Episode 5: Bringing Heaven to Earth
Season 1 · Episode 5
Bringing Heaven to Earth: How Ordinary Believers Can Spark Spiritual Revival
Show Notes
Amy and Justin Howard continue their series on healing and deliverance by asking what inner healing really is and why so many followers of Jesus feel uneasy about it. Drawing on Scripture, church history, and years of prayer ministry, they show that our discipleship often stops at the mind while our bodies, emotions, and memories still carry unhealed stories. Along the way they tackle honest questions about the New Age, meditation, and the imagination, and offer practical tools like the four R's, imaging prayer, and praying for the connection between head and heart. It's a warm, hope-filled invitation to let the love of God reach the places behind our strongholds.
In This Episode
- Western discipleship tends to stop at the mind, but we are embodied people whose bodies and emotions keep the stories of trauma, good and bad, from as far back as conception.
- Inner healing means encountering the love of God in areas of trauma and past wounding that still live on in us through negative emotions, pain, and mental struggle.
- The hosts address common fears about inner healing, whether it is New Age, merely charismatic, or just pop psychology, and distinguish practices that must go to the fire from good, human things that have simply been corrupted.
- Denying the role of the body, brain, and emotions in our faith is a form of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism; the incarnation and the resurrection affirm that our bodies matter to God.
- Strongholds (2 Corinthians 10) form around wounds we feel God did not protect, and healing comes as the knowledge and love of God are applied to what is hidden behind those walls.
- The four R's, repent, renounce, release, and receive, alongside imaging prayer and a prayer for the head-heart connection, are core tools for inner healing.
- The sanctified imagination is a God-given faculty; picturing Jesus at the cross, placing our false name tags on him, and inviting him into painful memories can move truth from the head to the heart.
- EncounterLife, a 12-week coached cohort following an Encounter Weekend, helps people continue their healing and untangle emotional idolatry and 'cultural codependency.'
Going Deeper — Discussion Questions
- Where in your own discipleship have you 'stopped at the mind'? What might it look like to invite your body and your heart into your relationship with God?
- The hosts talk about knowing the right answers about God while the heart has never really felt them. Where do you notice a gap between what you believe in your head and what you experience in your heart?
- A stronghold forms around what we feel we must protect because we don't believe God protected us. What are you working hard to keep safe on your own, and what would it mean to let God guard it instead?
- Amy and Justin describe the four R's: repent, renounce, release, and receive. Which of these do you find easiest, and which is hardest to actually do?
- How were you taught to think about the imagination growing up? Does the idea of a 'sanctified imagination' feel freeing, uncomfortable, or both, and why?
- The episode challenges the notion that the 'really spiritual' things are only the intangible ones. How have you seen the temptation to spiritualize away real emotional or physical pain?
- Consider the image of the block of ice slowly thawing. Where in your life are you tempted to expect instant healing, and how might you make peace with healing as a journey of sanctification?
Full Transcript
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0:03Welcome to Between Heaven & Earth
Welcome to Between Heaven and Earth. We're your hosts, Justin and Amy Howard. And together, we lead a mission agency right here in beautiful New England. We are thrilled that you've joined us. In each episode, we'll explore what it means to follow Jesus by bringing Heaven and Earth together in your family and community. Our goal is to empower you to thrive in the collision of kingdoms and courageously join with Jesus in his great project of healing and restoration. This podcast is brought to you by Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, dedicated to working with ordinary followers of Jesus to mend, make, and multiply disciples right where they are. Let's dive in.
0:54EncounterLife and Ongoing Training
All right, welcome back, everyone. We're continuing our series on healing and deliverance. And this is really intended to stir interest in how God wants to heal—and what part normal followers of Jesus like you and me play in bringing Heaven and Earth together. We've been covering a lot of fascinating topics, from what it means to be a priest. Yeah. Priesthood of all believers. And what it doesn't mean. What does it look like to bring Heaven and Earth together? What does it mean that the kingdom of God is already here, but not yet fully here, and our role in bringing those two things together?
And so this first season, we're roughly following Amy's Kingdom Prayer Ministry Training Manual, which you can find on Amazon. And we're just about to launch a few other cool things. Yeah, you want to talk about that for a minute? Yeah, I'm just super excited. Yeah, so I think that we are—so the ministry at Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, we hold some events. And then we have a bunch of follow-up opportunities to help people keep their healing and go deeper in their healing. So we have these catalytic events where people encounter the love and power of God in new ways. Those are called Encounter Weekends.
And then we have something called EncounterLife, which is a follow-up to Encounter Weekend. Yeah, EncounterLife is a 12-week coached cohort. It's led by a seasoned prayer minister slash coach. So someone that's been—that's being trained and has been trained in both prayer ministry and helping coach a group of people in hearing the Lord for themselves, for one another. And it really kind of digs deep into the first commandment. It's this idea that Jesus said to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And a lot of times we kind of stop at mind—that's sort of our Western limit. The limits on our Western discipleship are oftentimes the mind.
So love God by accumulating more information about the Bible. Yeah, and thinking right thoughts about God, which are good things. I mean, having an orthodox sense about God—we say orthodoxy is the most healing. So you can usually tell if it's orthodox if it really does bring about long-term healing and godliness and integration. But our discipleship is often limited to ideas about God and changing your ideas, and then certain behaviors. So we would say that's your strength. You know, it might be tithing or serving the poor, or—and those are all, those are really, really important aspects of discipleship. But what's often missed is the fact that we're humans with bodies, and humans that feel.
So we have emotions, we have bodies that now, thanks to van der Kolk, we know our bodies keep stories. So the traumatic things, the good things that have happened to us—from conception, our body carries memories of those things that shape the way we experience the world, the way we think about God, the way we feel about ourselves. Yeah, so we're getting ahead of ourselves, but we're talking about EncounterLife, which is the 12-week follow-up. And I just want to make this announcement that we're actually going to be putting out a workbook and a coaches' edition for a brand new workbook for EncounterLife. That's coming out very soon. It'll be available on Amazon.
And we're just really encouraging—if you've ever been to an Encounter Weekend, we would encourage you to sign up for an EncounterLife cohort. Yeah, you can sign up even if you haven't been to an Encounter Weekend. But yeah, so really, we really look into particularly some tools for encountering God, not just in our minds and not just in the place of our strength, but also in our heart and in our body. What does it look like to bring our body and our heart into the conversation with God? What is it?
We also look at the second commandment a little bit, this idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, and the way in which we kind of end up living in a pretty significant emotional idolatry in a lot of different areas of our lives. We need people around us to be okay. We need to manage threats in our environment. We like to curate our environment so we feel safe. That's what we talk about when we say a culture of emotional fragility. So we really look at some tools for addressing some of those. Yeah, and you have some really great one-liners that come out of EncounterLife. So one of the one-liners is learning how to get in the way of being loved well by God. Oh, yeah.
And that's where people get kind of confused about it. Yeah. That's a great one-liner. And then the other one has to do with where you find your okay. Yeah, where is your okay? Where is your okay? Is it in—okay. Reclaiming your okay in you, in God. Yeah. And when it rockets out of you into the stuff around you, into the gas prices, into your marriage, into your kids—I'm not okay unless they're okay. And we spend time looking at how that kind of idolatry actually disciples us in a way that is opposite of encountering God and bringing the beauty of God into our environment. Yeah. And you know, in the psych realm, that would be called codependency. That's right.
And so we're eventually going to be taking a deep dive into codependency, because I remember preaching on this at one point a few years ago, where I was just preaching—and this maybe was a moment of inspiration—but this phrase, cultural codependency. Yeah. And that is something that is huge right now, is cultural codependency. Like, it's encouraged to be codependent with a culture. Oh, yeah. It's like cultural holiness. Yes. There's a sense of, I am doing the right thing if I'm culturally codependent. Right. So in EncounterLife, you're going to just start untangling a bunch of stuff. And EncounterLife—12 weeks, virtual online cohort, going deep in your—and continuing your healing. Yeah.
And you can go to the group with other people, other believers online. It's very practical. It's a little bit of information and a lot of practice. Yeah, absolutely. So you can go online at encounterculturene.com. And you can look up when the next round of EncounterLife cohorts are beginning. Amy's trained up a team of coaches, and more coaches are going to be onboarded, because this is becoming a pretty popular thing to do. I mean, this is where, you know, folks are longing for rhythms and practices that are going to put them in the way of being loved by God. Yeah. We say if the love of God is four-lane traffic, EncounterLife is teaching you how to run into the road. Yes.
7:51Today's Focus: Inner Healing and Deliverance
Teaching you how to get hit by the love of God. That's a little violent. In the way of being loved. Well, you know, man, that's good. Well, today we're going to—we're going to dive into, roughly, around session four of Amy's teaching in her Kingdom Prayer Ministry Training Manual, and we're gonna look at what is inner healing. Yeah, you know, I think—you know, we look at the Gospels, we look at the New Testament church.
There's a lot of physical healing that happens. And certainly we've seen physical healing—you've been physically healed, in ways, numerous times, that we would consider miraculous. We have prayed for people, and many of our listeners have prayed for people, and they've seen physical healing. But what is this concept of inner healing? And maybe this will just kind of jump-start this, because I was in a group of pastors just a few months ago in New England, and there were about 40 of us there, and it was a fantastic time together. And they asked me, well, what is the ministry
I'm a part of? And so I talked about inner healing and deliverance—which isn't as weird as you'd think among pastors, as what you say when you're on an airplane and someone asks you what you do, and you don't know if they're a believer or not, and you say, I'm an exorcist.
Man, you ever want to get someone's attention and get them keyed in, just tell them that you're an exorcist. I wear a lot of hats, but that definitely is one of them. Yeah. It's pretty fantastic. But I talked about inner healing, and it was—just kind of, it was met with a little bit of suspicion. And what did they say about that? What were the concerns? Well, I said, you know, we do a lot of inner healing, and they didn't—they couldn't really articulate what it was. But you could see, as I kind of preempted, or maybe put language to some of the discomfort they had around inner healing, that they were resonating with what I was saying. And I think that the primary thing is, well, is this New Age?
That's a good one. Okay. Yeah, the other one was, you know, are you guys, you know, some kind of crazy, you know, charismatic ministry? Yeah, you know, it's gonna—yeah, you know, strange things are gonna happen. And then the third one would be, you know, is this—I don't know, how do I say it? What was the third one I mentioned before? I don't know, but can I speak to the first one first? Yeah. There's an image that I think is kind of helpful.
10:28Redeeming or Rejecting Cultural Practices
So in the early church, when people would become Christians, or whole regions would come to receive the Lord, you saw kind of two things happen with spaces like buildings that had been dedicated to wickedness, or objects that had been dedicated to wickedness. You had things like, you know, in Acts—I think 19—when all of those who practiced the dark arts, the magic arts, came and burned their occult paraphernalia and their material.
So there's this sense that these objects need to be destroyed. These can't be integrated into our now practice—this, what we were doing before is antithetical to the gospel. But then you get someplace like—I was in Diocletian's palace a couple of years ago on the Adriatic, and what's really fascinating is, so it was totally pagan, you know, a center of much, much Christian persecution and wickedness, lots of execution and death and pagan symbolism. And, you know, just—it was really dark. But when Christianity became the faith of the Roman Empire, and the wicked emperors that had been persecuting the Christians moved out and the faith of Christianity moved in, instead of tearing that, like the mausoleum for Diocletian, down, the church instead cleansed it—just prayed over it, cleaned it out, and made it into a church. So I think there are two different ways of approaching something like New Age stuff. I think there are some things about New Age worship that just have to go to the fire.
Like, this is not baptizable. This is just practicing wickedness. There are practices, there are ways of approaching knowledge that are demonic in nature. So I want—if you're looking for secret knowledge through entities, through channeling, the third eye, through being one with the universe instead of one with the Creator God—those are stuff that you're not gonna, you're not gonna inhabit those spaces, and you need to get rid of them, other stuff that went along with it, whatever. But there are some practices that are part of actually being human, like meditation. And when we read in the Scriptures, I'm gonna meditate on the Lord day and night.
I'm gonna deeply ruminate on—and I'm gonna be near—or even, there's that practice in New Age of clearing your mind, and you hear people chanting on a syllable and being really still. Transcendental meditation. Yeah, transcendental meditation. Yeah, so this idea that I'm gonna empty myself—well, that's not Christian meditation at all. But being still and knowing that God is God—that is a deeply scriptural reality. That is deeply Christian. Yeah, yeah. And so things like inner healing, I think it's a good conversation to say, is this a practice that has to go? Like, is there something inhabitable about this place?
Is this a practice that is part of—kind of part of being human, but it's been corrupted? Or has had a divergent kind of practice in it that we need to just move out of the house altogether and say, yeah, there's nothing in here for us? Or do we say, this is actually a corruption of a good thing? So my mind was meant to be focused on God. My body—I can actually even learn to be still and be with God. I don't have to fill all this space with my thoughts. Is there general revelation to be had because it's a human thing? Yeah. Our need for silence and solitude and meditation. Right. So the Hebrew word for meditation in the Old Testament literally means to chew. Yeah.
And so meditation is a very—is it an Eastern thing? Yes, because Judaism is an Eastern thing. Christianity is an Eastern thing. So whenever someone says, well, that's Eastern religion—like, you mean Christianity? You know, so this idea that meditation or inner healing is something that is not Christian is just simply not true. But I think that, you know, there are many things that the church has seen as useful and baptized it, because it said actually all truth is God's truth. If it's really truth. If it's really true. That it started in God. Then it started in God. Yeah. So I mean, kind of, you know. But you're not gonna—you're not gonna, like, baptize the prostitution, be like, yes, here.
I'm serious. There's this idea that somehow I'm gonna make actually bad things good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not what we're talking about here. I mean, the Advent wreath. Right. Or the Christmas tree. You know, these are all— Or the word Easter. Or the word Easter. These are all pagan things that the church adopted as they were going into pagandom. Right. And people were coming to Christ and saying— Pieces of what was true, but you didn't know the fullness. You didn't know the fullness. Yes. What this pointed to, all of us. That's right. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. That's right. And so you were longing for the light. Let us tell you about the true light. Right.
That gives light to every man who has come into the world. It's Jesus the Messiah. And so, okay, so that's a long thing. But— Well, theologically, it's the incarnation. It's like the incarnation. Yeah, he speaks our language. God took on a body and spoke an actual audible language. So that we'd understand. That's right, yeah. And so, you know, like, a lot of people might be unfamiliar with, or they're maybe, you know, don't know how—you know, is the Enneagram satanic? 'Cause it kind of, you know, looks like a pentagram. I didn't even want to go there. Well, we don't really want to go there, but, you know, can it be—is the Enneagram a profitable thing in Christian spirituality?
Are there tools that can be helpful that can be mined from those spaces? Can it also be used in ways that are really antithetical to Christianity? Absolutely. But if you're filled with the Holy Spirit and you believe the Scriptures and you're rooted in the gospel, these things can actually be helpful. If it helps in that—I mean, was it St. Augustine that said, "Know thyself that you might know God"? Yes. Yeah. Learning what makes you tick and being a student of your own responses and reactions and longings and desires in the world and things like that.
If there are tools that kind of help us understand so that we can bring that understanding into the presence of God for healing, or if we can commune with him in new ways in those places, those are helpful tools. Yeah. Great. So what is inner healing? Well, some people might say, I'm afraid of it, I'm triggered by it because of the New Age thing. The other thing as well is, is it just kind of kooky charismatic stuff? Yeah. Or is it just a product of contemporary psychology? Right. Yeah. And then how do you respond to that?
When I just sort of mentioned those things to this pastor—and this is like a gospel-centered pastor, like really loves Jesus, loves the gospel—you could see him becoming more at ease, because I was mentioning the things that might be a turn-off. Yeah. But then we're going to get to the scriptural foundations for inner healing in just a minute. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, you've got a brain. I actually love science. So I think that at the end of the day, exploring the ways in which God created us is the ultimate function of science. So finding more out about God and what he's like and how magnificent what he's done is.
And then finding—so as a kind of downstream of that—exploring how our minds and our bodies carry emotions, or how your neural pathways are formed and how they're destroyed or how they're healed, I actually think that that should lead us toward a narrative of encounter with God and healing and wonder, rather than, oh, this is all just brain matter. Like, it turns out you're all just a—what is it?—a meat suit? That's gross. Yeah. You're just a combination of your firing neurons and your hormones and the enzymes that are triggering different reactions in your body. I actually think it's exciting and fascinating to find out.
