Gerry Wagoner

Each of us will experience many wrongs in life. 

We can’t go through life controlling what others do or say to us.  What we can do is have a proper attitude towards those who have hurt us.  And that proper attitude always involves forgiveness on our part.  It’s pretty important—if you want a healthy life, that is.

Failure to resolve the pain of wrongs that have been done to you will cause several consequences in your life.  Your heart will become a breeding ground for lies, and you will experience a pathway of bitterness and depression that will frustrate God’s purpose for your life.

Lies

If you have a stronghold where pain has been allowed in your life and you haven’t dealt with it, you will close your heart to God and to intimacy with another person.  Truth will begin to close in your life.  All of a sudden, lies will begin to build inside on the basis of those strongholds, and you will slowly find yourself distant from God and distant from those you thought you loved.  The word of God will close inside, and you will wonder “What is happening to my heart?  What is happening to my life?” 

Your spouse or friends may look at you and say “Why don’t you care any more about spiritual things?  Why don’t you care about me?”  Because, when you are distant from God you immediately will distance yourself from others.  If God is not allowed in your heart, neither will you allow others to see those hidden closets that you protect.  And the lies inside will eventually come out. You will become a slave to thoughts like the title of this article. 

“All men are creeps.  All men want is sex!  The vast majority of men are wicked!  Males are the most perverse species.  All women are hags!  I’m ugly.  If anyone knew this about me, they wouldn’t want me.  It’s all my fault.  My parents did everything wrong!”

 These lies flourish in the harsh soil of a damaged heart, and they have their source in Satan.  He is an expert on piling lies on top of pain in people’s lives (John 8:44).

A young girl who has been sexually abused, for instance, will often experience the secondary consequences of lies inside her heart.  “All men are creeps.  I’m dirty.  This is all my fault.  All that men want is sex.  I’m defiled.”   Around eighty percent of the marriages of these women will fail (end in divorce), unless they biblically resolve the pain of abuse, and accompanying bitterness. There is hope. 

A young man who grows up with an angry dominant mother, will often become rebellious (rebelling against authority) or he will become a hypocrite (learning to tell mother what she wants to hear).  Both hypocrisy and rebellion are sins, by the way.  This will cause problems later in his marriage, unless he biblically resolves his rebellion and bitterness from his heart. 

I hate what the enemy does to people, however I am pleased to say that with God, healing can come into a damaged life. 

The solution is to allow Jesus to come into your heart and heal the pain.  This has to happen in the heart—not the head.  With healing comes truth.  Truth rides back into your life on a white horse, and the lies scramble to get out of town.  Arrivederci.

Lies are exposed when confronted with absolute objective truth.  And that gives us a chance to renounce the lies in our life.  So where do we find absolute objective truth? 

•  In video games? 
• In a gender studies class at La Sierra? 
• Television? 
•  An Instagram account,
• Pornography?
• Hollywood?

 There could be some occasional truth there, but using those mediums to find truth is like eating Twinkies to get water when you are super thirsty.  Not good. 

A girl with resentment towards men because her boyfriend broke up with her, or her dad abandoned her, or because of abuse, will not confront the lies in her life with God’s truth by taking a course in toxic masculinity.  She will become a little worse, her bitterness protected by a phalanx of guardian lies.  (Look for an article on toxic masculinity in the near future.  It may or may not be titled Toxic Asininity).

A guy, bitter at women, will not find truth in the company of other angry men.  He will become a little worse (“If you run with an angry man, you will learn his ways”—Proverbs 22:24-25).  If he gets into pornography, he will become way worse (look for an article on that in the near future) and be entangled in a snare.

 Here’s a test.

•  Ask God to reveal any lies that you are believing in your heart.
•  For every lie that the enemy confronts us with, God has (at least) three truths in His Word that break that lie. 

Example:  “I’m worthless.”

1) “For you are bought with a price therefore glorify God in your mortal bodies.”

2) God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.

3)    “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).  Your value begins with the fact that you are made by the hand of the Creator in His very image.

4)  “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1). 

Another Example: "All men are creeps!"

1) Was Jesus a man? Yes. “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men”  (Luke 2:52).

2) Barnabas was a man. (He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost, and of faith” Acts 11:24). And there are many other decent Godly men who care about God’s honor and glory, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.

3) “Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2).

 Truth

 After the last supper had been eaten, Jesus turns to His disciples and says ‘I’m running out of time.’  He begins to share with them His last words.  He uses words for Intimacy nine times in chapter 15.  Three times He turns to His disciples and says “I want to be your friend.”  “Can we be friends?” 

 God desires intimacy with you and I, and when we seek Him with all our hearts (pain and all) He brings healing, joy, peace and forgiveness into our lives (Jeremiah 29:11).

 Apart from intimacy a relationship is dead.  Apart from intimacy with God, salvation is dead (“I never knew you”).

 This means opening our hearts to God and allowing Him to come into every part of our life and every closet.  When He comes into our life through the Holy Spirit, He brings truth with Him.  And that truth will always align with the Word of God, breaking the power of lies over us.

And truth will make us children of the most high God.

 ****

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ … that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4–7).

 Your heavenly Father has planned a magnificent, never-ending future for you.