Book summary “Lord, Heal My Hurts”: summary

Introduction

You carry deep emotional and spiritual hurts from past rejections, traumas, and disappointments that refuse to fade. Human psychology and worldly philosophies offer only broken cisterns that leave you searching for lasting peace.

You can find permanent healing from deep emotional and spiritual trauma by turning to God as your Great Physician and applying His sufficient Word.

Kay Arthur argues that true restoration comes only from understanding who God is and aligning your life with His truth. The book moves from diagnosing your pain to exploring the living Word of God, Calvary's redemption, and God's sovereign control. You will then learn how to fight spiritual battles in your mind, extend genuine forgiveness, and release bitterness.

Consider these questions as you begin:

• Where do your deepest emotional and spiritual hurts originate?
• How does the Word of God act as a healing balm?
• What keeps you from forgiving those who have deeply wounded you?

1. Why Am I Hurting

Your deep emotional and spiritual hurts stem fundamentally from human sin, but a Great Physician and a spiritual balm are available to restore you.

Kay Arthur experienced deep personal guilt, family fracture, and severe grief after her first marriage ended. At age twenty-six, after six years of marriage, she separated from her first husband Tom following an escalating argument and physical altercation.

She threw her diamond engagement ring and platinum wedding band on the recreation room floor during a marital breakdown that ultimately ended in divorce and suicide. This profound personal failure exposed the heavy toll of ignoring God's precepts.

The Source of Pain

The underlying root of societal decay, family abuse, and personal trauma is human sin, defined as failing to listen to and obey God's Word. Sin originated in Eden through disobedience and unbelief, and modern pain follows the exact same pattern when people refuse to listen to God.

The southern kingdom of Judah failed to learn from the judgment of the northern kingdom of Israel and was eventually taken captive by Babylon because they would not listen to God's warnings. Assyrians took the northern kingdom captive in 722 B.C., and Babylonians took the southern kingdom of Judah captive in 586 B.C.

The Great Physician

Drawing on the prophet Jeremiah's lament over the brokenness of Judah, the author highlights that a balm in Gilead and a Great Physician exist for soul healing. The prophet Jeremiah cried out in anguish over the brokenness of his people, asking why their health had not been restored when a balm and physician existed.

God had Jeremiah record His burden for hurting people approximately 2500 years ago. Lasting healing is achieved through learning how to apply God's spiritual balm, following the Great Physician's instructions, and giving His medicine time to work.

You can begin your healing process today by taking these specific actions:

• Shut yourself up with the Lord to ask Him to show you any past or present hurts.
• Write down your personal hurts, or your mate's and friends' hurts if you feel fine, to define them clearly.
• Look up Jeremiah 17:14, write it out, and memorize it by reading it aloud three times in succession morning, afternoon, and evening.
• Communicate your feelings and doubts honestly to God through written prayer.

2. The Word of God as Balm

The living Word of God serves as your unchanging plumb line and the ultimate source of spiritual healing, completely equipping you for life.

God's name Jehovah-rapha reveals Him as the self-existent healer who can take bitter situations and make them sweet. This name was introduced in Exodus when the Israelites spent three days in the wilderness without finding water before reaching Marah. The Israelites found the waters bitter, grumbled against Moses, and God instructed Moses to throw a tree into the water to make it sweet.

Scripture as the Plumb Line

The Bible serves as an unchanging plumb line to discern truth from error and evaluate outside counsel. Any psychological or human counsel contradicting biblical principles must be rejected as ungrounded in divine truth.

Humanity commits two spiritual errors by forsaking God as the fountain of living water and hewing broken cisterns of human reasoning. Instead of running to God in prayer and Scripture during distress, people turn to worldly psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy, which can only offer superficial remedies like Band-Aids. King Asa relied on human physicians rather than turning to the Lord when confronted by his enemies.

Secular sources often teach that victims of incest or severe abuse remain permanently amputated or scarred. Faith in God's power allows believers to become new creatures with the mind of Christ. A woman who suffered from infancy abuse wrote to the author mentioning she was thirty-seven and still unable to form friendships with males due to unhealed trauma. She rejected the analogy of an emotional amputee, choosing instead to hold out for total healing and the abundant life.