And what's really interesting to me is, I think, really well-done science—I wonder sometimes if scientists who don't know the Lord even know how much they point toward God. The new studies in epigenetics that are coming out come to mind, this idea that trauma can be coded in your RNA and passed down through the generations, so that your grandfather could have experienced wartime trauma, and there are pieces of that that continue to live in your body even now. And for God to have said, this is going to track to the third and fourth generation—like, sin and humanity is going to not just matter to the person that did it, it's actually going to track down the generations.
And God provides the hopefulness in a statement like, no longer will it be said in Israel, the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. So there's this hopeful reality in that, but science is backing up what God had been saying all along. Right. Yeah. And there is healing. It's promised in the Scriptures. —And we say that. —And I would say also that this idea of inner healing—you're talking about the brain, you're talking about body, trauma, brain, all this stuff— —Yeah, emotions, chemistry, neuro pathways. —I actually think that denying that is actually a form of Gnosticism, which is an ancient church heresy. —I knew I loved you.
20:28Confronting Gnosticism: The Body Matters
Talk to me more about Gnosticism. —Well, it's this idea that the body doesn't matter. —Yeah. —That your neurons, your emotions, your RNA, the trauma that might be lodged in your body from an experience that you've had, PTSD—all these things, that, you know, oftentimes we want to spiritualize these things in the church and say, well, you know, if you just believed the Scripture more, or if you just prayed more, or if you had more charismatic experiences and more experiences of the Spirit, then you would be, you know—it wouldn't matter. —Yeah, I can be removed from somehow all of my negative— —Right. —your memories, your—all those things.
And those are deeply ingrained in our bodies. —Yeah. —And our memories are in our brain. We are, you know, a unity. We're not just spirit. We're not just spirit people who have a body for a little while. —Yeah, but it's tempting, right? —But it's tempting to believe that. —Because my faith is, in some ways, an intangible reality, right? I choose and I think and I believe and I act, and that is the embodiment of my faith—like, it's not really faith until I'm acting, right? But there is a sense in which things of the spirit are invisible.
God is a spirit, and, you know, the second member of the Trinity has a body forever, but God the Father and God the Holy Spirit are spirit. —Right. —So there is an intangible sort of sense about our faith, and it is tempting to think that the things that are really of God are the intangibles. —Right. —Like, the stuff that really matters to my Christianity is the sort of intangible stuff, and if it's in the realm of the intangible, well then I should be able to always just address it by a factoid. —Right.
And it's more spiritual. —And, right, it's intangible. —If it's intangible, it's more quote-unquote spiritual. —Right. But the idea that your brain is a clearinghouse of memories and experiences and stories, and that God wrote into your brain and body the need to be—so that God, who is Spirit, would be seen in the places of those exiled places, those places of trauma, by another person who then ministers in the power of the Holy Spirit to you in those deep, dark places. Like, that's what I'm doing. —Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that the church will go a step further historically and say, it's not more spiritual to not need your body.
It's not more spiritual to not need other people. —The church had its best— —Right. —There are some moments. —No, that's true. —But I think that, you know, that's why God said it is not good that Adam is alone. —Yeah. —And so he created Eve. —That's why the resurrection. —That's why the resurrection—because we're going to be raised. Our bodies are going to be—right. —Right. Death doesn't get the last say over your body. —That's right. Yeah.
So there is this gnostic tendency in the church to be like, well, we just need to have faith in what God says spiritually and mentally, and eventually it will all kind of— —The depression will clear out. —The anxiety will clear out. —The OCD will go away, and the traumatic memories and the PTSD will all just dissolve. —Right. —And the Lord— Can I just say, the Lord is so kind. —And sometimes that has— —He heals in so many ways. —In so many ways. —Yeah. —But the idea of having inner healing as a tool that we utilize in the body of Christ is that it's a tool. —Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So let's look at some of the scripture around inner healing.
24:56Strongholds and the Weapons We Wage
So Paul—St. Paul—in 2 Corinthians— Oh, that Paul? —Yeah, St. Paul. Not just any Paul. St. Paul. In 2 Corinthians 10, he talks about the weapons that we wage war with, and he says, you know, we're not waging war against flesh and blood. Yeah, and—well, we walk in the flesh, we're not waging war according to the flesh. He says, the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. And then he says, you know, we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. So we destroy arguments—but how do we destroy them?
Well, it's with the divine power to destroy these strongholds, these arguments. And the divine power is the very knowledge of God. Yeah. So what are these strongholds, and how do you tear them down? Yeah. So negative experiences that are left unhealed form how we experience and understand God and ourselves and the created world. And we talk about this in Encounter Weekends. Yeah. So it forms a lens through which we see God. Tozer said, the most important thing about you is what comes to mind when you think of God. And those negative unhealed experiences—so trauma, deprivation, sin, demonic affliction—those form our take on the world.
Like, when I look out across my relationships and my—have you ever had a conversation with somebody where maybe you witnessed a conversation between two people, and then one of them was telling you about the conversation later, and they describe the conversation way differently than you heard it? Have you ever had that happen? That, you know, maybe they interpreted inflection, tone of voice really differently, and motive really differently. Yeah, I would say we know a lot about that. Well, you've been married for a while. It's very possible.
