The Locked Room
From Hugh Shelbourne [edited]
Every one who comes to Jesus is damaged, but we seldom recognise how great our need is. Jesus said,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Luke 4:18,19
He was not speaking of physical healing. Jesus perfectly understood the fallen condition of man. He knew that their problems were of the heart, the mind and the body. He had been anointed in order to minister new life in place of existing spiritual death. He knew that the wounds of life could only be resolved by a new birth. Wholeness would mean healing of a kind no doctor could bring.
The Locked Room
I think that we each have a hidden, dark, dusty, cobwebbed room in our hearts. We pass its closed door quite frequently in our ordered existence, but we seldom see reason to enter it. It is the place where we put the hurtful memorabilia from the past. Childish memories are there. Bad dreams are there. Events that once disturbed us are there. Past fears are there. Painful memories are there. Children suffer all kinds of assaults as they grow up. Some are intentionally harmful, others are accidental, but all the reactions to the traumas of life are hidden there. Some of the disgraceful things we ourselves did are there too. We all make mistakes in life; some colossal and many small. It is in this room that we put away all the stuff we no longer need and by not acknowledging it we seek to disown it.
We do this because we can only deal with past memories by trying to forget them. We may even have locked that door and intellectually thrown away the key in a determination to put it out of our mind for ever. The problem is that there is a cost involved in doing this. That room becomes a secret no-go area in our lives, it is always there lurking in the background.. If for any reason someone reminds us of its contents we react protectively and sometimes aggressively. For many that room becomes a prison of their personality and character. We can never forget its contents for long and the struggle for relief from its looming presence in our subconscious can lead to all kinds of errant behaviour.
That room is like a wound with a scab on it. We can add layers to the scab in order to bury the wound and seal it over, but it still throbs, as all wounds do. Everyone carries their past within them. All our experiences, whether we consider them to be negative or positive, contribute to the process of our development to maturity and make us who we are. So many of us feel ourselves to be unlovable, unloved and unloving; we feel we are trapped by the failures and negatives in our past. What is worse is that our arch-enemy Satan has a good memory and is unremitting in his guilt inducing accusations. This is his constant work and it hinders our capacity to love others and so our relationships will always be limited.
Maturity leads to healing
The point is that we all need to grow up physically, emotionally and spiritually into whole people. Physical wounds are obvious to us and can generally (but not always) be treated medically. Emotional wounds and psychological wounds (that is in the soul) too can be treated at least to some extent by counselling and therapy if they are recognised. Spiritual wounds can only be healed by Jesus. It is always possible for physical, emotional and psychological wounds to have their root cause in the damaged spirit thus the symptoms do not yield to conventional healing treatment.
But we cannot compartmentalise the process of growing up. The spirit, soul and body are interactive and interdependent and so are necessary to one another in the overall process. The Promised Land is the adolescent stage of our growth to maturity. It is the place of active warfare with the enemy, and the place of his defeat. As we confidently apply the Word of God to our lives in all departments, we grow in knowledge and wisdom. We become ministers to others and effective priests.
Demonic bondage
There is another kind of bondage that we need to recognise. It is the unrealised potential in our lives for the direct intervention of demons. The conventional wisdom of the world dominated by Satan has no idea of man’s damaged spirit or the hostile spiritual powers around us. In a straight denial of biblical revelation, man is considered to be merely body and soul. This ignorance puts the foolish at risk, because the demons love to take control of a man’s spirit if at all possible. They can do this by luring the unwary into increasing sinful activity, so stimulating the natural lusts of body and soul that the craving for more and more sensation leads to a loss of self control.
Anyone willingly giving himself over to sinful activity effectively worships the object of his lust. This forbidden idolatry opens the door to demon possession of that individual by his or her express invitation. At this point the demons have control of the individual by his spirit and he is powerless to help himself.
Babylon in the Bible is the dwelling place of unclean spirits, and represents human society without God. Without the enlightenment of scripture society fails to recognise the spiritual idolatry that is at the heart of materialism. In the minds of those who think of these things at all, demons are associated with primitive societies. The revelation of the Word is that demons are quite capable of such sophisticated deception that the intelligentsia are unaware of what is going on and are blind to their own bondages. Many seemingly respectable people are dominated by demons through their excesses and perversions, and are quite unable to help themselves. Our newspapers daily carry the evidence of this spiritual reality and yet we constantly marvel at the apparent foolishness of those who are making the headlines. The demons understand the iniquity that is in us all because they too are dominated by it.
In the beginning, man had agape-love in his heart; he was the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit who is agape-love. But, as we saw in chapter three, man’s spirit separated from the Holy Spirit (God) at the time of the Fall, became a crippled thing. Once fallen, Adam was devoid of agapelove and devoid of the spiritual power to control himself. Because of this every heir of Adam is born into the world without agape-love and without the power of self control, and therefore is always vulnerable to the hostile spiritual powers of the atmosphere.
