Do you have broken, hurting areas in your life? God has just the words you need to hear. Pang Foua Yang Rhodes helps you discover those healing words for your life today.

Transcript

 So some of you might not know this, but Greg and I are not able to have kids. we don't have any children. We, would love kids. Been married 20 years. Greg would make an amazing. Father, he is fun. He does all the goofy things. He can throw kids around. He's that much fun. We just couldn't conceive, and it was a really long journey for us of getting in touch with that pain and recognizing the brokenness in our bodies.

And coming to terms and accepting what God had for us. But it was really rough those first couple of years when we were trying to figure out what to do. I just remember how hard it was for both of us when we were searching for answers. Getting poked at and prodded at by every doctor. Taking Hmong herbs that looked like twigs. And while we were waiting and hoping for physical healing and really waiting for a miracle, and during that time of pain, the last thing I wanted to hear from people was, oh, don't worry. Y'all have children when the time is right. Some people even said to me, don't cry. You know, crying means we don't really trust God.

And I just remember thinking, I just need you to be here with me. I don't need your advice. I don't need your admonition for me to trust God more. I just need you to be here with me and I don't know what kind of pains you're going through, what struggles you have. But I'm pretty sure that each one of you has some deep hurt, some deep pain.

Because we live in a fallen world, we live in a world where things don't go right, and we are imperfect people, and so we hurt each other. We make poor decisions. Our bodies fall apart. They just don't work the way we want them to. And I don't know. Some of the pains you have may be really deep. Maybe some of you have been abused. Maybe some of you have been betrayed by a partner. Maybe some of you have ruptured relationships with your family, your parents, but whether someone hurt you or whether you made really poor decisions that ended up hurting yourself, or you experienced physical limitations, the pain and the brokenness that comes from that are very real.

I am a marriage and family therapist by trade, and in doing therapy with people, and then even in my own life, I find that in the midst of our pain, most of us ask three really core questions while we're in the midst of that pain.

One is, does anyone care? I'm in so much pain. Does anyone care?

The second question is, can anyone understand? Can you understand the depth of my pain?

And finally, we ask, is healing possible? Will it ever get better?

So we're gonna look at those three questions that we asked in the midst of pain. The first question: Does anyone care? What we're really saying, what we're crying out for when we ask that question is, I need connection. In the middle of my pain I feel isolated. I feel alone.

I feel like it's just me with this pain. And can somebody come and be with me? Will anybody come and bear that pain with me? And if possible, will anybody cry with me? Psalm 103:13-14 explains to us how the father has compassion for his children. So the Lord has compassion on those who fear him, for he knows how we are formed, and he remembers that we are dust.

This is what we want. We want that compassion. Compassion is not pity. Pity is: I'm sorry, I feel so bad that you're going through this struggle. Compassion is I'm next to you and I feel your pain, and I don't have any words to take that pain away, but I wanna be here. As you go through that pain, I wanna be here with you.

Psalm 34:18 explains more about what God's compassion for us looks like. The psalmist tells that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted. When God has compassion on us in our pain, he doesn't just look far from afar and say, oh, I feel bad for you. No, he is close to us, and he comes, and he's right there up close and personal. And when he gets up that close, he is moved to tears.

Many of you might have memorized the shortest verse in the Bible. It's found in John 11:35. If you haven't, I'll help you memorize it today. John 11:35 says, Jesus wept. Just those two words, Jesus wept. In the new century version, it says, Jesus cried. But this was the action that Jesus showed, and this is what he did when he was at the funeral of his good friend Lazarus.

 Jesus had just told his disciples in this chapter that he was gonna go and raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew Lazarus had died and so he wasn't crying because he was sad that Lazarus was dead. He was just about to raise him from the dead. But here's what John the Apostle wrote in this chapter tells us in John 11:33. We learned that when Jesus saw her, who was married, the sister of Lazarus, the dead man, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and trouble.

So Jesus came to be with Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha, and when he was up close and personal with them, he was moved with compassion because they were stricken with grief that their brother had just died. And Jesus standing next to them, saw their anguish. Anguish is when you feel like there is nothing left.

And you feel the pain to the core of who you are. And in looking at Mary and Martha, Jesus also felt their anguish. And because of that, he sheds tears. And Jesus wept because they were in sorrow. So you know what? Your tears are not bothersome to God. He will not come to you and tell you. Stop crying.

Why are you crying? No. Your tears will move him to compassion. In Psalm 56:8, David, who's writing this poem to God in the middle of his pains, he has lots of enemies chasing him. He's been rejected by people and he's running for his life. And this is what David said: You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.

Did you get that? David is saying, I'm in so much pain and I'm crying so much, but hey God, I know that you sobbed. And you see my tears. And not only that, but you actually store up my tears. You collect them. In ancient times at funerals, people used to have these little glass jars that they would actually collect the tears of let's say the widow or the family members.

And then the amount of tears you collected would show that the amount of love and respect you had for the deaf. So this idea that our tears are stored up in treasure. So if you ask the question in the middle of your pain, does anyone care? The resounding answer from God is: Yes, I care, and I am right here next to you, and I will cry with you in your pain.

That's God's answer to that question. So we ask, does anyone care? And then we also ask, does anyone understand when we ask this question? It really is a cry for someone to validate our pain. We wanna know that my pain matters. We don't want people to come alongside us and trivialize our pain or minimize it and tell us: That's it? That's what you're crying over? Just get over it.

