How To Handle Hurt

[00:00:03] Reeding and welcome to this episode of Become A Competent Biblical Counselor, this is Dr. Dave Jones and today's episode is entitled How To Handle Hurt. Every once in a while when I go around from place to place and talk to people about counseling.

[00:00:38] I ask a lot of times if they're operating in the past or individuals who have cases. I ask them to write out some of the problems they're dealing with and to hand these

[00:00:49] into me in the form of a brief synopsis of a case or a difficulty or a problem that they are confronting in counseling. I have one of those that I've brought along today for our broadcast and here's how it goes.

[00:01:05] A Christian woman claims that all of her life, she has been hurt by different people. She says that she just can't take hurt and has made several attempts on her life as an escape from difficult situations.

[00:01:20] She says that she is so sensitive that she tends to reject any counsel that is painful. She avoids intimate relationships for fear of hurt. How can she be helped? There are a lot of factors, of course, to keep in mind in responding to any specific situation.

[00:01:42] Whether people write in with questions or whether in a case like this, where someone summarizes it, whether we have enough of the facts to really deal with the problem adequately, obviously the facts here are highly interpreted by the person who writes the question.

[00:02:01] But that's just for the sake of the discussion today because what it is said, those typify many people that the sooner the question has the right facts and that insofar as we're able to deal with those facts, we're dealing with a real situation.

[00:02:19] So let's look at the question once more. Here's a Christian woman. She is a Christian. That is very important. That's of critical importance in all counseling contexts. If a person is a Christian, you have all the resources of God's Word available.

[00:02:38] All the resources of this spirit of God to enable a person to fulfill the commandments and the requirements of the scriptures. So you're working with an entirely different entity when you're working with a Christian than when you're working with an unbeliever.

[00:02:56] That makes a lot of difference in counseling. As a matter of fact, when you begin to counsel an unbeliever, the most important objective that you must have in mind is winning that person to Jesus Christ if at all possible.

[00:03:11] Only then does the real counseling at any level of depth begin? Why it's a person can't be dealt with in terms of his heart in relationship to God? So this woman's a Christian but now all of her life she's had problems.

[00:03:27] Her problems are expressed in terms of a hurt. She says she's been hurt by people and she says that she can't take hurt. Now we probably can answer this difficulty in terms of the question itself.

[00:03:43] This woman says she can't take hurt even though she's being hurt and has been hurt all of her life. In her response, she has probably accurately put her finger on the real problem. She cannot probably take hurt. That is, she has never learned how to take it.

[00:04:05] God's way. She has instead developed nine Christian patterns for responding to hurt. You see, she avoids intimate friendships for fear of being hurt. She tends to reject any counsel that's painful. She's taken made several attempts on her life to escape from difficult situation.

[00:04:27] In other words, her whole philosophy of life is a non-Christian one. Rather than dealing with problems rather than facing them up squarely, rather than handling them according to biblical principles and God's ways, she has been running from problems

[00:04:44] for fear of being hurt by them or hurt by the people who are involved with them. In one way or another, she tries to avoid the difficulties around her. Well, that's a mistake. The Bible makes it very clear that we can never escape hurt.

[00:05:04] You can't escape it because that's kind of world that we live in. You can't escape it because hurt in a world of sin is everywhere. And so she's going to have to learn how to face life's hurts and life's difficulties.

[00:05:19] And you see, her problem is that she can't take hurt. She says, and the problem is that she's trying to take it. She's trying to be passive in the sight of hurt. In other words, just standing there taking it and somehow or others stiff up or living

[00:05:37] it, that is not a Christian response to the problem of hurt. When someone hurts us, our response has to be active, not passive. Our response is not merely to stand there and take it. Of course we are to do that, but that's not all.

[00:05:56] And if that's all we have to do, of course we're miserable in the face of hurt and eventually learn to flee from it. But when one understands the biblical way to respond to hurt, when one understands what

[00:06:10] the Bible requires of a person who was being hurt by another, he doesn't have the problem of simply standing there because he knows that he has been given directions. And Romans, the 12th chapter, we are told that we are to bless those who persecute us,

[00:06:28] bless and curse not. Now you notice that that is not a negative or a passive response to the hurt of persecution. And someone is out to hurt us when he does hurt us, when he persecutes us, the Bible says, what? We are to bless him.

[00:06:47] That is we are to say good about him and we are to say good to him and we are to seek God's blessing upon him. There's a lot of things that we have to do in response to hurt. Immediately those three things come to mind.

[00:07:03] We must do something good in our speech toward him. We must respond in a biblical and good proper way toward him. And we must speak to God properly about him, and we must pray for him and seek to do whatever we can to help him. Take another situation.

[00:07:21] This is if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink. If your fear is an enemy, a person who wants to hurt you and actively rather than passively you don't just sit there and let him go on hurting you.

[00:07:38] You turn the tables. You turn it all around on him and you begin to go after him with good. You begin to go after him by doing good, providing for his needs. If he is hungry, you feed him. If he is thirsty, you give him something to drink.

[00:07:56] You look forward wherever it is in your enemy that he needs desperately and you give that to him. Finally it's all Sunday of the verse 21 of chapter 12 of Romans, do not be overcome or conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.

[00:08:13] You are to go out of the warpath, out into the battle, go into the fray, an attack that which is hurting you and that person who is hurting you, attack him with good. Attack him with all those good things you can do for him.

[00:08:31] Now that is not a passive response of taking it, staying there and taking it. So we find the key to this woman's problem really lying in the area of how she responds to hurt. She tries to take it.

[00:08:45] She tried that for a long while but eventually she realized that she couldn't take it any longer and so she then learned to run from hurt. Neither standing or taking it passively, no running from it are the biblical responses.

[00:09:03] But in the face of hurt, in the face of wrongdoing, in the face of persecution or cursing, in the face of slander and the face of any kind of hurt, whatever the Christians response is to do good, do the person who wants to hurt him.

[00:09:20] There is the answer. And when you are instead of focusing upon the hurt that's being done, instead of focusing upon the person who is doing wrong to you or instead of focusing upon where you can flee

[00:09:32] to escape from it and how you can get out from under the hurt, when you begin instead to focus upon what you can do for that person, your whole mindset is on something entirely

[00:09:44] different and you, like the Lord Jesus will soon find it possible not only to take the hurt but to say Father forgive them for they know not what they do. Lord Bless those who are being hurt by others that they may know how to respond in good

[00:10:00] and positive ways to overcome evil with good. So the point of exercise here in this episode is that it might do you some really good time to spend rehearsing how you can do good for that person or couple of people that are constantly finding ways to hurt you.

[00:10:23] We hurts in your own quiet time, how you are going to respond to them next time and this it's going to take practice because you are habitually responding and behaving in a certain way that is contrary to what the Bible says you do must do.

[00:10:38] So respond, Biblically this is how Jesus would have you to respond to those people that hurt you, do good to those that hurt you. This tough, but you could do that because you have the Holy Spirit that's going to guide

[00:10:51] you to give you the comfort and encourage to do it and that's going to give you the impetus to what to do it even more. Hope this helps have a great day and be blessed. Goodbye.