By His Wounds
For many of us, it appears we seem to be in an unending, tumultuous, and painful wilderness of trials, disappointments, and heartbreak. Deep down in the hearts of His people is the desperate need and yearning for refreshment and revival of soul and spirit. Scripture tells us this life-changing healing can only come from the presence of the Lord.
Acts 3:19-20 reminds us “Repent, therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord”. These verses have become vivid, real, tangible words of life to me. Times of refreshment. Times of healing. That has been my prayer. That has been my most fervent desire as I struggle with anxiety, loneliness, and fear that this season of tribulation will not come to an end.
After waking up from a startling, intense, and unshakeable nightmare, I “randomly” opened my bible to page 614...otherwise known in my bible as...Isaiah 53. Without any hesitation, I can boldly and audaciously proclaim that the Lord revealed Himself to me in the most powerful way I’ve ever experienced in recent months.
BY HIS WOUNDS, I AM HEALED.
Healed. Past tense. I am healed. It’s done. It’s completed. It’s settled. It is finished. I am healed. I am restored. I am refreshed. I am free. I am alive. I am made whole. I am healed.
This was once a prophetic passage. But it is now a completed, finished work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Perhaps you’ve been orphaned, abandoned, betrayed, abused, rejected, forsaken, belittled, left out, or hurt. When pain has been inflicted on us, either from others or even from ourselves, Jesus took that pain. What happened at the cross is more powerful than I could ever believe. It’s powerful enough to bring healing. It’s powerful enough to change who you are and what you think about yourself and your God.
Nothing will satisfy you. No bottle. No drugs. No relationship. No pleasure. These can only mask your pain. Nothing will fulfill that desperate longing to be whole, to be complete, to be joyfully healed and refreshed. Nothing but the saving power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Every wrong that I have done and every wrong that has been done to me has been conquered in every right that Jesus has done and every wrong that has been done to Him. Jesus did the remarkable, the miraculous, and the unthinkable by putting Himself between me and every painful thing imaginable. I heard one pastor perfectly state that grace is radically unjust. It makes no sense what He did for me, so we now ought to ask...what did He do?
The first step towards freedom, towards this unexplainable healing, is to grasp and really cling on to what Jesus did for you. This is not a passage to just skim through late at night or as part of a morning devotional. This is not a passage to recite on Good Friday. This isn't light reading. This is a passage to recall and meditate on. This is a passage to slowly digest and chew through.
Isaiah 53…This is what my Jesus went through for me, and for you.
Jesus was made ordinary in His humanity.
Jesus wasn’t the One you’d choose to be the Messiah. He was made ordinary. He was born in a manger. He was made lowly and ordinary. Nothing about Him would have drawn us to Him physically.
So often we struggle with self-image. We want to be that flawless, beautiful woman. We want her flawless complexion, toned arms, and head-turning smile. We want all that she has. We struggle to embrace our identity of being fearfully and wonderfully made in our ordinary ways. And yet, Jesus was just ordinary. Extraordinary in divinity but nevertheless, simply ordinary.
Jesus was despised and rejected by men.
How often we feel left out, unwanted, or uninvited and yet Jesus was despised, hated, cursed, and rejected by men, by even His closest disciples and friends.
Jesus lived a life filled with sorrow and suffering.
He lived His life with a broken heart. Only Jesus cared about the orphan, the adulteress, the prostitute, the leper, the mute, the ill in the way we are called to. Only Jesus wept over His beloved and broken city. Is my life marred by sorrow and suffering? Jesus understands and endures through suffering. He was acquainted with grief.
Jesus was undervalued and undersold. He was not esteemed.
The King of Kings was not esteemed worthy. The very God Incarnate was undervalued.
He was touched by our grief and our sorrow.
His life was touched by it. He understood what it meant to be in contact with pain and sorrow. Stricken. Smitten. Afflicted. He was defiled by our spiritual disease of sin.
He was pierced.
After He died, the sword pierced His body where blood and water flowed out.
He was crushed. For our iniquities.
The weight of the wrath of my sin crushed Jesus to death. In the garden alone, His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
He was punished.
Disciplined. Penalized.
He was wounded.
He was welted, bruised, beaten, punched, and stripped by the thirty-nine lashes.
He became sin.
He became defiled, dirty, and messed up by sin’s deadly disease. Every iniquity, from every person, from all time, was laid on Him. He who had no sin became sin for me----so that in Him, I might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21).
