Mercy | ReceiveHealing.com

In God’s Mercy or At His Mercy?

June 27th, 2008

Reading Level: Very Impassioned

While in a time of prayer and meditation this morning, some thoughts came to mind about God’s mercy. Are we in His mercy or at His mercy?

Many of us have been raised to feel that we are “at” God’s mercy, that God is an uncompassionate authority figure who rules over our lives at a distance, yet He is unmoved by the severity of our situations and we are forced to feel grateful if He acts in our behalf. Such feelings may be due to inadequate religious teaching from childhood or a parent or other authority figure that misused their authority. Feelings of being “at” God’s mercy may even stem from being raised in poverty, which often causes one to feel that you are always at the mercy of others’ whims and unable to help yourself.

As I began to study the topic of God’s mercy this evening, I discovered that God’s mercy is clearly governed by His overwhelming love and concern for us.

The first passages I came across were of people in crises who were writing about God’s response to their cries for help. Take a look at these people’s view of God’s merciful responses: Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Healing Through Overcoming Family Past

February 19th, 2008

Reading Level: Impassioned

In my life experience of working with people who are seeking after God, there has been a noticeable characteristic of people’s responses to God being affected by past parental relationships.

I have seen children from abusive family situations that felt great apprehension at the thought of even talking to God, fearful of His rejection or of some sort of mistreatment by Him. I have known women who were making an effort to seek after God, but because of past abusive relationships with fathers and ex-husbands, could not emotionally handle the intended positive analogy in Scripture of paternal characteristics in God. Though Scripture makes clear that spiritual beings are neither male or female, since God often uses the analogy of a Father to illustrate to us certain positive characteristics that can be seen in earthly fathers, people can, without being aware of it, project bad attributes particularly from fathers (but also mothers and any other person seen as an authority figure) onto God. Throughout my career, I have made it a point to remind people that God’s fatherly characteristics are those of, not just a good father but, a perfect one, since God is perfect and that concept has been helpful to them.

There is a term in psychology when dealing with boundary violations that is called a withdrawal of love. An example of this emotional violation is when a parent who is displeased with the child, whether for poor behavior or even just behavior against the parent’s personal preferences, responds with anger.

Even if the child’s behavior was ethically unacceptable and needed some form of discipline, the discipline included more than just corrective action; it was carried out with types angry behaviors which portrayed that the parent no longer loved the child due to his behavior. Parents like this, often unintentionally, also display behavior that conveys to the child that his actions were a personal insult to the parent. This results in a performance-based relationship. “If you do what I like, I’ll love you. Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Believe You Deserve to be Well

February 15th, 2008

Reading Level: Very Impassioned

One of the first issues worthy of discussion on this site is, “Do you really believe that you deserve to be well?”

This sounds like a ludicrous question, but medical science has proven that it is not. Our mental perspective, what we think about ourselves and God, has a great effect on our physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

For the purpose of example, there is a particular area in the medical field in which the procedure actually brings back to one’s mind past emotional hurts that are causing current physical health problems. Brief, physical treatments are then done which actually remove the pent up emotion from that bad emotional experience which has been stored in the body. During the physical treatment, you are asked to state out loud phrases along the lines of, “I deserve to be healthy. I deserve to be free from allergies” etc. People are then cured of various recurring physical ailments once that stored negative emotion from a past experience was removed from the body.

Believing that you deserve to be well is just as necessary a perspective in the area of faith and the spiritual realm.

In Matthew 9:29, while bringing healing to people, Jesus said, “According to your faith will it be done to you.” The Amplified Version (expanded from the Greek) says, “According to your faith and trust and reliance on the power invested in Me be it done to you.” Most anyone you talk to, regardless of their religious beliefs or the lack of them, believes that Jesus healed people. Yet even Jesus said that people’s healing was dependent on whether or not people believed that they would be healed or, one may say, whether or not they believed that God desired to heal them. Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »