The Inner Healing Toolbox

This post is devoted to providing specific concepts and principles for achieving inner healing from “The Inner Healing Toolbox.”  The concepts and principles mentioned here are merely preliminary, however, and are in no way exhaustive of all the concepts and principles that might be involved in the inner healing process.  But this is an excellent opportunity to begin building or expanding upon your own understanding of the things you need to know and do to achieve true and lasting inner healing.

First and foremost, you are a spirit, and unless you approach your inner dysfunction from a biblical, spiritual standpoint first—from the standpoint of truth, the way things really are—you will never be able to achieve true and lasting inner healing.  Every kind of mental and emotional disorder named and catalogued in the latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the Fifth Edition or DSM-5) has its roots in the fact that we are all born separated in our spirits from God as our Spirit Creator and Source of Life.

This spiritual truth is absolutely foundational to a correct understanding of the human condition.  The dark deficit in our spirits that we are all born with inevitably leads to wrong beliefs and bad choices that begin in childhood. Then these become habitual and repeatedly damage and degrade our spirits, souls and bodies, often for life. Further, because the components of the human composite are so intricately interwoven, injury or damage done to one part or component almost always involves injury or damage to other parts or components at the same time.  

Ordinary clinical counseling that ignores the spiritual component of the human heart and dismisses God’s role in the inner healing process is woefully inadequate and incomplete. Since such counseling typically addresses only concerns of the mind and emotions like anxiety and depression, it tends to treat spirit and soul as one and the same thing when they are not. Ordinary clinical counseling is therefore misguided from the start and incapable of guiding a suffering counselee to true and lasting inner healing.

First John 4:16 of the Bible says not merely that God loves us, but that “…God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”  But since God is also Spirit, the only way to truly know Him, correctly relate to Him, and experience His perfect, healing love is through our own spirits interacting with His Spirit.  We cannot detect Him by our physical senses and we cannot think or feel our way into His presence with our minds and emotions—we must come to Him on His terms in spirit and in truth.

In the New Testament of the Bible, the Greek word translated “spirit” is pneuma meaning “air in motion, breath or wind,” while in the Old Testament, the Hebrew word translated “spirit” is ruach also meaning “breath” or “wind.”  As explained in another post, human beings became animated, sentient beings when God breathed into the clay body of the first man the “breath of life,” and he became a “living being.”  The faculties of your spirit are the God-oriented faculties of conscience, intuition, revelation, communion and worship. 

God engages with us in our spirits when He by His Spirit makes us aware of and warns us about choices that have moral implications both positive and negative (conscience), prompts us in unseen ways to act or not act in a particular manner (intuition), reveals previously unknown matters to us (revelation), connects with us in fellowship (communion), or relates to us as our Heavenly Father with His children as we express our deepest love, adoration and appreciation to Him for His blessings and mercy (worship).

But until we are born again and our deadened spirits are regenerated by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ, we cannot know God at all.  Our degraded conscience will remain hopelessly prone to doubt and error, our intuition will remain very vague and imperfect, and we will remain unable to receive revelation from God, commune with Him or worship Him in spirit and truth as He requires.  Most tragically of all, we will not be on the path to eternal salvation and entry into God’s kingdom, the journey that He so passionately urges us to undertake.  Jesus said in John 3:3, “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Entering God’s kingdom at the end of all of your pain, suffering and struggles in this life will of course be the ultimate healing, but you can’t get there from here without taking the first and most important step of the journey: you must be born again.