Inner Healing

Even as believers, we often find that we have trouble gaining victory over various sins in our lives, whether sinful actions or emotional responses. This might be lust, bitterness, anxiety, fear, anger, un-forgiveness, or many other things. But this seems to contradict the word of God. For example the word says the in Christ we receive power through the Holy Spirit:

Acts 1:8 But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you

And as we walk by the spirit, we will have victory over the flesh:

Galatians 5:16 I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh.

The problem is that these same sins hinder the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives:

Ephesians 4:30-32 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. 32 And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

We must be cleansed of these things before the Holy Spirit can exercise His full power in us. Fortunately, we are promised forgiveness and cleansing if we confess our sins:

1 John 1:9 (NLT) But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.

The challenge here can come in from an incomplete confession. The church often teaches us overly simplistic confession:

“Jesus, I confess that I’ve sinned. Please forgive me.”

Confession means to admit to doing something wrong. God says this is a sin, and you have committed it. You say, yes, I agree, that is a sin, and I admit that I have committed it. For this to work, we have to acknowledge how we’ve sinned, specifically. Not just I’ve sinned, but I’ve sinned by being lustful, and I’ve sinned not just today, but I’ve had a pattern of sin in my life. We have to view the totality of our sin. Once we truly recognize the totality of our sinfulness, we humbly agree with God. Yes, I confess. I have sinned. Having this deeper confession allows us to then ask for His forgiveness and cleansing.

There are sins that are harder to understand, though. For example, we sin when we have a pattern of anxiety in our lives. If we are anxious, we do not believe that God will take care of us. Through experimentation, some have found that patterns like this can begin early in our lives. When this is the case, the most effective approach to forgiveness is to remember the moment it began. When we do this, we can recognize why we came to believe what we believed. We recognize what the truth is, and how we departed from it. Given this understanding, we lay before God this sin, and how it has persisted throughout our lives. We confess it as sin, and we ask for forgiveness and cleansing.

How, though, do we remember something that happened years, sometimes decades, in our past? God remembers. As we learn to hear His voice, we can ask Him to bring to mind specific moments in our lives, and He will.

As an example, I struggled with anxiety. Through prayer, the Lord showed me a time when I was 3 years old. It was a very stressful time that made me believe that I was alone and that I was in danger and there was no one to take care of me. The truth was that Christ was there. He was going to take care of me. I did not need to be afraid. I allowed the enemy to create a foothold, so a spirit of anxiety took hold in my life, and formed in me a life of habitual anxiety. Understanding the root of my anxiety allowed me to view my life of habitual anxiety in its totality, and to confess it all before God, who then forgave me and cleansed me of all unrighteousness.

When we discussed authority, we saw that habitual sinning gives the enemy a foothold in our lives. He gains a certain amount of authority over us. Once we’ve been cleansed of a habitual sin, we must make sure that any enemies that had gained a foothold through that sin are expelled. Fortunately, since we have been forgiven and cleansed, we once again have authority over that enemy, so we can expel them.

Further Reading