Deep down. We fear that people are just gonna tell us to buck up and be tough and stop crying. So we wanna know, does anyone understand the death of the pain that I'm experiencing? So for me, you know, not having kids, if somebody has six kids, I wanna know when they tell me it's gonna be okay. Like, can you really understand the depth of my pain that I can't even concede one child while you have six? Or maybe you just lost your job and you're really fearful for the future. And somebody with a stable well paying job comes to you and says, oh, don't worry about it. Things will get better.

And you wanna say: can you understand the depth of what I'm going through? and that really is our question. And then when we turn to God, we often think, God, you're perfect and you're all powerful and you have all these rules for me. And so I bet you probably don't understand the depth of my pain cuz you don't experience pain like I do.

And we often wonder if God can understand the depth of our pain. And because we wonder that the Bible tells us very clearly that God understands our brokenness and our pain. You know how he understands? He became one of us so that he could experience what we experienced. The Apostle John, when he was trying to introduce Jesus, the son of God, to his readers, he said: Jesus, who is the word, the Son of God, became flesh. He took on flesh, and he came into the world and lived among us.

And so God became a human being so that he could experience our pain, that he would know the depth of our pain. In John 3:16, probably the most memorized verse. Jesus himself is talking, and this is what he said. He said that God loved the world, meaning you and me so much that he sent his son into that world and that whoever believes in his son would not perish but have eternal life. But again, Jesus was saying out of love and compassion, I am here. I am here.

Long before Jesus saw the earth, prophets had foretold that someday God would send a Messiah, someone to save his people, to come into the world and save us. And this is how he described the son of God that God would send in Isaiah 53:2-3. This is how Isaiah describes Jesus:

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain, like one from whom people hide their faces. He was despised and we held him in low esteem.”

This is the son of God who came into the world and people rejected him. They despised him, and Isaiah says he, this Jesus, was a man who knew suffering and pain. I wanna read something from a book called Making Sense of Suffering, written by a philosopher, Peter Kreeft. Peter Kreeft captures so well what Isaiah was saying here, that Jesus came into the world and suffered. So this is what Kreeft wrote:

“In coming into our world. He came also into our suffering. He sits beside us in stalled car in the snow bank. Sometimes he starts the car for us, but even when he doesn't, he is there and that is the only thing that matters. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us? Not for our evil, but for our good or our attempted good. He was despised and rejected of men. Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, oh no, not again. I can't take anymore. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us, hide their faces from us. They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love betrayed? He too, loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. He came unto his own and his own received him not. Does it sometimes seem as if life has passed us by or cast us? As if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion. He sinks with us. He too, is passed over by the world.

So as we return to this question, does anyone understand the depth of my pain? And more importantly, God, do you understand the death of my pain? Jesus would say, yes, I do. I understand. I understand your pain and brokenness because I experienced it, but as comforting as it is to know that somebody cares and that they understand us while we're in pain, ultimately what we want is for the pain to stop. The third question that we asked in the middle of our pain is healing possible?

We wanna know, can I be saved from this brokenness? This is a cry for redemption. In the midst of the pain, we are often filled with hope that tomorrow things will get better. And then we're also filled with this sinking despair that what is broken will never be able to be repaired and that it will never be put together the way it was supposed to.

And that is our fear. Maybe we wonder if we'll ever be free from the memories of abuse, or we wonder if we could ever earn our parents' trust again, or we wonder if we'll ever be able to play basketball like we did before we tore our acl. We wanna know, can I be healed? The definition of healing or to heal.

Freedictionary.com has given us three definitions. One is to restore to health or soundness. The second one is to set right or to repair, like to heal the rift between two people. And third, to restore a person to spiritual wholeness. So those are the definitions that are given by his dictionary, but that's what you and I want when we're in pain.

We wanna know that we're going to get better. We want our thoughts and our actions to be repaired. We want our relationships to be set right? We want our bodies to be cured. And we ask, is it possible? In Psalm 147:3, the psalmist tells us this. He says that it is that God heals the brokenhearted and that he binds up their wounds.

If you can picture it, it's very action-oriented. God is there, and he's healing us, and he's binding our wounds. In Exodus 15:26, God is talking to his people, the Israelites, and he says to them:

“I am the Lord who heals you.”

He wanted them to know that one of his jobs was healing them from their brokenness and their pain. To our question that we ask is healing possible? God's answer, again, is a resounding yes, and his answer was Jesus the prophet Isaiah, when we just read earlier, describes that Jesus was a man of sorrow when he suffered and he endured much pain. And Isaiah goes on to explain in verses four and five why Jesus had to suffer. And this is what Isaiah says:

“Surely he took up our pain and or our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds, we are healed.”

God doesn't just heal us because he can, because he has the power to. He doesn't heal us just because we ask him to. He heals us because Jesus paid the price so that we could be made whole again, that we could be restored, that relationships could be repaired, and that someday our bodies would be made whole again. He suffered for us. He was broken for us. He died so that you and I can have physical, relational, and spiritual healing.

Does anyone care that you're hurting? Does anyone understand the depth of your pain? Is healing possible for you? Yes. By his wounds. Jesus demonstrated by his wound that he cares, that he understands, and that he is able to heal you in the midst of your deepest pains, in the midst of your brokenness.

Remember these three most healing words in the Bible? By his wounds? By his wounds, it is by his wounds that we are healed.