He was oppressed and afflicted.
A payment was exacted from Him. He was put in a spot where He was required to offer up a payment of a great price. He was exploited and stripped of all freedom.
He was slaughtered.
It was a brutal, excruciating, and public death on the cross.
He was silent.
No defense. No argument. No justification. No angels called to save Him. He willingly and silently gave up His life.
He was judged.
He was innocently made guilty before the Holy, Righteous God.
He was taken and cut off.
Abducted. Kidnapped. Cut down. Separated. Isolated. Removed.
He was betrayed. He was arrested. He was denied. He was mocked. He was blindfolded. He was beaten.
He was abandoned.
The Father turns His face away. There is nothing worse than to be without the presence of the Father.
He became guilty.
Guilt will tear you apart. It will make you feel dirty and sick, inhibiting your ability to function with others around you. He knows when I feel guilty. He became my very guilt.
He was tormented by the demons in the spiritual realm in the darkness.
The timeless classic "Pilgrim's Progress" perfectly illustrates this verse in the following words by John Bunyan as Christian is going through the valley of the shadow of death, "It whispered softly into his ear with many suggestive and distressing blasphemies. Christian thought these blasphemies had originated in his own mind, and it troubled him deeply. As he continued on his journey, the thought that he could possibly blaspheme the One who loved him so much weighed heavily on him."
He was killed.
Pause, let this truth sink in...
Because of all of that, I am healed. He took the worst because sin brings the worst in us. He died the most excruciating death because sin’s consequences are excruciating.
Who did this to Him? I did. You did. Yes, God offered up His Son, but He never would have had to if I could have offered up the price to pay for my sins. We may be victimized by the brokenness of this world, but only Jesus was the victim of the wrath of God as a result of the oppressing payment of my sin. He bore the sin of many. He bore your sin.
Yet it was the will of the Lord…Out of the anguish of His soul, He shall see and be satisfied...He makes intercession for the transgressors
Do you believe that? It’s tragically true that Jesus went through this. For me. He made intercession for the transgressors. Why did he do this?
“...For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”-Hebrews 12:2
Jesus did all of this, endured the full weight of my sin, for the joy set before Him that was me.
God ultimately shows us the way He loves us. No matter how many times we turn our backs on Him, He searches for us. He paid for us with His Son, and he reconciled us back to Him. His love is radically and relentless.
God knew that in order for us to have access to His love there must be an exchange---the ultimate exchange when God chose to offer His Son for our freedom. We are so undeserving of this kind of sacrifice, but God did not want heaven without us in it! This exchange is what we are always trying to get back to--our sin for His righteousness, our deserved destiny for His purposed plan, and our pain for His freedom.
Until we can fully understand the sacrifice and the love it must have taken to allow His own Son to die on our behalf, we will never understand the fullness of our freedom. Freedom from pain. Freedom from heartbreak. Freedom from addiction. Freedom from the belief of being white trash. Freedom from self-injury. Freedom from fear. Freedom from never measuring up. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from our past.
Freedom of being alive. Freedom of being cleansed. Freedom of being made a child of God. Freedom of being in a family. Freedom of being the righteous of God in Christ. Freedom in the finished, completed, settled work of Jesus Christ.
By His wounds, we are healed. Past tense. Healed. It has already happened. The prophecy here has already been fulfilled.
My healing does not come from making others pay for what they did to me. The healing begins by understanding that I made Jesus pay. Only then can I walk in the power of the Spirit, only then can I embrace the promises found in Scripture and experience the fullness of this life and the eternal life to come.
My only response, my only tearful words to ignite any kind of worship to Him are simply: Woe is me, for I am undone. I must decrease. He must increase. I believe.
My hope is that you come back to the cross every day to rest in this place where everything you have ever done or has been done to you was nailed and taken. Isaiah asked at the very beginning, “Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” In other words, do you believe Jesus did all of this? Do you believe He did all of this for you personally? Have you allowed yourself to receive the gift of God’s sacrificial love?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hannah is a twenty-something Tucson native saved by the overwhelming grace of Christ and a disciple of His Word. Hannah loves country music, camping and hiking, binge watching Gilmore Girls and traveling on spontaneous road trips. Her favorite days consist of a great cup of coffee, a good book, and enjoying monsoon thunderstorms. She longs to see young women thrive in their relationship with Jesus, knowing He always has immeasurably more in store for us.