“I have refined you, but not as silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.“
Isaiah 48:10
“Once we have come through the ‘furnace of humiliation,’ desperately, fearfully clinging to Christ for all He is worth, then we are fully equipped to march into somebody else’s furnace.”
‘Blessed with Bipolar”
Becoming a real and authentic person starts with basic responses that we’ve made in the presence of Jesus. Amazingly, this simple faith becomes the prerequisite, granting us the right to enter. However, without faith in those promises, you won’t find anything real or true.
You will not be able to handle the Kingdom of God unless you’re walking out a life of brokenness and humility.
I believe that only the heat of the furnace can teach us these things.
There are furnace promises, but they, without truly understanding them will walk around in unreality. Often ‘they get religion.’ These are those who land on “the rocky soil.” They become ‘quasi-disciples’ who will do and say things that they really don’t really understand.
But furnace people have the connection to that which is honest and true. They rarely enter into anything false or manipulative. Their own hearts are transformed by the fire, and only then are qualified to minister God’s grace. Only furnace people can enter in. You will know them by their scars.
The Church has a tremendous need for those who have withstood the furnace of humiliation.
After we endure its ugliness and its great evil, we’ll discover that we’re in an altogether different place than when we first started. The Church is waiting for those who went in and then come out on the other side.
Furnace people have the ability to function gracefully at this particular stage.
Furnace people are brought to a place where they can minister the grace of God into desperate situations. We must convince ourselves, that furnace people have a gift. They have been through the worst. They may be battered and bruised. But they still stand.
Our brothers and sisters have carried the Word with wisdom and grace. They come to us, through the fire. But will we receive them?
My hope is that you would personally grasp what God has worked in you. That really is your truest calling. The things good or bad, that have happened to you are part of how you’ll understand grace. He waits for you to respond. Will you come to Him, through the grace you find in the flames?
The most gracious people you’ll ever meet are those who endured God’s furnace.
“The furnace of affliction is a good place for you, Christian; it benefits you; it helps you to become more like Christ, and it is fitting you for heaven.”
A terrific study is finding the people who fell at Jesus’ feet. Tucked in the Gospels you’ll find stories of those who despair. You’ll also see them come to Jesus in brokenness and humility, without any other recourse. I call these the feet-finders.
They came to Jesus because they had no hope otherwise. They were people who were hopeless and wretched, they had long ago run out of options. They came to Jesus, falling down in front of Him. They were all feet-finders.
They were men and women who were truly desperate.
“Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
John 11:32
One of the classic scenes in the Gospels is when Mary meets Jesus after her brother’s death. She doesn’t understand Jesus’ delay, Lazarus has been very ill and Jesus could have healed him. She is grieving and confused. But she only has one posture and one place in her heart to be– at the feet!
There are some common characteristics that feet-finders have:
A great need that can’t be met without His touch
To understand one’s true condition–humility, brokenness
To beg for a healing, for self or family
To honor Jesus as the Messiah
To be more receptive to His teaching, to understand Him
To become a witness to others (although it does seem secondary)
The following 3 verses are just a small selection of those who fell at Jesus feet.
“And great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and they put them at his feet, and he healed them.”
Matthew 15:30
“But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.“
Mark 7:25
“Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”
Luke 8:35
But there are several other instances where people came to sit at Jesus’ feet:
Mark 5:22-23, Jairus, a leader in the local synagogue
Luke 7:37-38, a sorrowing mother for her daughter
Luke 8:41, also Jairus
Luke 10:39, Mary, when Jesus was teaching
John 11:32, Mary, meeting Jesus entering Bethany
John 12:3, Mary, with her perfume
Revelation 1:17, John to express what he was seeing (also 19:10)
In every case we find people consciously coming and kneeling at the feet of the Lord Jesus. It was a deliberate action that came from their hearts. Each had a terrible need, and each was without hope.
It’s the end of religion if you’re a feet-finder. No more facades, no more treadmills. Instead your heart forever changes.
