Wounds or Scars - Travis Kropf

Good morning, bring greetings to each one of you in

the name of Jesus this morning. Maybe just a note

of explanation about the message this morning. This message is

hard for me to bring in some ways, I think,

partly because I fear not communicating clearly and being misunderstood

because of that, and also because while it's a very

simple message, it's also very complicated because we're people. Often

when I share a message here, it's one I've shared

at home, at least it's the home congregation, and that

is not the case this morning, and probably the result

of a series of events that happened in the last

week and a half. I was inspired with this message

through some conversation and comments, and sometime toward the end

of last week, Brother Phil Kaufman asked if I would

trade with him and be here this morning, And so

you get the the burden the message I have this morning,

and probably be sharing it at home in the next

few weeks as well. The title of my message this

morning is wounds or scars, and the burden for this

came as I thought about individuals. Probably it started with

a particular individual people who appear, from what I can

tell observe to be carrying wounds, wounds for many years,

and it would appear that those wounds have not been

allowed to heal. I would like to begin this morning

by thinking about pain a little bit. The role of

pain in our lives? Is pain a good thing? I

have a response, it's pain good? Okay? Yes? Do we

like pain? When was the last time you thank God

for pain? If you enjoy reading, I would recommend the

book The Gift of Pain. It's probab doctor Paul Brand.

Pain is a motivator. Pain tells us that something is wrong.

Earlier this week, one of my children had a dentist

appointment and had a filling, and they came home and

they were hungry, and against better judgment, I allowed him

to eat some solid food, and that evening, when it

was time to eat dinner, he said, I can't eat.

My mouth hurts, and with some inspection, he had chewed

up the inside of his cheek. At lunchtime, he was

still numb from the dentist's chair and didn't feel what

he was doing to his mouth inside of his mouth.

Doctor Brand worked in India. Started largely in India. He

worked with people who had leprosy and in his research

he discovered that leprosy is basically my way of saying it,

it's neurological, it's a losing of sensation. And we think

of leprosy and what I remember hearing all my life

is that leprosy eats your fingers. It's deforming it. Your

fingers disappear, your nose, maybe facial features. But his research

showed that it was not leprosy that caused the fingers

to disappear, but it was the lack of feeling, the

lack of pain. And so people with leprosy lose the

feeling and their extremities and they will pick up something

hot and burn their hand. They don't know it, and

the next day they'll repeat it because there's no there's

no pain involved. Or I think in some cases third

world country's rodents would actually eat their fingers. There was

no pain. They just they slept through it. And he

would have said that that is the cause of losing

losing your fingers. You could take that into the world

of diabetes. Probably foot wounds they don't heal well. It's

because you don't have feeling. You don't realize what you're doing.

Normal person as you walk, your foot adjusts and it's

always compensating, so you don't damage a single part of

your foot. You don't think about it, but your brain

is receiving those signals, those signals of pain. Pain is

a gift, and as much as we try to get

away from pain, as much as we try to avoid it,

it's a real gift. I think it's something we should

thank God for a lot more than we do this morning.

Might desire is that each of us can find healing

for our wounds. Someone tell me what is a scar?

Thank you. It's a wound that's healed. We all have scars.

Scars tell a story you small children would probably I

have a small scar in my hand. I was bitten

by a monkey, that's true, not pulling your leg. I

have another scar here on the side of my hand.

It's probably the biggest scar on my hand. Spent a

winter in Belice and I was working on a motorcycle

and a wrench slipped and I ran my hand across

the sprocket for the motorbike and it wasn't The scar

is out of proportion to the wound in my mind,

but there's probably some reason for that. It was a

wound that I picked a lot, you know, those scabs

that are kind of fun to kind of keep working on.

Websters would say a scar is the mark remaining after

injured tissue is healed. If you break a bone, most

times there would be a scar. If you had taken

X ray, there would be a visible mark on that

bone where it was broken. But scars are wounds that

have healed. Scars are evidence of healing. That's what to me,

a scar is a very beautiful thing because it's evidence

that healing has taken place. All of us have wounds

in our lives. The question is have they been healed.

