5 Ways God Can Heal Your Heart

Here are 5 things that will happen in your life when God is bringing you into a season of healing your heart.

1. God Will Open Your Eyes to the Glorious Truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Any true healing must begin with our relationship to Jesus Christ. This is the point Jesus made over and over again right at the beginning of his public ministry. In Mark 2:17 (NIV) Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” In Luke 4:17-21 it states:

. . . and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’”

The gospel is the good news that God saves us when repent of sin, place our faith in Jesus Christ, and depend on God’s grace alone for salvation. God wants us whole, God wants us pure, and God wants us free from sin so we are able to fully glorify him.

Through the gospel of Jesus Christ God makes that possible. So if God is truly beginning to heal your heart, your eyes will be drawn to the glorious person and work of Jesus Christ.

2. God Will Heal Your Heart By Confronting Any Personal Sin that Is Causing the Damage

There are certainly wounds to the heart that happen for reasons besides personal sin. If you are abused by someone, if a tragedy happens in your life, or if you lose a relationship you truly cared about, these are examples of wounds that are not because of personal sin.

However, very often the deepest wounds in our hearts are caused by our own sinful actions. God will not heal your heart and then leave the source of the problem to damage your heart again. God never heals us by ignoring the root issues. God ruthlessly attacks sin in our lives and he won’t let us ignore anything that we are allowing to pull us away from him.

So one sign that God is truly beginning to heal your heart is if he is amplifying your conviction towards your sin. To find the healing you really want from God, it won’t always happen in sweet moments of meditative prayer. It won’t always happen with candles and piano music on. No, sometimes you will have to fight for your healing with everything you’ve got. You will have to become violent against your sin. You will have to kill your sin through the power of the Holy Spirit before it kills you.

Notice the warning God gave Cain in Genesis 4:6-7 (NIV), “Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

Wow, I love what God just said there. “You must rule over it.” Sadly, Cain did not rule over sin but he allowed himself to be ruled by it. Genesis 4:8-10 states:

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let’s go out to the field.’ While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. . . . The Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.’”

Cain didn’t take the war on sin serious enough. If you want to find healing and freedom, you must be prepared to fight for it. Sin isn’t a game. It’s not something that you can play with and remain unburned. The only solution is to play for keeps, to accept this really is a matter of life and death.

So one sign that God is truly beginning to heal your heart is if the Holy Spirit is forming a passionate conviction in you to repent of the sins in your life.

3. God Will Heal Your Heart By Causing You to Offer People Radical, Undeserved Forgiveness

As I said at the beginning of point 2, not all wounds to the heart are our fault. Sometimes we are broken because of the sins and poor choices of other people. When we are sinned against and wounded by others, we can often feel completely powerless. When something happens to you against your will, it can make you feel weak and victimized. It can feel like your strength was taken away from you.

So what can be done? We can’t change the past. We can’t undo what others have done. And we can’t pretend like the wounds never happened. When someone or something took away your choice to live the way you wanted to live, you will always feel weak and wounded until you regain what you lost through that traumatic experience. To regain what was lost you have to regain your choice to live how you want to live. You have to take back your freedom that the sins of others tried to take form you.

Ironically, therefore, the only way we will find healing and regain our strength is by doing the one thing no one can force us to do – forgive. When you forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it, you are taking back your control. God doesn’t force us to forgive. He commands forgiveness but then lets it to be our choice. One of the reasons God allows our forgiveness of others to be our choice is because God knows the choosing is part of the healing process.

When you choose to forgive, you are telling the person who hurt you that they do not control you, they cannot tell you what to do, and they cannot take away your freedom to live the way you want. Do you know why God chose to forgive us even though we didn’t deserve it? Because God is sovereign and he can choose to do whatever he wants. Because God has supreme power and control over everything, he chose to send his Son to pay for our sins so that we could be forgiven. As Roman 1:16 states, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes . . .”

Likewise, when the Holy Spirit enters us, God gives us the power to do things that show the world that they do not control us. Forgiveness is one of the most powerful ways to find the healing your heart desperately desires.

4. When God Truly Begins to Heal Your Heart, He Will Cause You to Not Waste Your Pain

When painful things happen in our lives, there are so many things we don’t know. We won’t know what the outcome will be. We won’t know how long this pain will last. And we won’t know why all this is happening. But there’s one thing we can know with certainty: pain will change you.

I can guarantee you that when you go through something very painful and traumatic, you will never be the same afterwards. I don’t know how it will change you, but I know life will never be the same now that this pain has happened.

When we accept the fact that nothing will ever be the same because of this pain, we then have to make the choice that is in our control: How will this pain change us? You will be changed by pain, but how you are changed depends on what you do with your pain. If you use your pain to press into God rather than using it to run from God, your pain can actually become a part of the healing process.

Ironically, God often brings the deepest forms of healing to our hearts through the most painful life circumstances. Oftentimes we won’t let God touch the most broken places in our hearts until we have no other choice. Sometimes when life finally knocks us down, it is only then that we are opened up enough for God’s healing touch to reach the deepest wounds within us.

So when God is truly healing you, he won’t let you waste your pain. He will use your pain to transform you into someone completely different than the person you were before this pain took place. We can’t escape the trials of life, but we do have a choice in how we respond in our darkest hours. Will we cry out to God or will we run?

5. God Will Heal Your Heart Through Bringing You Into His Presence

There’s so much more that could be said about the process of healing, but without doubt, the deepest healing always occurs through being in the presence of God. 2 Corinthians 3:17 states, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

If you want a spiritual healing, you must spiritually connect with God the Holy Spirit. I can’t explain this point to you. I can’t conjure up the Spirit for you. All I can tell you is what the word of God says. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” If you want freedom, if you want healing, if you want to come out of the valley and into the light, then you must experience the presence of God personally.

With that said, perhaps there is no better way to close than to simply read one of the most famous passages of Scripture in all the Bible, Psalm 23. It states:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
²     He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
³     He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.

⁴ Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

⁵ You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
⁶ Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.”