But the reason we do that—I mean, it's complicated, but one of the reasons we do that is because we have preconceived ideas based on experience, and that can be based on transferred experience. So maybe way back in my past, I had an experience with someone named Justin. So now every time I talk to someone named Justin, I transfer those bad feelings onto this next person named Justin. That's kind of a weird, exaggerated example. But we do that with our parents and authority figures and trauma and all sorts of different things like that. So we're just going with that.
Well, I mean, just yesterday, I was talking to someone—there, they were at our table, and I was like, wow, this person reminds me a bit of someone who, like, you know, totally betrayed me. And it was really hard. And so it made me—I have to fight not trusting this person. Hey, listeners, are you ready to become fully alive? Life can feel overwhelming, and many of us struggle to feel fully alive. Perhaps you feel stuck in your marriage or career. You might be struggling with anxiety or depression, or you really want to take your relationship with God to the next level. The good news is that you don't have to go through it alone.
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So at the end of the day, something deep in us knows God is the most powerful and has the most ability to rescue us. And in places where we don't feel like we've been rescued and haven't had an experience of the rescue of God, the narrative continues to be transferred onto him. So, I had this bad experience, therefore, deep, deep, deep down, God doesn't really care. Deep, deep, deep down, God didn't see. It didn't matter. And so that forms a stronghold. It forms a stronghold. That's right. Now, a stronghold is—it's not a term that we necessarily use in the contemporary world. It was a medieval and pre-medieval term, like going way back. I mean, I don't think it was used after—I don't even know.
I should look that up before I say it on the podcast. But anyway—I, anyway, associated with the medieval and pre-medieval concept of, you know, if you had stuff that you wanted to protect from an invading force. If you're like, these are the things that someone else is going to take. So, like, the women and the children, the treasure, the animals, our lives, our livestock, the stuff that we want to protect. Okay, don't branch into the realm of healing yet. So this is practical. So if I've got a practical stronghold and there's an invading army, I'm going to put the stuff that I want to keep safe inside a thickly buried structure.
So inside a keep, inside a, you know, walled-in place that I can then guard more easily against attack. So we do—we form strongholds around stuff we want to protect. So if I don't feel like I've been protected by God, now it's up to me. Now I need to protect my heart from injury. Now I need to protect my finances from ruin. Now I need to protect my kids from the spirit of the age. Now I'm like, it's all on me to protect these things. So those strongholds are this idea that I need to protect. And we'll talk next week about the guardians of those strongholds.
We'll talk about deliverance ministry and how the enemy wants to keep those strongholds in place, because then he can continue to call the shots. He can continue to keep that—those things you're keeping safe. That's like—kind of, now the healing light of God can't get in, and you're not really going to grow in those areas because they're on lockdown. So the enemy keeps kind of exercising his own authority. So what Paul is saying here is that through the ministry of God—so we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. So what is God really like? How does he feel about you?
What did he show about himself and accomplish in the death of his Son, Jesus? So what we're doing is, we are applying the love of God and the knowledge of God to those strongholds. And we're actually saying, you don't have to keep yourself safe in these areas anymore. God wants to come in and heal them. Right. He wants to come in and be the one that heals what's behind those walls. Right. And then is the one that actually, long-term and in the most important ways, keeps you safe. Yeah. No, that's—and that's true freedom.
And that's what—and then, you know, sort of the other side of the healing beyond is this idea in Romans, in Romans 12, when Paul says, don't be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Yeah. So that by testing, you may discern what the will of God is—what is good and acceptable and perfect. Like, there's, you know, this—the vision that God wants to give us of how he feels about us, and what our life means to him. You know, what is—you know, our identity in him, our mission with him. That all comes by the renewal of the mind, and the renewal of the mind is letting him love us in the places of those strongholds. And some of them do have guardians.
Some of those strongholds do. Like, we need deliverance from demonic interference. We're going to talk about that too. Like, well, can Christians have demons? Oh, that's a great thing to talk about. Some people tune in because that's another—that's another thing that, you know, many good Bible-believing, you know, leaders are like, well, no, that can't be. Everyone's super mystified about how there's just repeated scandals and drama and pain. Right. And the church statistically looks so much like the world. Yes. Yeah. Unfortunately. So yeah.
So I think that, you know, being able to talk intelligently about inner healing as it relates to even, you know, mental health and the things that are going on internally—things we've believed, the experiences that we've had that have colored our views of God, that have formed strongholds so that we're self-protected. Yeah. And stop growing in those areas because they're on lockdown. Because they're on lockdown. Absolutely. Where, you know, if someone dares, like, touch that just a little bit, it's like touching a pustulent wound. I know it's kind of gross, but it's true. It's like, man, that is so on fire right now.
And I'm going to now react toward you, instead of respond to you relationally and in connection, because I'm so self-protected and guarded, and I can't even take it. Right. You know, those are the strongholds that are up—those are our self-protection. And God comes to love us in those places of self-protection. And he uses the priesthood of all believers to do that. Yeah. Amen. So what is inner healing? What is inner healing?
We are encountering the love of God in areas of trauma and past wounding that continue to live on in us through negative emotions, through mental illness, through pain that we continue to experience internally—and the stuff of the stronghold, like what's behind the stronghold that the love of God wants to reach. And the tools of it are very similar to what we talked about last week. So the baseline tool actually still is the four R's. Yeah. You want to do a refresher? I feel like I did the four R's. Oh, yeah, the four R's. So repent, renounce, release, and receive. So repenting is basically agreeing with God and aligning your will with God's will. Yeah.