I'd like to start. I'd like to think about wounds

and we'll get to some scripture further on in the message.

And there's a side of it where it's hard for

me to bring a message that doesn't have a lot

of scripture in it. I believe these principles are very biblical, though,

And to begin with, where do wounds come from? And

maybe that's a very simple question, but I'm thinking now

of wounds to our soul, our spirit. Some wounds are

given by their people, and I would like to kind

of take that and divide that down further. Sometimes we

receive wounds in our innocence. I think if children, children

are probably the maybe the bigger victims of some of this,

but older people wound them, whether it's through words, whether

it's through abuse. But the children are innocent, they had

no part in it. They had say, they had agency.

It is beyond their control. Some wounds are just a

part of life, and I think about that as relationships.

You have a group of people, you're going to rub

and you're going to somebody's gonna say something that's offensive.

Once in a while. I do it to you, you

do it to me. It's part of life, and it's

not it's not that it's okay. It's not that we

shouldn't seek to avoid wounding, but it's a little inevitable

because that's the way life seems to work. Those are

wounds given by other people. Some wounds are self inflicted.

To think of the one example I think of in

the Bible, and I'll refer to him a little more later.

At King Saul. What did King Saul do? Well? He

walked away from God. God had lined out what it

meant to follow him and gave him very direct commands,

and Saul decided to deviate from that, and his saul

went down that path. He self inflicted wounds, and we'll

talk a little more about that later. We make choices

and the consequences of that cause wounds. Again, there's healing

for those, but they're self inflicted because of choices. There's

wounds of grief. I think we all understand that. Think

God also, there's a certain level of wounds that come

from observe violence. And I don't know if that's the

best way to say it, but you think of first responders,

law enforcement, maybe military, there's a lot of trauma that

goes with that and just dealing with the effects of

sin of violence. We're not made to handle that. We

weren't created for that to have large amounts of that

at least. So you think of wounds, there's a sense

in which we need to separate the event from the wound.

We cannot undo events in our lives. They've happened and

they're done. There's no way to undo those. But if

the wound is the result of an event, it can

be healed because it's what happened in here. Because of

the event that happened in that part can be healed.

How do wounded people act. We do a good job

of hiding, We do a good job of covering up

until we can't anymore. But wounded people are hurting people,

and wounded people often push others away in their desire

to protect that wound, and wounded people often end up

wounding other people. It's just part of it. And we

could look at King Saul again as an example of that.

You know, is he chose to go down that path

away from following God. Pretty soon he became mentally unstable,

and then he became an angry man, and then he

started throwing spears and trying to wound other people. What's

the other term, generational trauma. We tend to pass on wounds,

and I think parents, especially if you have wounds, you

need to find healing because wounded parents wound their children.

So you think of a physical wound, how do you

take care of it? I have three ways that we

often take care of a wound. The first one is

we cover it up. We pretend it's not there. We

wrap that thing up tight and we're just gonna ignore it.

Or like I said about this one on my finger,

maybe we just keep picking it. We just can't leave

it alone, or we can expose it so it can heal.

Children get a little cut or something on their hand.

You know, you put a band aid on it to

keep it clean. Right, and at night, what do you do?

You take the band aid off so it can have

some air, right, as long as it's not bleeding anymore.

You expose it so it can heal. You allow it

to have some air and to be so you think

of covering up a wound. There's an element of self

preservation in this, and especially I think of children. They

don't know what to do with the wound. They often

feel it's their own fault, and so just to survive,

they isolate it. They wall that off. They may even

forget about, almost forget about it in a way. Sooner

or later, to be healed, it has to be brought

out in the open. It has to be brought to

light in order to heal. It cannot heal when it's

wrapped up and walled off over here in the corner.

It may be years later. You may not even think

about it for years, but in order to heal, it

must be brought out and exposed to light, to air.

How do we heal our wounds? If you're working in

the shop in the kitchen and you cut your hand.

What do you do? What should you do? You clean

the wound right, You dump in the peroxide, You scrub

it with soap and water, whatever it is. But you

clean it and that's painful, and then you keep it clean.

That's what the bandage is for. The bandage is not

to hide it. The bandage is for cleanliness. Like I said,

you're gonna let it have some air when it's not bleeding,

when it's not gonna get tore open. You leave the

bandage off as much as you can when you're in

a clean environment. Put your BNW or your healing elements,

whatever you like to use. You can put that on too,

and that'll help. Have you healed the wound at that point?

Is there anything you can do to make that wound heal? No.

You can facilitate healing by keeping it clean, but you

cannot heal that cut. There's nothing you can do to

heal it. Your body does the healing right. Your body

knows how to repair that. If you give it a chance.

Your will't need some circulation, So you have again, you

have diabetes. Poor circulation. Your foot doesn't want to heal

needs that flow of blood. If you wrap that cut

on your finger up so tight that it can't get circulation,

it's not gonna heal there either. What is healing Actually,

one of the definitions that I liked was healing is

a natural movement toward wholeness. Think again, the cut on

your hand. Your body heals itself. Your body knows how

to do that. It's not being a victim. It's not

I have a cut on my hand, so I'm going

to go sit in the corner for the next week

or two and talk about it and cry over it

and how terrible it is. That's being a victim. Healing

is not self improvement. It's not just working hard enough

to try to fix myself. I'd like to read a

number of verses here, so we think of the source

of healing, and that in our physical bodies. Our body

knows how to do that. But the inner part of us,

there's another source. I have some these printed out. A

few of them I will turn to. Isaiah has a

number of prophecies of Christ. I'd like to read some

of those and think about the pictures that are given here.

Isaiah nine to two, the people that walked in darkness

have seen a great light. And they that dwell in

the land of the shadow of death upon them hath

the light shined Isaiah forty two, verses six and seven.

I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will

hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and will give

thee for a covenant to the people, for a light

of the gentiles. And then verse seven, especially to open

the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison,

and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

There's healing, to open the blind eyes, to shed light

where there's darkness, to expose evil Isaiah thirty five, verses

five through eight. And then the burden me Then the

eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears

of the death shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame

man leap as an heart, and the tongue of the

dumb sing. For in the wilderness shall waters break out

and streams in the desert, and the parched ground shall

become a pool. In the thirsty land, springs of water

in the habitation of dragons, where each lake shall be

grassed with reeds and rushes, and an highway shall be

there and away, and it should be called the I

have holiness, and the unclean shall not pass over it.

But it shall be for those the wayfaring man, though

fools shall not air. Therein again the picture there of healing,

but of not only healing, but of abundance. Instead of

the desert, there's going to be lush vegetation Isaiah sixty one,

verses one to four. The spirit of the Lord is

upon me, because the Lord hath, Because the Lord hath

annointed me to preach the good tidings unto the meek.

He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives, opening of the prison

to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year

of the Lord, the day of vengeance of our God,

to comfort all that mourn to a point unto them

that mourn, and zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes,

the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise

for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called

trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he

might be glorified. And they shall build the old waste.

They shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall

repair the way cities and the desolations of many generations.

We could read on. There's more pictures, but again the

picture of healing goes back to Jesus. The source of

healing is Jesus. A couple more in the New Testament

Luke chapter one, verse seventy nine, and this is Zacharias prophesying,

and he's talking about John the Baptist being the forerunner,

the prophet of the Messiah going before him, and he's

talking about the Messiah's work. I believe here he says

to give light to them that sit in darkness and

in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into

the way of peace. Again, healing and light. There are

two things that go with these prophecies. And one more

in Luke chapter four. And this is actually a quote

from Isaiah sixty one that I read. I want you

to think about this. This is jesus Us going into

his local synagogue and he'd read this. The spirit of

the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me

to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent

me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to

the captives, the recovering of sight to the blind, to

set up liberty them that are bruised to preach the

acceptable year of the Lord Verse twenty one, and he

began to say to them, this day as is fulfilled.

