Gregory Dickow - Heal Your Trauma and Break Through to Your Destiny
Well, today is a day of healing, and I dedicate this day to your healing. And I really believe that something supernatural is going to happen in your life as we process through how to heal our trauma and how to break through into our destiny. Because I believe that's exactly what God assigned us to do today. So let's pray together and let's expect healing to manifest in our soul from within and carry out into every other area of our lives.
Father, thank you for your presence. Thank you that in your presence is healing. In your presence the mountains melt like wax. In your presence there is breakthroughs. There's joy, fullness of joy. I pray for supernatural joy and a healing to flow today. Thank you that everywhere Jesus was He brought healing. And I thank you He's here now. You're here now. We receive your healing. We receive your touch. We receive your breakthrough into our God given identity and our God given purpose. In Jesus name, Amen.
All right. So let's get right into this today. Thank you for joining me. Our global family around the world at Life Changers International Church. This is your day. Healing unresolved trauma. It's so important. And some of what I'm going to share is going to be right in the midst of it. I believe you're going to find freedom. I believe you're going to find the breakthrough. I believe you're going to find peace, even joy. You're going to feel it inside and out. I really believe that because what healing trauma does is it reveals your true identity and then it helps launch you into your destiny. We're limited in life because we're carrying unprocessed pain. But today, we're going to let the healing begin.
The foundational verses for this season of our lives and this season as a church are found in Ephesians chapter one, verse 11 in the message Bible. For it is only in Christ that we find out who we are and what we're living for. It's in Christ. There's an identity crisis in this world, and therefore there's a destiny crisis. People aren't fulfilling their potential. They're not walking in their God given purpose because they don't understand who they are in Christ. They don't understand their true identity as a son or daughter of God. Sometimes that's a struggle. You may be going through a struggle trying to figure out if you are a son or daughter of God, or if you are a son or a daughter. There's so many people that are being pulled into this question mark about gender rather than the real question mark is who are you in Christ when that's answered? Everything else will take care of itself.
So we have in first Peter, chapter two, our other foundational verse, verse 25, You were lost sheep, God tells us, with no idea who you were or where you were going. So we only, only in Christ that we find out who we are and what we're living for. And we were lost sheep with no idea who we were or where we were going. But this verse goes on to say, But now you've been named and kept for good by the shepherd of your souls. So what a powerful promise that God will find us. Keep us. Launch us into our destiny and purpose. But the thing that gets in the way of these verses manifesting in our lives. In your life. In my life. It's the unresolved trauma. It's the unhealed trauma. But by healing the soul within you, from the damage trauma has done, it'll both reveal your true identity launch you into your destiny.
When life seems hard, when it's painful to get up and start over, start a job, get your business launched, succeed in relationships, heal in a relationship, or heal out outside of a relationship. When it comes to making a genuine contribution to humanity, why does it seem like it's so hard? Why is it so hard to be happy, so hard to get our jobs done? So hard to see success in our lives is because we haven't done the deep work inside. I believe when we do the deep work of healing the boy or girl within us, then we become successful in other in every area of life because our very emotional core. It feeds every cell in our body. And when we realize that there's an incongruence between who we could be and who we're behaving like.
That's what's so painful and hard to face. But if we heal that boy or that girl on the inside and do the deep, hard work on our soul, that's when we that's when we truly become men and women of God. That's when we truly experience a more effortless life. Even addictions, they're hard when you haven't done the deep work. But when you have, addictions, start to fall away. Relationships are hard. But once you do the deep work inside you, and when I say the deep work inside, it's letting God do that work, right? But all the work we do to fix and clean up our relationships and try to hold everything together with a hold it together with a string or hold it together with a Band-Aid. Everything we do to try to fix it, hold it together, clean it up, get out of our financial mess, find some peace in our painful existence.