Formality and religious politeness are jettisoned. Brokenness and true humility takes their place. A foot-finder is no longer operating on spiritual niceties. Religion is comfortable, noble, and respectable, but it cannot heal or change people deeply.
Feet-finders know that they need Jesus desperately and will go to any length just to be touched by Him. They defy what is conventional and proper. They are not what we call respectable. You can find them at the feet of Jesus. They are feet-finders. Foot-finders weep, kneel, beg, shout. Too many tears and maybe some snot.
Hardly decent to religious people.
Are you really that desperate yet? Have you seen your need, and do you realize how lost you would be without His healing touch?
Often when I do pray, I sometimes think of the woman who was unclean. She speaks to me about approaching Jesus. I see myself in a crushing crowd of people, and I’m reaching out just to touch the hem of His robe. I know only Jesus can stop my own uncleanness. (Matthew 9.)
I’m convinced only Jesus can make me clean and whole.
I’ve tried to be holy and acceptable to Him. But I felt like a juggler, trying to keep my balls in the air all at the same time, and I could never pull it off. So I tried again and again.I was the unofficial master of religious effort.
But I found my rightful place at His feet. It’s where I belong. I love Him.
“Snuggle in God’s arms. When you are hurting, when you feel lonely, left out. let Him cradle you, comfort you, reassure you of His all-sufficient power and love.”
This should give direction and dialogue on the issues faced by every church member. It is a great opportunity we have been given— to minister to every person in the Body of Christ. —Bryan
by Ken Camp, Associated Baptist Press —
Living with depression — or any other form of mental illness — is like viewing life “through a glass darkly,” according to Jessy Grondin, a student in Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School. “It distorts how you see things.”
Like one in four Americans, (25%), wrestles significantly with a mental illness.
Depression is one of the most common types of mental illness, along with bipolar disorder, another mood-altering malady. Other forms of mental illness include schizophrenia and disorders related to anxiety, eating, substance abuse and attention deficit/hyperactivity.
Like many Americans with mental illness, Grondin and her family looked to the church for help. And she found the response generally less-than-helpful. “When I was in the ninth grade and hospitalized for depression, only a couple of people even visited me, and that was kind of awkward. I guess they didn’t know what to say,” said Grondin, who grew up in a Southern Baptist church in Alabama.
Generally, most Christians she knew dealt with her mood disorder by ignoring it, she said. “It was just nonexistent, like it never happened,” she said. “They never acknowledged it.” When she was an adolescent, many church members just thought of her as a troublemaker, not a person dealing with an illness, she recalled.
Mental Illness that affects believers must be accepted by the Church.
A few who acknowledged her diagnosed mood disorder responded with comments Grondin still finds hurtful. “When dealing with people in the church … some see mental illness as a weakness — a sign you don’t have enough faith,” she said. “They said: ‘It’s a problem of the heart. You need to straighten things out with God.’ They make depression out to be a sin, because you don’t have the joy in your life a Christian is supposed to have.”
A Baylor University study revealed that among Christians who approached their local church for help in response to a personal or family member’s diagnosed mental illness, more than 30 percent were told by a minister that they or their loved one did not really have a mental illness. And 57 percent of the Christians who were told by a minister that they were not mentally ill quit taking their medication.
It’s not a sin to be sick.
That troubles neuroscientist Matthew Stanford. “It’s not a sin to be sick,” he insists. Stanford, professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the doctoral program in psychology at Baylor, acknowledges religion’s longstanding tense relationship with behavioral science. And he believes that conflict destroys lives. “Men and women with diagnosed mental illness are told they need to pray more and turn from their sin. Mental illness is equated with demon possession, weak faith and generational sin,”
Stanford writes in his recently released book, Grace for the Afflicted. “The underlying cause of this stain on the church is a lack of knowledge, both of basic brain function and of scriptural truth.” As an evangelical Christian who attends Antioch Community Church in Waco, Texas, Stanford understands underlying reasons why many Christians view psychology and psychiatry with suspicion. “When it comes to the behavioral sciences, many of the early fathers were no friends of religion. That’s certainly true of Freud and Jung,” he noted in an interview.