Equipped for Every Good Work

The Word of God functions as the metaphorical balm of Gilead and the ultimate source of spiritual and emotional healing. Just as Gilead was historically known for a healing and cosmetic salve and served as a city of refuge, the living Word of God provides total refuge and cures the soul's deepest destructions. Kay Arthur experienced the seedbed of her book in a guest bedroom in Dallas, Texas, on a Saturday night after turning to Psalm 107 in prayer.

Scripture is uniquely God-breathed and profitable in four specific areas to completely equip a believer for life. The ultimate goal of studying God's Word is to achieve a symmetrical adjustment of all human faculties to be fully equipped. Through Greek terms like artios and exartizo, the author explains that Scripture brings a harmonious combination of different qualities and powers so a person becomes adequate for every good work.

You can apply these truths directly to your daily routine:

• Study the Word of God daily to receive specific guidance and divine remembrance.
• Allow Scripture to serve as doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.

3. Calvarys Love and Redemption

Jesus accomplishes your healing through His life, His substitutionary death at Calvary, His resurrection, and His ongoing priestly intercession.

All emotional, physical, and spiritual wounds ultimately stem from sin, which mars and destroys human lives. Through Christ's death and resurrection, believers have a representative in heaven and access to the Great Physician, Jehovah-rapha, who mends and makes whole. The cross of Calvary serves as the Christian's Gilead where Jesus experienced the hell of sin and suffering to provide complete healing.

Kay Arthur's friend, devastated by a wall of rejection from her adult son, found her sorrow immobilized until she ran in prayer to God and anchored her faith in His unchanging promises.

The Ministry of Jesus

Jesus accomplishes the believer's healing through three distinct means: His life, His death, and His present ministry of intercession. During His earthly life, Jesus bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, fulfilling Isaiah 53:4 through healing the sick and demon-possessed. Through His death, He paid for transgressions so believers can live righteously. Today, He continually intercedes as Great High Priest, ensuring believers are never alone.

Emily Farmer realized during a Precept Bible study course that Jesus' work of salvation is complete and His ongoing ministry is to continually intercession for believers. True healing and permanent salvation require recognizing one's total spiritual poverty and inability to earn salvation or free oneself from sin.

Kay Arthur experienced this as a registered nurse at Johns Hopkins at age 29, making resolution after resolution to quit immorality before finally collapsing in prayer on July 16, 1963.

Victory Over Sin

Believers are freed from slavery to sin through their spiritual identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. Paul explains in Romans 6 that the old self was crucified with Christ so that believers should no longer be slaves to sin.

You can apply these instructions directly to daily life:

• Consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
• Do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts.
• Do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness.
• Present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

The bodily resurrection of Christ is an essential part of the gospel that proves God accepted Jesus' payment for sin and broke the power of death over believers. Christ's resurrection testifies that God was propitiated, allowing God to declare believers righteous through justification. Because sin has been paid for, Satan and death no longer hold mastering power over children of God.

4. God Is in Control and Present

All past sufferings work together to conform you to Christ through His refining fire, while His omnipresence ensures He is intimately acquainted with every trauma.

God uses three primary things to achieve conformation to Christ: our proper relationship to Him, our response to the Word of God, and the suffering that attends the life of every believer. Rather than destroying or embittering you, trials act like a silversmith's fire, designed to remove impurities until the silversmith's image is clearly reflected.

Kay Arthur shares how a woman who lost her baby in a fire was bitter, stating she would only listen to God when He gave her back her baby, thus missing the healing God offered because of hardened anger. Just as a silversmith refines silver by heating it multiple times and scraping away impurities until he can see his reflection, God places you in the crucible of suffering to burn away the sin nature.

You can respond to trials by applying practical steps:

• Read Romans 8:28-39 and mark key words like God, Christ, and personal pronouns.
• List everything you learn about God and Jesus Christ.
• Write out the good that God intends to accomplish in your life through past events.
• Learn to see every trial as part of God's refining process to make you like Jesus.
• View past, present, and future trials as part of God's refining process.
• Decide whether to let suffering embitter you or transform you into the image of Jesus.

The Omnipresent God

Psalm 139 reveals God as the Omniscient One, Omnipresent One, Creator-Sustainer, and Righteous Judge who knew and formed every individual before birth.

God is intimately acquainted with every detail of your life, including your thoughts, path, and days ordained before birth. Because He is omnipresent, you can never flee His presence; He was present during every past hurt and trauma to protect and preserve. Relying solely on modern psychology to cure deep emotional wounds elevates human wisdom and implies that God's Word was impotent before psychology was invented. True healing begins with an understanding of God's character, sovereignty, and the complete sufficiency of salvation.