If we just instead of focusing all our attention on cleaning everything up on the outside, if we just used our energy more strategically and healed that child within and healed the person within us, everything else would flow naturally from our lives. We got to heal and call forth the warrior that's inside of us. Jesus said in Luke, Chapter four. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He's anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor and heal the broken hearted. So I'm going to give you the steps to healing trauma. But I want you to see that Jesus is the original healer of trauma, and he tells us here in this verse, he says, He comes to heal. The broken hearted. Broken comes from the Greek word, which literally originates from the word trauma or trauma, traumatized.
So Jesus coming to heal the broken hearted means he came to heal the traumatized heart. We have to realize that our hearts have been traumatized. Trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event. And when trauma occurs in our lives, when we're young, when we're boys or girls, we begin to experience defeat. We begin to accept defeat. And there's a Latin word, the Latin word for defeat. In the original language of Latin, the word defeat is the undoing of the self. In other words, we fall away. We fail in life when we fall away from our true identity, when we undo ourself, from our true identity, when we undo ourself from our connection with God. We fail when we start questioning who we are in Christ and we don't realize or embrace who we are in Christ.
You see, we're declared victorious because we're more than conquerors. But we must go on to experience victories for our brains to function properly. Victory, science has proven, victory is critical for brains to function properly. Continual failure makes our brains function improperly. Failing and getting up is a victory. So just to clarify that. But trauma, again, is an emotional response to a terrible event and the word of God when used properly. It's where all healing begins in the wounded soul or the traumatized soul. Too often... well, once is too often, but too often the Bible is used to divide people, to criticize people, to condemn people, to pronounce people as guilty rule breakers. But the Bible is a cure. It's a scalpel to delicately open up the soul and create a path for healing.
Now, one of the primary sources of trauma, emotional abuse, sexual assault, physical assault, sudden death of a parent or child, natural disasters, witnessing a crime. I mean, there's a lot of culprits for trauma, but how do we know when trauma exists? This is very important because wherever you find yourself reacting in a way that you regret, reacting to somebody's word, reacting to some event, reacting to somebody's comment, reacting to something somebody does to us, we find ourself reacting in a way that we regret and we do it consistently. That's a signal that needs to be a signal to us when we respond in a way that we regret to respond in a way that we wish we wouldn't. That's a signal that there's trauma there and there's an opportunity for healing.
So maybe an example. This is true in so many ways, but somebody compliments you and you get scared or you get angry or you run from that relationship that reveals that maybe someone has flattered you in the past and taken advantage of you by getting you to believe their compliments had no strings attached, but they then abused you or mistreated you in some way. So now any time somebody compliments you, you associate it with that trauma. That's just one simple example of where trauma shows up in our lives and how it shows up in our lives. But we've got to heal. Heal it today. Ready? Let's go. How do we get back our ident? God given identity that the devil tries to rob us of? He doesn't rob us of it, technically. He gets us to doubt that we truly are who God says we are. Sons of God, kings and priests. The head and not the tale, above and not beneath, more than conquerors. The healed the sons and daughters of God, the beloved of the Father. We can go on and on about who God says we are.
Well, how the devil works is try to get you to doubt who you are. So the way that we heal the trauma is first we we follow step one acknowledging our pain. We have to acknowledge our pain when there's pain in our body, it tells us something's off. It tells us something's wrong. Either it's a result of some sort of stress or some sort of injury. When there's pain in your body, there might be some digestive problem. There may be something that you ate, there may be something. But but you understand pain is a sign to treat the body to treat something in some way. Maybe prayer is the treatment. Maybe all you need is prayer. Or maybe you do need to look at what you're eating or you do need to look at who you've been hanging around. Maybe there's pain because of that, but naming and identifying where trauma has occurred is so important.
Jesus said in Luke chapter eight, verse 30, to the demon possessed man: What's your name? What's your name? In other words, by getting the person to say their name, they were identifying the problem and by Jesus getting the man to name the demon. It gave the man an understanding of what he was up against, and it gave Jesus an understanding of what he was about to cast out of that man. We have to name our pain to be healed from it. Like, Are you feeling rejected? Call it out. Say Yeah, the pain I feel is rejection. The pain I feel is I still am bitter at my father for not raising me right or I'm bitter at my uncle for abusing me or I'm bitter at whatever it is.