You're agreeing with God that this belief or this way of responding or reacting is sin. Yeah. And then you renounce it, meaning you take it off. You choose to hand it to Jesus. Right. You don't say, Lord, take this away from me. You say, Lord, I give this to you—because he will never co-opt your agency. That's right. You must give it to him. And then, because it's the enemy who's the thief—that's right—God comes through the gate of your yes. And then you release, meaning you release them to the cross of Jesus. You release them to his broken body on the cross. Right. You're not sending it out into the universe. You're not just leaving it to pick up later.
You're actually handing the stuff. And this—this again, and right, right here, this little bit is the big difference between just flat-out four R's—what do I do with sin—and inner healing. When you're—the power of the imagination to picture these things happening is what's happening in this releasing place in inner healing. Yeah. And then receiving is receiving from God in the place of that woundedness—receiving connection, receiving healing, receiving forgiveness, receiving, you know, the things that we need from him, the filling of the Holy Spirit. Yeah. That's good. So let's talk about imagination. Well, yeah, because I think this is a big part of inner healing.
This is a huge part. One of the major ways that we commune with God in the place of healing. One of the big tools. And this is the tool that goes alongside the four R's when we're dealing with inner healing. Right. And one of the things that we've observed in ministry for the last 15 to 20 years, and in ourselves too, is the head-heart connection—that we believe something is true in our minds, but we don't believe it or experience it in our inner being, as Paul—Paul calls it our inner being in Ephesians chapter three. And so inner healing is to heal the inner being. Yeah. And so let's talk a little bit about that head-heart connection, because that is a major piece. Okay.
37:08Reconnecting the Head and the Heart
So we'll put a pin in imagination prayer, although imaging prayer is key in this. Yeah. I can just—straight-up, a prayer that I like to pray when I sense that there's a disconnect. When I'm talking to somebody, they're sharing their experience, or where the pain is—there's a prayer that I love to pray. And that is asking the Lord to heal or to create a new connection between the heart and the head. Sometimes there isn't one at all.
Like, I just—there are those of us who just—we can think all day long, and our hearts are so far out of the conversation, whether it's because we never learned to bring them to the table, which—because of trauma or pain or unbelief or demonic stuff. For whatever reason, many of us—I think all of us, probably—this is a great prayer, and you can pray it right now, even as we are, even as we're talking. You say, Lord, I want to experience on the inside the things that I know are true. And I'm just asking you to bring—to create or heal, if there are damaged connections, to unblock them, to heal them.
And if there are no connections, to create a fresh one, miraculously, God, between head and heart, so that the two can commune with one another—so that I can feel and think in ways that are godly. Right. So we love to ask the questions when we're ministering to someone, or even to ourselves: What is my brain thinking about this thing? Yeah. And then, what is my heart feeling or saying? And are those two things the same? Yeah, no. And what's really interesting is, most people that I minister to really usually will give you their thoughts first. Like, so, you know, how do you feel about this? Well, I think it's this, this, this, and this—and actually they're telling you what they think.
Do you have, like, an anecdote? Do you have a story? Of course—you know, we're going to use aliases—but I think it's important. Maybe a story sticks. Ah—and this can be edited out. So you're wanting a story. Okay. Mine—but I do think it would be important.
Yeah, I was praying for somebody a little while back who had experienced just a profound amount of abuse at the hands of a parent—just a, just a ton of abuse. And, you know, they were in their mid to late middle age, and, you know, had kids of their own who they loved very much, but they were completely incapable of being angry. They'd never felt angry about what had happened to them. They'd gotten saved when they were maybe a late teenager, and learned a lot—like, a lot about what God was like through the Scriptures. But when I asked, you know, how do you feel about what happened back with, you know, with that parent, their response was, I mean, yeah, it happened. That happened.
And they weren't responding from a place of, yeah, I've healed from that. They were responding from a place of, I've never really been able to, as an adult, emotionally process what happened back there. And the natural response, the God-given human response to abuse is anger. And they'd never been able to, as an adult, feel angry about what happened. And the reasons for that are complicated. But it became very evident that they could give the right answers—yeah, God loves them, I've forgiven them, da-da-da-da-da-da—but that their heart was still, like, had never experienced the healing of God from those memories. That their body was still riddled with pain.
They were still just really emotionally fragile, really incapable of being in a place of conflict or anger from other people. Like, really, really—the manifest, their experience in the world was one that was deeply unhealed. So, like you were saying before, like, anytime anyone touches that, it's super, super hot. And they experienced that with other people's anger, because their own anger was completely malformed. So what was their reaction to other people's anger? An intense aversion or explosion? Okay. So, I've got to get out of the room right now at any cost, or I've got to, like, way overreact and shut this down as fast as I can. Yeah.
Which is normal—I mean, you see that a lot, and probably most of us that are listening to this can relate on some level, because most of us don't love conflict. It's not always because we've had traumatic incidents in our lives. So as we were talking about, I realized there's a real disconnect between the language of the head, which was very much Christian—like, yes, this is—your head believes the right things about God—but their heart had never experienced a connection with their head. So there's, like, stuff trapped in their heart that their head couldn't process, that they couldn't feel it. They're distant from it.
And there's a stronghold around that place that basically—I don't, you know—maybe said, if I do get angry, the world's going to fall apart. There's too much here. There's too much. Or, if I let someone be angry, there's going to be abuse of some kind. Yeah, perhaps, perhaps. And so what we did first—and this is wild—is prayed for a connection between head and heart. And as we sat there in prayer, both of us—I mean, I had a—I mean, even in my own body, the Lord was showing me what was happening. Like, I could feel it in my own body as we were praying, which was really helpful and orienting.
