God Healed My Heart

My name is Charlie, and I would like to share how God has healed my heart.

God has been doing a major rewiring in me in a lot of ways, and it's been really amazing. I'm so happy about it, because it's changed the way that I view so many things. It’s changed the way I view myself within my own family, the way I am to be as a husband, and the way I am to be as a father. It has affected how I look at everything.

In Ephesians 5, it says,

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.
Ephesians 5:25-33 NASB® 1995

I have read this many times to myself and to my wife. I have been striving to examine myself about whether I am following them well over the past seven or eight years. I would also read Ephesians 5:22-24 and ponder them for my wife, expecting her to follow them.

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.
Ephesians 5:22-24 NASB® 1995

I had two instances when I got annoyed with my wife and called her out in front of our daughter. I had been reading these verses and thinking, something's wrong with my wife, and I had gotten angry with her again. Anger came out in my words and my tone.

A few months after those situations happened, the three of us went to a coffee shop to study the Bible together. As we began to share what God was teaching us, I was going to bring up the scriptures again in Ephesians 5. In that moment, I got a huge revelation from the Holy Spirit. God gave me instant understanding of the situation. He said, “You have a big hole in your heart, Charlie. And you have been trying to get your wife to fill it, and she cannot fill it the way you want her to fill it. Only I can fill it.”

I just felt a peace and calm come over me, and I instantly shared it with them. I didn't realize that ever since I was a kid, I have carried around a giant hole in my heart. I had a very tough family life growing up. My father was a military man; he didn’t know how to love properly. I endured a lot of criticism, shame, and anger from him. It really hurt my mother and us kids. God had given me understanding years ago that my dad had it worse as a child in his family growing up than I had. At that moment, the Holy Spirit showed me that since childhood, I'd been looking for other people (in particular my wife) to fill that hole in my heart.

Since God has opened my eyes to this, I no longer live with anger issues coming up in my life. The vision He gave me was Him using bricks and mortar to fill the hole. He showed me that when husbands and wives get married, we often come into our marriage with a lot of presuppositions. God showed me that this is developed as we grow up, so we need to go to God to examine what He says about this. We're born into our families, and then start to experience family love. We start to learn what family love is, and that can be very different in each family. And then we develop a set of preconceptions or presuppositions of what married life and love should be like, instead of understanding that, as spouses, we are supposed to love each other as Jesus teaches us. In most cases, we have created an expectation for how our spouse should love, and a spouse cannot live up to these expectations. Marriages often suffer huge internal pressures between spouses because of these expectations. In many cases, they result in divorce.

If you come into a marriage with your own expectations of how your spouse should love you, then you are going to have conditions on your spouse, which is the opposite of loving your spouse as your own flesh. If you go into a marriage or in a marriage looking for your spouse to make you feel loved, you will build up hurts towards each other because they can not fill the love deficiency inside of you. Only God can fill that deficiency.

Every little detail of how we live our lives, where husband and wife need to come together to make decisions together, can result in disagreements. It is normal to have disagreements from time to time between husbands and wives; what matters is how we handle them. Some decisions are small and even trivial and don’t matter in everyday life, but some big decisions will need to be made from time to time. How husbands and wives handle disagreement is extremely important. If the disagreements result in a lot of negative emotions like anger and hurt, and resentment, then these hurts can start to be stockpiled into a list of hurts that then get used like ammunition for any future disagreements. This can then turn into feelings of “you don’t love me, or you don’t respect me.” I had this happen a couple of years ago. I was really angry with my wife and feeling unloved, and I confronted her privately and I said to her, “You don't love me.” She jumped up immediately and said, “No, I do love you!” I then prayed silently, and He told me, “She does love you. She just doesn't love you the way you want to be loved.” I repeated this to her, and the anger was diffused on the spot, although in retrospect, I still didn’t have a full understanding of the full scope of my love deficiency issues. I now realize the Holy Spirit was giving me a clue at the time. I thank God that He revealed to me a picture of my heart with a gaping hole in it, with a trickle of blood coming out of it. ”

Then I felt Him come into my heart. I had an immediate change, and I know it's a permanent change, a transformation. In Romans 12:1-2.

Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:1-2 NASB® 1995

The Greek word for transformed is “metamorphoo,” which means to transform or transfigure, of Christ’s transfiguration, to change in fashion or appearance.

”Transformed”: Lexicon in Biblehub: The Greek word for “Transformed” is metamorphóō (3339) and means to transform, to change form;
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance: change, transfigure, transform;
HELPS Word-studies: 3339 metamorphóō (from 3326 /metá, "change after being with" and 3445 /morphóō, "changing form in keeping with inner reality") – properly, transformed after being with; transfigured. [3339 (metamorphóō) is the root of the English terms "metamorphosis" and "metamorphize."]

I know that God is transforming me by doing His mighty work in me.

I can testify that I was not able to change myself. I’m now praying for my relationship to be improved with my wife, and I’m not putting any stipulations on my prayers. God may need to change me for our relationship to be improved, and I trust Him to do a work in her if she needs corrections too. What I didn't realize is that I would need God to come and do a work in me, to change me; I didn't need to focus on changing my wife. Since experiencing this transformation, I literally think differently. I have peace towards my family, and God made it happen.

I will be able to have the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) abound in me in greater measure than before. I pray to have them at all times. I now have a calmness over things that we've talked about in the past that might have made me irritated or annoyed. Now, I can't imagine having anger towards my wife in these areas. We may have disagreements because we will not always agree on every little detail of how everything should be done. However, the difference will be in how we deal with them. As for me, I am determined to remove all anger, annoyance, and irritation and instead produce the fruit of the Spirit in every area.

Something else I have learned from all of this is when husbands and wives have disagreements in front of their children (and we will have those from time to time), when they display anything in their words or even their tone, feelings such as anger, outrage, irritation, or annoyance, we need to be careful that we are not being hypocrites, and that’s a really tough realization.

We, as husbands and wives who are disciples of Jesus, are to be living examples of Jesus in our homes to our children. But if we fight and devour one another, then we are not truly Jesus’ disciples. Oftentimes, we tell our children and show our children the verses about how we're supposed to produce the fruit of the Spirit, and then do the opposite; we are causing stumbling blocks for their learning. This is related to another verse: fathers, do not provoke your children to anger (Ephesians 6:4).

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4 NASB® 1995

I was getting my daughter angry when I delved into anger, irritation, and annoyance. After God showed me this, I apologized to both my wife and my daughter. I'm so thankful to God, His Holy Spirit, and to Jesus again for healing me so I can live a life pleasing to God. This is further proof that the Holy Spirit is real. God's Spirit is here for us today. He is our helper if we call upon Him, pray in faith, and ask for help. If you will admit that you need help, He will help you. Remember to be humble because it may not necessarily be how you want Him to do it. Sometimes we might hope that he brings that help by changing our spouse, but maybe what he's going to do is what he did with me, which is not changing my spouse, but changing me and my expectations.

I'm thankful to God for doing a work in me; He has healed that hole in my heart. Ever since then, I've had so much more joy in my life. His work in me extended further than just my family. He has now given me greater clarity on how to be with others at work, in our church, with friends, and with strangers.

Thank you, Lord, for loving me enough to hear and answer my prayers and help me see my sins that I didn’t even know I was committing. Thank You for loving me the way that only You can. I love you. Amen.

References:

Lexicon: Biblehub.com
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance: Biblehub.com