Healing from hurts inflicted by others
It is not only the fruit of our own iniquity that harms us. The iniquity of our world harms us. The iniquity of society harms us. The iniquity of family life and loved ones harms us. Until it is conquered as the Word shows us the enemy continues to have power over us. All this points to the truly terrible catalogue of pain and injury in man’s unloved and unloving, body, soul and spirit which Jesus wants to deliver us from.
All is to be restored by the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. But his work of renewal is by using the double edged sword of the Word. One edge reveals the iniquity, the other edge reveals agape love. The clearing out of the one is necessary to the infusion of the other. Obedience to the Word opens the way to change of character and change of character leads to blessing: i.e. the same grace principle of the Old Covenant carried through into the more powerful New Covenant.
The modern church is spiritually naïve because of its refusal to see God’s Word as His total provision to meet all our needs. It is has almost no insight into man’s condition and God’s remedy for it. God wants us to realise that by means of the New Covenant we have nothing less than the possibility of a total restoration, which is to be like God as Adam once was, but more so.
I Corinthians 6:17
“He who is united with the Lord becomes one Spirit with Him.”
Walk in the light!
The first step is the restoration of our spirit to fellowship with its Creator who gave it. God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5)
“It is the God who said, “Let the light shine out of darkness,” (at creation!) who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”
II Corinthians 4:6
Once we have the assurance and security of Father’s agape-love for us, we can face and deal with the contents of the darkened room. Everything must go. That supernatural light, better than any laser beam, can excise all the pain of the past so that it no longer has power over us. When we are saved and secure in Father’s love, we will no longer need a darkened junk room to hide our fears and unwanted past.
I John 4:18
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”
That agape-love alone deals with the fears of our past failures, weaknesses and inadequacies. Adam feared to meet with God after the Fall. Because we know we are accepted in Christ, we do not fear to meet Father face-to-face within our own hearts. Because we know that He has already dealt with our past, we are able to discard it.
II Timothy 1:7
“God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self control.”
That Spirit, now joined with our healed spirit, enables us to face every eventuality, past present and future, without fear for ourselves, and is the resurrection power that continually restores our spirit, soul and body to wholeness. Our enemy is only too well aware of our weaknesses and our past sins and he will seek to bind us to the failures, feelings and injuries that have resulted. Our liberty, healing and wholeness is established as we overcome him day by day through the obedience of our faith-walk. We need to haul everything out of the junk room, shake it out, look it over and throw it away. We do not negate those experiences as being real enough, but we bring them all to the cross by which we were saved, openly and freely. They are to be buried in our baptism. We no longer allow the past to have power over us.
Knowing who you are!
Knowing who we are in Christ and using our new power of self control, we can look at everything without fear. Where forgiveness of others is needed, we forgive them, freely and fully. Where our conscience bothers us, we confess and accept the assurance of the Word (I John 3:19,20) that we are forgiven. Where repentance is needed, we repent and ask for forgiveness. Then we put on our new nature, thanking Father, for we are His chosen sons. By faith we will be troubled no more.
It is possible for us to sometimes go on harbouring negative thoughts and feelings through unforgiveness of others or resentment or even by long term habits of thinking and feeling. If we do this we are choosing not to live in Christ and the experience of complete deliverance will not be ours.
II Corinthians 5:17,18
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God.”
We need nothing from that room. It belongs to a past which God has declared to be over – you are a new person and those events and their memories have nothing to do with you as you are now. You are free because the Son set you free! (Remember it is not by feelings but by faith.) Not only are we free from all the past, but in our new life we are discovering the process of transformation as a new creature into the fullness of what our Father has given to us. We are God’s children, now! (I John 3:2). This means in practical terms that not only are we loved just for ourselves, but also that we can love others just for themselves.
Walk in love!
This becoming agape-love means that we are increasingly lovable. I think that very few of us who still carry the secret room about, ever consider that others can truly love us for ourselves. We know too much about ourselves. We have the evidence of the past to convince and convict us. With our biblical insight, we realise that no human love is pure. Certainly, we have the capacity to carry out occasional acts of altruism where we act regardless of self interest, but the fallen nature is by definition completely self centred. Unsaved people can never love unselfishly – for as we have seen, it is not in the fallen nature of man to do so. Everyone looks for love from others – we all know a need for it – but that need can never meet in our human relationships for more than a short space of time.
Now, as a new creation in Christ all is changed. Because Father loves us totally and for ever, our own need is met. Now we, like Jesus, will love, serve and even die for others who do not deserve it.
“But whoever keeps his word, in him truly love for God is perfected. By this we may be sure that we are in him: he who abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.”
I John 2:5,6; 3:16; 4:12,13; 4:20,21
“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”
“No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own spirit.”
“If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.”
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