And again, this is—I'm changing a lot of details even as I'm telling the story, to try to make it so, you know—but we pray for this kind of thing a lot. So this could actually be one of about 400 different incidents that have happened in real time. But at the end of this particular healing—like, as we were praying for a connection—the moment that I felt, I felt as I was praying, the sort of—yeah, a connection being formed, like growing up from the heart, up through the neck, into the head. And the second that I felt it touch their brain, they began to weep and feel rage for the first time. Wow. Like, were able to be really, really angry about what had happened.
Now, there's a lot of back stuff that needed time to get out—that was not the end, the end. That was just the beginning. Right. So the Christian head can say, I believe in God, God is good, what this person did wasn't okay, but I need to forgive them. Yeah. So—in that—that will produce—so, you know, what if they don't feel anger? What if that never comes to pass? Yeah, I—so we love to—so for this individual, I mean, she really needed to—
Like, experience—more than one—more than one thing was stuck in there, like—the image that we love to use is one of, like, ice. Like, if you were to hold a big block of ice on the top of your hand, and that represents—you know, that ice has had time to build over the years. You've been living in the freezer. You've been living in the freezer, and every time someone opens the freezer door, a little bit more moisture gets in. You've had your freezer—need—our freezer needs to be defrosted. That's why I'm thinking about this.
It needs to be defrosted. Every time the moisture gets in, the ice gets a little bit deeper, and by the time you come to healing prayer, there is, like, a two-foot block of ice on top of your hand. So when you step out of the freezer into the light and healing love of God, and then somebody else—let's just imagine them putting their hand on top of that block of ice—that ice starts to melt right away. Healing is happening; the distance between, like, that—that block of ice is thawing. But you as an individual may not really feel healed until the whole block of ice is gone and that other person's hand can touch your hand. Mmm. So if there's a long story of trauma and abuse, it may be a journey of healing and restoration. And that's just being human, right?
It's not a hopeless statement. That's part of—it's what's classically called sanctification. Right. So we're all experiencing that in different areas of our lives. So we're talking about this head-heart connection. So we were just talking about the unpleasant emotion of anger. It is—is a part of the heart—you being connected to your heart. Yeah. And that was healing. That was—it wasn't like, oh my gosh, you know, God—you know, suddenly I have this new manifest experience of the Trinity. It was actually a healing of saying, now my body is able to digest and process this pain in the light and love of Jesus. Yeah. So I'm becoming a more whole person. Yeah. My heart is being welcomed to the table.
46:28The Sanctified Imagination in Prayer
I want to talk a little bit about imagining prayer as well. Yeah, I think that's important. We'll close with this, because I think this is important for us to touch on. Yeah, let's talk about the imagination. Yeah, in prayer. Yeah. And I think—I mean, when you think about imagination—I feel like I grew up in a really, you know—I love, I love so much about, and I'm so thankful for, the kinds of churches that I experienced growing up. But there wasn't a vision for the imagination. It was like, mostly your imagination was dangerous. Yeah, 'cause it's not real.
It's not real. So if you imagine it, it's not a real thing, and the only thing that it's for is probably, like, lust. Fantasy. Fantasy—like, those things are bad, and you need to repent of it. But there wasn't an equivalent or greater good that your brain was for, that your imagination was for—like, it could only really be used for deception and for sin. Yeah, I don't know if that was—anything like your—absolutely, absolutely—like, you need to go, you need to separate yourself from your fantasy world as much as possible. Right. And then you're left with this weird reality that God gave you the ability to picture things in your mind that you haven't experienced. Right. And if you do picture them in your mind, and you ruminate on them at all—
It's childish. Yeah, it's imagination. It's not real. It's not anything else. It's so interesting, because bad thoughts, like ruminating—I love that word that you use—ruminating on revenge, ruminating on lust, ruminating on all those things—actually, we know it corrupts our hearts. Yeah. What are the—the things I would say to—oh my gosh, right? If I only had—up late at night, thinking of the best way I could have responded to that—I'm gonna devastate them the next time, every time—those kinds of things. Or other ways that your brain is used, that you ruminate on those—if only I had a little bit more money—I'm going to scheme and scheme and scheme, and my whole energy is going to be taken up because I'm jealous or I'm fearful, and all of your mental energy is taken up sort of imagining what life would be like if you did have a ton of money, and what you'd do differently, and how people would see you differently, and kind of—
Yeah. So it's all just toxic imagination. Right. And someone like C.S. Lewis talks about the sanctified imagination—the imagination being sanctified, being made holy, and how that's important. And St. John of the Cross, who is a Christian mystic in the 16th century, said the Christian imagination plays a great role in the spiritual development of the soul. And then you've got G.K. Chesterton, who says there's something mysterious, and perhaps more than moral, about the power and call of imagination. But whether we like it or not, we use our imagination all the time. It is a faculty of being human. It is just—and God has an imagination. He thought creation up. Yeah. He thought you up. Yeah.
Before he created you. And so we have the capacity to imagine good or evil. We have the capacity to imagine in a way that sows into our flesh, or sows into the Spirit and enables us to grow into the likeness of Jesus. Yeah. And I don't think it's just, like, a this-or-that in equal measure. Like, the bad stuff is over here, and it's this much bad, and the good stuff is the same amount good. Right. And then we choose to think and imagine in ways that agree with what God says is true. And I'll give you an example of that in a second. But I think the power that God provides in those places is infinitely greater than the destructive power of bad thinking. Right.
