new weeds, and even temptations as they begin to take root.

We join together with God in the process of present sanctification. We can’t do it on our own, but we work with God by allowing Him daily access to our hearts. And through that time, He performs spiritual healing, making us more like Him day by day.

Tonight it’s time to identify weeds in your heart. Figure out what sins have a tendency to overgrow and crowd your life. For me it’s anxiety and fear and worry. For you it might be lust or greed or coveting (wanting what someone else has). It might be dishonesty or stealing. It might be low-self worth, that you don’t value what God has created in you. You might be considering suicide or self harm.  It might be that you have disrespect towards authority. It might be independence, to the point that you can’t see your need for God. It might be that you struggle with anger and defiance.

We all have an inborn tendency towards sin. And I personally believe that each of us has a particular sin or group of sins that we gravitate towards – a bent. I don’t want you to leave this place without identifying that sin.

We are going to take two minutes of quiet here to ask God to reveal in your heart what your particular weeds are. If you already know, begin praying about how to start the process up pulling up those weeds.

[two minute of silence]

Now that you know your area of weakness, I want to spend two minutes seeking God about that area of your life. Ask Him to uproot the sin that threatens to overtake your heart. Commit to surrendering yourself to daily weeding. Pray hard, like your life depends on it, because those pet sins are the most likely to destroy you.

[two minutes of prayer]