You can internalize these truths through focused exercises:

• Read Psalm 139 aloud at least three times to memorize and retain it.
• Read the psalm a fourth time, mark each Thou and Thee, and list what you learn from them.
• List what you learn about God and yourself from the psalm.
• Cry out in faith "Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed" and pray persistently as taught in Luke 11.
• Search the heart and ask God to reveal any hurtful ways.

5. Your Mind the Battlefield

Your mind is the primary battleground where you must take thoughts captive to Christ, put on God's armor, and reject worldly strongholds.

Believers are engaged in a spiritual war for their thought life. Satan aims to make believers weak and ineffectual by causing them to focus on past failures, rejection, or accusations, erecting mental fortresses that must be destroyed. Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights before being tempted by the devil.

Kay Arthur shares that when she was a new believer and felt great joy after speaking at a meeting, a sudden prideful thought dropped into her mind telling she was a great speaker, which she initially thought was her own until she recognized it as a tactic of the enemy.

Spiritual Warfare and Thought Control

Every incoming thought must be examined and filtered through the criteria of Philippians 4:8 to ensure it aligns with God's truth. When thoughts knock at the door of the mind, believers must frisk them by measuring them against specific biblical conditions to decide whether to submit to them or refuse them.

• Recognize that recurring negative or prideful thoughts are often from the enemy.
• Evaluate incoming thoughts against the standard of the Word of God.
• Take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
• Examine each thought when it comes to the mind.
• Test whether the thought is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, excellent, and worthy of praise according to Philippians 4:8.
• Refuse any thought that fails to meet these conditions.

When persistent evil or demoralizing thoughts do not go away, believers have the authority to verbally address Satan and command him to leave in Jesus' name. Following the example of Jesus in the wilderness, believers can resist the devil by speaking aloud and claiming the victory of Christ's blood and the Word of God.

• Address Satan verbally or under your breath when persistent contrary thoughts occur.
• State clearly that those thoughts are not from God and have no place in you.
• Command the enemy to leave in the name and by the blood of Jesus Christ.

Dwelling on a sinful or abused past leads to depression, but believers must recognize that their old self died with Christ and refuse to chain their thoughts to a corpse. Uncontrolled thoughts about past sins, abuse, or rejection produce mental inertia and depression. Because the old man was crucified with Christ, reminiscing or weeping over the past is spiritually deadening.

• Identify thoughts of the past that trigger depression or guilt.
• Go to God in prayer and thank Him that the old person is dead and forgiven.
• Commit to focusing thoughts exclusively on what God says is true of the new person in Christ.

The Armor of God

Standing firm against spiritual forces requires putting on the full armor of God, where every single piece is directly connected to knowing and applying the Word of God. Spiritual survival depends on divine equipment described in Ephesians 6. The armor enables believers to extinguish flaming missiles of doubt and protects them from destructive self-focus and distorted views of God's character.

• Be strong in the Lord and put on the full armor of God.
• Gird your loins with truth by wrapping God's Word around yourself.
• Put on the breastplate of righteousness, shoe your feet with the gospel of peace, take up the shield of faith, put on the helmet of salvation, and wield the sword of the Spirit.

6. The Power of Forgiveness

True healing requires your deliberate choice to forgive others from the heart, matching the infinite debt forgiven you by God.

The Choice to Be Healed

When Jesus asked the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda if he wished to get well, it confronted him with the end of his excuses and the demand for personal responsibility. The invalid had been ill for 38 years. He blamed his lack of healing on not having a man to put him into the water when it was stirred up. Many people refuse healing because their wounds bring pity, serve as an excuse for failures, avoid responsibility toward God, or maintain a false sense of familiarity.

• Ask yourself the question: Do you wish to get well?
• Identify and write out your hesitations, fears, or questions when confronted with the possibility of healing.
• Examine whether you are using your pain as an excuse for shortcomings or to maintain control.

Practicing Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a matter of the will and deliberate choice, not changing emotions, and refusing to forgive is an act of disobedience to God. In the parable of the unmerciful servant, a king forgives a slave an unpayable debt of 10,000 talents, valued at about $10,000,000 in silver content. That same slave immediately choked a fellow slave who owed him 100 denarii, while 1 denarius was equivalent to one day's wage, valued at $18. A slave who was forgiven 10,000 talents refused to forgive a fellow slave who owed him 100 denarii.

