Pondering the Ruin of Hurt

Well, hello, and welcome to Ponder by NorthernLife. We're having a conversation about the Word of the Lord, as it was preached to us on Sundays, and as we encounter it in our everyday lives.

My name is Jack, I'm here with Ben, Tristan, and the Monster from Mount Kola, self-described. And we're doing something a little bit different. So you may have noticed we didn't release our episodes last week.

Unfortunately, that was because many of us were unwell.

For this Rhodes Ruin series, rather than doing our regular episode for the one sermon, because the sermon, there are two sermons a week, we're doing a little shorter 15-minute episodes for each topic.

We'll be releasing these next four episodes over the next couple of days. So hope you enjoy this format, and let's get into it. Jono, I believe it was your sermon on Hurt mediated by Leanne.

Yeah.

Could you give us a little recap of what that was on?

Yeah, for sure.

Apologies for my voice. I sort of lost it this morning. Thanks to Leanne for preaching.

I was a bit sick on the Saturday and passed her the ball, and she ran with it the next day. So Hurt was our first cab off the rank for the series. Hurt is caused by all sorts of things.

To be hurt is not a sin to feel it or even to do it to others. But it results in pain, which can then do things to us. It produces sometimes bitterness, anger, all sorts of feelings that can turn into vice and sin.

We spent most of the sermon looking at the narrative of Joseph. And he had a lot of hurt in his life, a lot of betrayal, a lot of pain. And yet he decided to not allow that Hurt to define who he was or how he would act.

And he very clearly was able to reframe what the devil intended for harm, he believed God intended for good. And the macro of the narrative of the people of Israel tells us God was at work. So there was Hurt involved in an individual's life, Joseph.

But that was to lead him along a path that allowed him to gain power that God gave him. And he exercised and used that power for good, for saving Israel and Egypt and many of the other nations. And so that led us to how does Hurt get dealt with.

And obviously we go to the cross and Jesus paying for the all of the sin that causes hurt and encouraging each of us to not allow the painful things that people do to us to define our identity. But if Christ says we're new, we believe it.

We live out of that newness of identity in Christ.

So that idea of identity and sort of one of the key aspects was sort of reclaiming our identity to not be based in the hurt, as you said.

Sometimes that can be difficult, I guess, when our emotions are pushing us to really centre on the hurt, because it affects us more than just our minds, it's a wound in your heart. How do we sort of resist the impulse to sort of dwell on that?

Well, in the sermon, sorry to but in a sort of a second go at the answers. In the sermon, we talked about acknowledging that hurt, and encouraging people to not just bury it, but to express it.

And if you can, express it to the person that has hurt you, and to say, look, you did this to me, and it was painful. So the truth of reconciliation and forgiveness is not to minimize what's been done.

It's to just choose to let God be the avenger and let Jesus pay for the sin. But, you know, we're allowed to express the truth.

And do you think that has the effect of releasing some of those feelings of hurt? Like, if we acknowledge it, and especially if we bring it to the person?

I think that's what the genre of lament in the Psalms does. It's, I mean, what is lament, if not facing honestly the hurt and pain and suffering of life, but not just kind of stewing on it in your own soul, putting voice to it and giving it to God.

I think that's a really helpful and important step in our healing for hurt, expressing the pain to God, even the hurt that we perceive from God. God, why haven't I found a spouse yet? Or why did this happen?

Why was this person taken from me? Giving it to God is what the Psalms of Lament teach us to do.

And all of the Psalms of Lament, except for one, end with hope, which is kind of this, maybe this gospel twist at the end of the peace and meaning that can be found on the other side of hurt.

Yeah, it's exactly that. It's not allowing the wound of your hurt to define you.

It's allowing Christ to really define who you are, because when hurt becomes our identity, it leads to you viewing other people in that lens of, oh, because of my past experience, I can't do this, or I'm not as open to this.

So it leads to relationship withdrawal. It leads to many different sorts of avenues of ruin in your relationship space. That's when it really takes over, in letting it, what is defining you here.

Is it your hurt, or is it what we have in Christ?

I was just thinking, sometimes when we have been hurt, it requires us to, for our own safety, cut off the relationship with a person, right?

Sometimes that you just have to do that, because they could still be a danger to you, or it's just not viable, or the hurt is too deep, and you just need to, I need to just not talk to this person for a while.

How do we forgive in those sort of circumstances, or how do we, yeah, how can we release that when we're also, unfortunately, the relationship is going to end because of this.

I just think because, you know, sometimes someone hurts you, you can go and you can be reconciled to them, and that's the way in which you can express that forgiveness and you can, you know, mend what has been damaged.

But in those relationships where the relationship has to end, what do we do?

Letting them off the proverbial hook is a powerful idea. I'm not going to hold you on my hook. I'm not going to carry it around the pain.

And what the Bible says to do is to speak blessing over them. So it's a decision of the will to say, I forgive you. Maybe I can't be with you, because it's not safe, but I forgive you in the name of Jesus, through the cross of Jesus.