So give us an example of the sanctified imagination, or imaging prayer, if you will. Yeah. One of the exercises that we love to do—and this is just an easy one—is when you identify names that you've adopted, that you wear, that you're like, yeah, I think I'm stupid, or my dad called me, you know, something bad. Yeah. Pick whatever it is. Or I feel unworthy, or I don't have value. Or I'm defined by the bad things I did—so I am an addict, I am a, you know, bad word for such, you know, sexual promiscuity—I'm like, I am a whatever. I'm a, you know—I am those things. That's just how I see myself.
So in imaging prayer, what we would do out loud is invite somebody to close their eyes and picture Jesus. And oftentimes picturing Jesus at the cross, when we need justice, that is a very helpful image, because the cross is where justice takes place. So we close our—I would invite them to close their eyes, and then just kind of, in their imagination, look down at their shirt and see those name tags that are there. So the name tag of liar, the name tag of, you know, slut, the name tag of cheater, or stupid, or fat, or whatever it is that you're wearing on your shirt.
So you see them, and we invite them to then even use their own hand—like, not just in their imagination, but to really make the gesture, if they feel comfortable doing it. So to see those names, and then to choose to peel those name tags off, and reach your hand up and place those name tags on the chest of Jesus on the cross, and then let go. And even saying those things out loud—you can say the four R's while you do it. Like, I renounce the name blah, blah, blah. I forgive the person who called me that, and I release them to you, Jesus. And I take this name off, and I choose to give it to you instead. You bore the weight and the injury that this name has caused me.
And in you, this isn't true about me anymore, but I'm giving it to you. So that would be an example of imagination prayer. Another one is, maybe you can imagine yourself wearing a dirty robe—times we just feel so dirty, or even underdressed. Like, I'm cold, I'm alone—and allowing Jesus to put his robe on you. To see the exchange taking place. Another way that we use imaging prayer is actually to go back and revisit scenes that were traumatic. And both in prayer for reintegration with that person—if they've been alienated from the person that they were when those things happened—just to invite them to, like, hey, how do you feel about that? That 10-year-old version of yourself.
I hate that person, they ruined my whole life. I feel a lot of compassion toward them. And then welcome the power of the Holy Spirit to bring reconciliation. So if there's forgiveness that needs to happen. And then the other thing that I love to do in traumatic spaces is ask if Jesus will come into that memory and receive the trauma that's taking place. So, can Jesus take your place here? Can he receive into his own body, into his own broken side, into his hands and his feet, the cost of what happened? Would you let him carry that for you? And then imagining it, and allowing that to happen. Yeah, I've seen that be incredibly powerful.
I mean, I've received that kind of prayer, and it's been incredibly powerful. I mean, just thinking about it right now makes me kind of emotional, because at that point, the reality of the cross and of Jesus's substitution— Yeah, yeah. —becomes less of a doctrine that I mentally assent to, and an encounter with the Holy—and an encounter with the one who loves me best. And who is all up in my stuff. And right where it hurts. Right where it matters at all. He's not afraid of it. He doesn't despise me for it. I didn't just take one for the team. That's right. Yeah, yeah. That he is really concerned about it. And so that's how the head-to-heart jump is made. Yeah, yeah.
And that's why imaging prayer is so useful in healing prayer. Well, we're gonna continue on this topic, but we're gonna dive in next week a bit about the guardians, and what does it look like for those strongholds to have demonic influence, even for believers. And we're gonna dive in, like, you know—well, some of the questions—well, can believers be possessed? You know, can they be oppressed? Well, they can be oppressed, but not possessed. And, you know, so we're gonna look at that, 'cause that seems to be a hot-button issue in a lot of groups that we come alongside of. And I think we have a really great approach, if I should say so myself.
55:52Closing Encouragement and What's Ahead
But before I leave—you have to believe in what you do. For saying, yeah, that's true. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe it. There's a great book that I have done with my son. It's called Imaginative Prayer: A Year-Long Guide for Your Child's Spiritual Formation. And it's written by Jared Patrick Boyd, who's a spiritual director and a pastor in the Vineyard. And it basically just takes, like, a catechism—like, a, you know, Bible truth, doctrine, sort of question-and-answer thing—and then it gives you things to read to your children, along with, like, breath prayer, and helps them imagine the truth of the Scripture, or put themselves in the scene in the gospel.
Yeah, so to practice using their holy imagination. To practice using the holy imagination and encounter Jesus in their imaginations, 'cause kids have vibrant imaginations. Yeah. I did. And I wish I had something like this. So, Imaginative Prayer by Jared Patrick Boyd—put it down in the chat. In the chat. In the chat, in the notes. But thanks for joining us. We really look forward to speaking with you again. If you are interested in EncounterLife, go to our website, encounterculturene.com, sign up for our next round of EncounterLife. There you'll also find our Encounter Weekends and our EncounterEquips. And we are going to have EncounterEquip live and virtual within the next few months.
And we're excited to let you in on that and announce it. It's gonna be a big celebration, because then churches and groups can do it wherever you are, from the comfort of your own living room with other people, or in larger group settings, and in church settings. It's gonna be pretty momentous for us. So until next time, God bless you. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Between Heaven and Earth. We hope that you are stirred to curiosity and courage as we explored bringing Heaven and Earth together right where you are. Remember, you're not alone on this journey.
We're here to support you in understanding what the Spirit of God is doing in your life and responding in obedience to his good leadership. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and questions with us on our Facebook page or by email, podcast@encounterculturene.com. Your support helps us reach more people who are eager to join Jesus in his great project of restoration. Also, check out our website, encounterculturene.com, for upcoming events and equipping opportunities for you and your church. Until next time, may you find joy living in between Heaven and Earth, and the courage to bring them together wherever you go.