Daily Devotional - A Wounded Heart

For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded and stricken within me.
—Psalm 109:22

Is it wrong to have a wounded heart? No, a wounded heart is not wrong, but you need to get it healed and go on. In Old Testament days, if a priest had a wound or a bleeding sore, he could not minister. I think today we have a lot of wounded healers. By that I mean that there are a lot of people in the body of Christ today who are trying to minister to other people but who themselves still have unhealed wounds from the past. These people are still bleeding and hurting themselves.

Am I saying that such people cannot minister? No, but I am saying that they need to get healed. Jesus said that the blind cannot lead the blind; because if they do, they will both fall into a ditch. There is a message in that statement. What is the use of my trying to minister victory to others if I have no victory in my own life? How can I minister emotional healing to others if I still have unresolved emotional problems from my past?

In order to minister properly, we need to go to God and let Him heal us first. I think we need to wake up and realize that God is not looking for wounded healers. He wants people with wounds that He can heal who will then go and bring healing to others. God loves to use people who have been hurt and wounded because nobody can minister to someone else better than one who has had the same problem or been in the same situation as that person.

I am not saying that we have to have everybody's problem in order to minister to them. My point is that if we are still bleeding and hurting from our own wounds, we are not going to be able to come against other people's problems with the same kind of aggressive faith we would have if we had already worked through that problem ourselves.

The bottom line is that we need to let God heal us so He can use us to bring healing to other people.