The key verse for this study is 2 Corinthians 7:8-11
Most people have never properly settled the major traumas of their lives and the biggest traumatic episodes have never been healed.
Scripture can heal anything out there. The Word of God has provided healing through the blood of Christ.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - God has given us a great gift that after trauma, we have stress. When we are hit with a trauma, our bodies begin to produce huge amounts of adrenal and other hormones and chemicals to help us cope and deal with stress. What makes PTSD a disorder is when we stay stuck in the adrenal affect. We are so traumatized that we never come down from the release of the hormone. We have never properly dealt with the trauma we have been hit with.
With much of what we see in PTSD, we are not dealing with a mental illness; we are dealing with a brain injury. There are so many people who never properly learn to go around a mental injury and get stuck in a disorder. It may have started with a brain injury, but it’s turning into a mental and emotional illness. We are in epidemic proportions of mental illness.
Through suffering loss, the number one thing we want to deal with is spiritual loss, but too often the case, spiritual loss is an ignored topic. We go right to phycological, physical, or some other sort of temporal loss; and we deal with those issues from a phycological standpoint. We are missing the foundational issue.
Most believers today have a false security that takes away the fear of the Lord. There is no reason to fear the Lord anymore.
We have two distinct types of grief – godly or worldly. We have a human nature that can be disrupted by loss and trauma. When life throws us one of those blows that disrupt our faculties of thinking and emotion, we come to a valuable state. At these times, we are very vulnerable to an attack from the wicked one.
There’s a big distinction between godly and worldly sorrow. Godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation. There is a converting work that will happen in a godly sorrow. Godly sorrow works repentance. There’s something about godly sorrow when you invite God into your grief. You are grieving but your relationship with God is still there. King David was the master of this. He would bleed his heart out and bring God the middle of his grief, then all of a sudden he would be shouting the victory.
We are all going to suffer loss. In this world, God has promised us we will have tribulation. When our faculties get disrupted by the loss but the communion with God continues, it is a very open, honest dialog and you talk your faith through with God.
When you suffer spiritual loss, where is the weeping and the bitter brokenness that works its way back to God? Do we bring God into our grief?
We don’t know how to weep anymore. We need to learn to weep again and grieve the loss.
John came preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sin and demanded there would be fruit of repentance. There is a visible change in the person who has repented.
John’s baptism makes people ready to receive the Lord, but we have omitted the baptism of John in these days. We have taken this out of most theological discourse in this generation. We bypass it and in error lead people to pray a prayer for salvation.
John’s baptism leads us to repentance from dead works. Many religious people go to church but have never repented of their sin. There has never been the conversion or change of life. Most people in the church have never had the experience of true repentance for the remission of sin. Most people don’t view salvation as a salvation from sin, but a salvation from hell. The foundation is crooked.
We are talking about suffering spiritual loss. Some have invested a lifetime in religion but are still lost. Proper preaching says, “Repent.” Going to church is not fruit to repentance.
Don’t let religion be your shield...