Often sin is not the main issue.
Many conservative Christians also believe the behavioral sciences tend to justify sin, he added, pointing particularly to homosexual behavior. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association famously removed homosexuality from its revised edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As a theologically conservative Christian, Stanford stressed that scripture, not the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, constitutes the highest authority.
But that doesn’t mean the Bible is an encyclopedia of knowledge in all areas, and all people benefit from scientific insights into brain chemistry and the interplay of biological and environmental factors that shape personality. Furthermore, while he does not presume to diagnose with certainty cases of mental illness millennia after the fact, Stanford believes biblical figures — Job, King Saul of Israel and King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, among others — demonstrated symptoms of some types of mental illness. “Mental disorders do not discriminate according to faith,” he said.
Regardless of their feelings about some psychological or psychiatric approaches, Christians need to recognize mental illnesses are genuine disorders that originate in faulty biological processes, Stanford insisted. “It’s appropriate for Christians to be careful about approaches to treatment, but they need to understand these are real people dealing with real suffering,” he said. Richard Brake, director of counseling and psychological services for Texas Baptist Child & Family Services, agrees. “The personal connection is important. Church leaders need to be open to the idea that there are some real mental-health issues in their congregation,” Brake said.
Pastors much carefully reach out to the mentally ill.
Ministers often have training in pastoral counseling to help people successfully work through normal grief after a loss, but may lack the expertise to recognize persistent mental-health problems stemming from deeper life issues or biochemical imbalances, he noted. Internet resources are available through national mental-health organizations and associations of Christian mental-health providers. But the best way to learn about available mental health treatment — and to determine whether ministers would be comfortable referring people to them — is through personal contact, Brake and Stanford agreed. “Get to know counselors in the community,” Brake suggested. “Find out how they work, what their belief systems are and how they integrate them into their practices.”
Mental-health providers include school counselors and case managers with state agencies, as well as psychiatrists and psychologists in private practice or associated with secular or faith-related treatment facilities, he noted. Stanford and Brake emphasized the vital importance of making referrals to qualified mental-health professionals, but they also stressed the role of churches in creating a supportive and spiritually nurturing environment for people with mental-health disorders. Mental illness does not illustrate lack of faith, but it does have spiritual effects, they agreed. “Research indicates people with an active faith life who are involved in congregational life get through these problems more smoothly,” Brake said.
You can’t fix the issues, but you can love them.
Churches cannot “fix” people with mental illness, but they can offer support to help them cope. “The church has a tremendous role to play. Research shows the benefits of a religious social support system,” Stanford said. They stressed the importance of creating a climate of unconditional love and acceptance for mentally ill people in church — a need Grondin echoed. “There needs to be an unconditional sense of community and relationships,” she said. She emphasized the importance of establishing relationships that may not be reciprocally satisfying all the time.
People with mental-health issues may not be as responsive or appreciative as some Christians would like them to be, she noted. “Others need to take the initiative and keep the relationship established. People don’t realize how hard it can be (for a person with a mood disorder) to summon the courage just to get out of bed,” Grondin said. Christians who seek to reach out to people with mental illness need to recognize “they are not able to see things clearly, and it’s not their fault,” Grondin added.
Mostly, Christians need to offer acceptance to people with mental illness — even if they don’t fully understand, she insisted. “Just be present. Offer support and love,” Grondin concluded. “You won’t always know what to say. Just speak words of support into a life of serious struggles. That means more than anything.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Camp is managing editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.)
A great book:
“Grace for the Afflicted: A Clinical and Biblical Perspective on Mental Illness” [Paperback] can be found at www.Amazon.com, by Matthew S. Stanford Ph.D
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For more information: National Alliance on Mental Illness (800) 950-6264 Anxiety Disorders Association of America (240) 485-1001 Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance (800) 826-3632 American Association of Christian Counselors (800) 526-8673 Stephen Ministries (314) 428-2600
Broken Believers 