Karen experienced healing and saved her marriage by following the example of a friend who knelt, thanked God for her circumstances and parents, and released her abusive father from any perceived debt.

• Examine your heart for any unforgiveness toward others.
• Compare the wrongs done against you to the immense debt of sin forgiven by God.
• Choose to forgive as an act of the will regardless of your emotions or lack of desire.
• Release those who have offended you from any debt you feel they owe you.
• Go to God in prayer and explicitly state that you choose to forgive those who hurt you or your loved ones.

7. Handling Anger and Bitterness

You must surrender your human anger and bitterness to God, embracing meekness and accepting His sovereign dealings to complete your restoration.

Sources and Consequences of Anger

God experiences a righteous anger that is a holy, measured response to sin. Unlike this pure justice, human anger toward others is triggered by unfair treatment, hurt pride, or pressure. It quickly leads to sin if you leave it unchecked.

Kay Arthur blew up at her husband Jack when he changed the subject to checkbook balancing while she shared a disappointment. She stormed out of the room and slammed a book.

People also harbor unjustified anger against God when He allows suffering or does not answer every wish. Unresolved anger smolders in the heart and inevitably leads to bitterness, strife, and broken relationships. You must handle rising anger by turning away from it and entrusting justice to God.

• Turn from anger and don't let it control you, remembering to be angry and sin not.
• Be willing to overlook others' transgressions against you through meekness and discretion.
• Give people a gentle answer to turn away wrath instead of using harsh words.
• Deal with your feelings by meditating in your heart, being still, and bringing emotions to the Word of God.
• Trust in the Lord and commit your way to Him rather than attempting personal revenge.

The Cure for Bitterness

Meekness is the key that opens iron doors by trusting God completely. It accepts all of His ways as good and uses trials for purification. Dorie Van Stone endured severe rejection by her mother, brutal abuse, and sexual molestation in an orphanage. She still held onto her New Testament and the truth of God's unconditional love.

Modern self-love and self-esteem theories foster pride and put man at the center. True healing demands death to self and absolute acceptance of God's sovereignty. Many personal hurts persist because you refuse to accept others as God permitted them.

• Tell God you will accept His dealings with you as good and stop murmuring about your past.
• Quit disputing with Him over why difficult things happened.
• Exchange your anger and bitterness for His meekness.
• Trust Him to use the horrible and difficult things of your life as instruments of discipline and purification.
• Accept God's character and absolute sovereignty.
• Accept the saving and keeping grace of God by faith.
• Accept your calling and identity as shaped by God's grace from conception to the present.
• Agree with your adversary when told you are nothing, and reply that apart from Christ you can do nothing.
• Tell Satan that God loves you unconditionally and transforms you into His image.
• List the names of individuals who trouble or irritate you.
• Examine what you think they owe you and what unfulfilled expectations you harbor.
• Tell God in faithful obedience that you will accept them as He and His Son have accepted them.
• Forgive them and extend the love of God.

10 Key Ideas

1. Deep emotional and spiritual hurts stem fundamentally from human sin, but a Great Physician and a spiritual balm are available to restore you.
2. God's name Jehovah-rapha reveals Him as the self-existent healer who can take bitter situations and make them sweet just like the waters at Marah.
3. The Word of God functions as the metaphorical balm of Gilead and serves as an unchanging plumb line to discern truth from error and equip believers for life.
4. Jesus accomplishes the believer's healing through His life, His substitutionary death at Calvary, His resurrection, and His ongoing priestly intercession.
5. God uses the refining fire of suffering to remove impurities and conform believers to the image of Christ while remaining intimately acquainted with every trauma through His omnipresence.
6. Believers are engaged in a spiritual war for their thought life where every incoming thought must be examined against Philippians 4:8 and taken captive to Christ.
7. True healing requires your deliberate choice to forgive others from the heart, matching the infinite debt forgiven you by God.
8. Unresolved human anger toward others or God smolers in the heart and inevitably leads to bitterness, strife, and broken relationships if left unchecked.
9. Meekness is the key that opens iron doors by trusting God completely, accepting all of His ways as good, and using trials for purification.
10. Total surrender to God demands death to self, absolute acceptance of His sovereignty, and receiving His unconditional love and transforming grace.