Healing comes from Jesus. It comes from a relationship with him.

We cannot heal unless Jesus is the beginning point of

that healing process. That's the source of healing. I like

to think now a little bit about our part in

the healing process. The first one I have is that

I have to acknowledge it I have a wound. As

long as I cover it up, and as long as

I say I have not, there's nothing wrong. It doesn't

matter it happened so long ago. I just don't even

want to go there. As long as that's where we're at,

we're not going to find healing. We have to admit

that we have a wound before we can start that

healing process. Often we don't take that first step, and

I think sometimes it's through ignorance, probably, but I think

more often it's through fear because we're afraid of the pain.

The first step in healing a wound is to clean it,

and that's the most painful part, opening it up and

starting the scrubbing process, and we have to accept the

pain that goes with that in order to clean it.

Number Two, I'm responsible for my actions. I can't wait

until someone else comes to me and starts probing and

digging and asking me about my wounds. If you've got

them covered up, they may not ever come. I have

to take responsibility to start that process healing. Number three,

healing means making ourselves vulnerable. As long as I am

trying to protect myself, I'm going to really restrict that healing.

It's going to be almost impossible. Ready mentioned pain. Pain

is part of the healing process. The pain of cleaning

the wound is temporary. The pain of living with the

wound never goes away. We may need some help. That's

what the people sitting beside you are for this morning.

They're here to help you. We don't always need everyone

to know everything. One or two people's perspective can help

us a lot, though, And it's part of that exposing

it to air, exposing it to light. There is another

ditch in that I want to mention That is oversharing.

We can talk about something all the time and never

allow it to heal. And that's kind of like when

we pick that scab all the time. The whole world

doesn't need to know every detail of your pain. It's

gotten a lot easier in the last thirty years to

share everything with everyone. It's not been a healthy thing.

We need to make sure allowing light, allowing air to

reach a wound is different than just picking a wound.

You need to make sure we're keeping that difference. I

know this is talking of sin, specific sin against God

other people, but if you think of the responses of

King Saul and King David when they were confronted with sin,

you can look that up first Samuel fifteen, I believe

it is what did King Saul. He deflected. He said, well,

it's it's other people's fault. It's not my fault. They

wanted to do it. When David committed adultery and the

prophet Nathan came to him, David took him a little

bit to see it. When Nathan said, you're the man,

David said, I have sinned. It's my problem. He took responsibility.

I believe those two pictures apply to how we handle

our wounds. I have to take responsibility for the healing process.

Maybe I didn't cause the wound, someone else may have

caused the wound, but I have to take the responsibility

to start that healing process. Tewod Corinthian seven, verse eleven.

And this again is in the context of sin and repentance.

But I believe there's a lot of principles that carry

over to the healing process for this self, same thing

that ye sorrowed after a godly sort, What carefulness it

wrought in you, yea? What clearing of yourselves yea? What

indignation yea? What fear yea? What vehement desire yea? What

zeal yea? What revenge? You know? All things you have

approved yourselves to be clear in this matter? What clearing

of yourselves? What opening up of yourselves? What zeal? What

desire for healing? Scars? Your beautiful things? The scar. When

there's healing of a wound, there will be a scar,

and the scar will never go away. Depending on your age,

probably it'll get less and less. It will never completely

go away. The goal is to be healed, not just

to talk about being healed. Does Jesus have scars today?

I dug around some I couldn't find much other than

the Gospel of John, where Thomas talked about the marks

and thrusting his hand into his side. I believe Jesus

still carries those scars. I don't believe they're open wounds.

I believe they're scars because Jesus is the healer, and

yet he still has those marks of healing from the

wounds they he carried for us, the wounds that he

carried so we can be healed. If you have scars

this morning, praise the Lord who gets the glory for

your scars. Scars should always bring glory to God. I'd

like to close with familiar verses from Matthew Levin. Come

unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden,

and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,

and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly

in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls,

for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.