And I'm going to try to pray for you. That's one of the main ways that you find, you appropriate, as it were, the forgiveness Christ has given me, and He's given them, if they have confessed their sin to Him. And I don't, it's not mine to pay back.

It's Colossians talks about, as you've been forgiven, you should forgive others. And that's a journey to get there. It often begins with words, to just say it and keep saying it, and ask God to help make this real for me.

You often say that things are graduate Christianity.

I think that's like postgraduate Christianity. In Matthew 5, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about anger and murder, and then lust and adultery and words and justice.

But then the kind of culmination of that path to virtue is, you've heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but Jesus says, I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

It's literally the end of the pathway of what a fully mature post-graduate level Christian is. To be able to take that hurt and to not retaliate and take revenge, but to leave it to God and to bless and pray for those who persecute you.

I just say that to acknowledge that it's hard and really advanced kind of stuff in faith to be able to do that.

Yeah, maybe we're never more like God than when we can genuinely forgive.

Well, we say to God, forgive us as we forgive others. I mean, that's actually really... I find that line actually quite daunting.

Because Jesus says also, if you do not forgive others, your Father in heaven will not forgive you. And there's the parable of the guy who...

Unmerciful servant.

The unmerciful servant, right, who owes a debt to his master. His master forgives the debt, and then he goes and finds a guy who owes him money.

Not much.

Yeah, not much at all, and sort of, you know, tortures him or whatever, and then the king gets angry at the servant and punishes him.

And it's like this idea of, gosh, if you don't extend the mercy God has given to you to others, you're really putting yourself in a dangerous place. I guess that is another aspect of the ruin that hurt can lead to, if you cling on to it.

Yeah. The hurt part is very much along the idea of rotting, bitterness, and just internally rotting out.

Great book to read on this, and a lot of what I wrote the sermon about years ago, and then I reworked a sermon that I'd done a long time ago, was John Bevere's book, The Bait of Satan. And it's all about offence, what we do with offence.

And he just says, Satan doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the hurt being done to us, but he comes and uses that hurt, and he speaks to us and gives us ideas about what it means for us, and who we are because it happened to us, and we live

Yeah, it's interesting because hurt can, as you say, Jono, hurt can be the bait of Satan, as it were.

But my experience, hurt can also be a place where you really deepen with God.

Yeah.

Like I know one of the times that I felt closest to God is after I, like I'd been through a break up of sorts, and I was feeling really hurt.

And I remember in that time in my life, just really clinging to God in my pain, because I was feeling alone and I was feeling hurt, and God was all I had.

And I just like remember, I remember going on a run with like tears running down my face, listening to worship music, like just it like forced me into his presence and to my knees in front of him, because I was just clinging on to him, because like,

God, I'm hurting so much, but you're all I've got. And that was like a really deep moment for me. But also for others, I mean, it's a place where you learn to forgive like God, as we were saying.

It can be a gym where we work out our forgiveness muscles.

I think one thing I found helpful when it comes to forgiveness, when it stems from real deep hurt from someone, someone spoke into my life at a time where it was needed.

And I was always the kind of kid where, if I seeked forgiveness, it had to be reciprocal. It had to be at a point of reconciliation, where both parties are acknowledging, we are forgiving each other.

And then he taught me the valuable lesson of sometimes the road to reconciliation stops just at forgiveness. It's not usually a two-way street. And that was helpful in terms of, oh, I can forgive someone.

And it's to your earlier point of maybe that relationship needs to be cut off, but you can still forgive them.

So that was really helpful in terms of a real valuable lesson of trusting God with that wound of hurt and just forgiving them, giving it to him. And that's it.

Yeah, and it's really postgraduate stuff that he was speaking to a young trustee that I was like, dude, no. So, yeah.

The glorious story of the gospel is fascinating how it includes betrayal. It includes disappointment, emotional hurt. Apart from the women, all the men, it would seem, just fail Jesus as mates, let alone Judas.

But I always find that just so interesting that they could have written anything in the script, but it's not enough to have cosmic, he went and declared in hell the victory, and made a public spectacle of the devil.

No, no, he also got kissed by a betrayer, his mate, after three years in the trenches.

And I just feel like Jesus is saying the Trinity is relational, relationships are at the core of everything that matters, and sin is right there, expressed in hurt, disappointment, relational dysfunction.

And then there's Isaiah 53 that says, By his wounds we are healed, which is the narrow way that, rather than Jesus kind of forsaking hurt, he takes that hurt on himself, the hurt of betrayal and pain and death itself, and through his wounds,

literally like the blood and water flowing from his side, we are healed, and we find life and forgiveness through Jesus' hurt that flows right into our place of hurt. It's like the message of the Gospel is so powerful.

The healing that comes from Jesus' wounds. And likewise, the healing that can come from our wounds too.

Yeah.

Well, with that, we might wrap it up. Thank you guys for chatting and thank you all for listening. We will catch you on the next one.