We got to name it and then we invite Jesus. Number two. We invite Jesus to heal our trauma. Step two, we invite Jesus to heal our trauma, to heal it, and to restore our inheritance. Now, in Revelation chapter three, verse 20, Jesus said, I stand at the door and knock. He said, If anyone opens the door, I will come into him and I will dine with him and he with me. I will have communion with him. I will have fellowship with him. I will have I will share with him or her. Jesus said that he's knocking at the door, so we need to invite him in. We need to let him in. Just do that right now. Just invite Jesus. Just pray this Jesus come into my life in this area where I've been traumatized, in this area where I have pain in this area, where I've been abused, in this area, where I've been mistreated. Just invite him just by saying that. He's coming in now.
So we invite Jesus to heal our trauma. Lord, I invite you in to heal my trauma, to heal my soul from being stunted in its growth. That's what trauma does, is it freezes you from being able to grow past it, and you begin to build your life around protecting that which hurt you. So what we got to do is we got to open ourselves up to Jesus and let him heal us, be vulnerable in that way. And I want to say something about our destiny, our inheritance. The Bible says that we are to confess our faults to one another.
In James chapter five, verse 16, one translation says, Confess our sins to one another, but the words sin there is...There's several definitions to that. But I believe the definition that applies to this verse is the sin of forfeiting our inheritance, the sin of failing to agree or to believe we are who God says we are. The sin is not the mistake you made. Whether it was anger or fear or lust or whatever you did or thought or felt, the sin is the failure to believe that you are who God says you are. The sin is to forfeit your inheritance in order to protect your pain. And what we need to do is heal the pain so we can grab a hold of our inheritance. And what is ours in Christ. So we have to acknowledge that we've lived below our potential.
This is point number three. Acknowledge you've lived below your potential, below your privilege, below your inheritance. Acknowledge that you've forfeited the best for your safety or your comfort. Acknowledge that you've lived less than who you're created to be because you don't want to get hurt and you don't want to face failure and you don't want to face rejection. Part of learning in life, part of succeeding in life is learning how to process rejection, part of growing, part of meeting people, part of getting the right job, career business, or finding somebody that you can spend your life with. You have to face rejection. If you settle for what's easy and comfortable, that's you protecting yourself from rejection because you think rejections your enemy.
But rejection is actually it can be the greatest thing that ever happened to you because it forces you to have to go after something better, forces you to have to declare that you're not going to let rejection be the final sentence or chapter of your life. A few months ago I was talking, weeks ago, I was talking to our youngest son. He's going to college this fall and he applied at several colleges, impressive colleges, and the one he wanted the most at the time was one that said no to him. And he called me and he was discouraged. And I said, you know, no is the greatest thing that could ever happen to you. You know what “no” is? “No” is a “yes” to something better. “No” and rejection is the acceptance of something better. “No” means something better is going to open up.
You know, what happened is he ended up applying at a new school that he didn't think wasn't on his original list. It's actually better than the school that said no, and they accepted him. And that's where he's going now. So or he will be in the fall. So the “no” was really a “yes”. When you start treating your no’s as yes’s you end up living and thriving in something much better than what you think you settled for. So we have to acknowledge that we've lived less than we've lived below than. There’s a verse in, and we're going to pray together in a few moments. I'm going to give you a few more steps here. But in Romans chapter three, verse 23, I think it says, For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
And you know what that word means to fall short of? It means to become inferior to who you were meant to be. So when it says for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, it means we have become inferior to who God intended us to be. So real sin is to be, is to embrace our inferiority. Sin is embracing our inferiority. You want to break out of sin? You want to stop sinning? Stop embracing inferiority, and start embracing the glory of God and the destiny that He has for you and the greater potential that He has for you. Stop living less than. Stop living your life small. Stop settling for small. Stop settling for average. Stop settling for mediocrity. Trauma has caused you to settle. Heal it and go for the gold. Heal it and go for the prize. Heal it and go for the big. Man, I'm getting excited here. You ready for this?
All right. Next point is, burn down the lies that your pain has taught you. Burn down the lies that your trauma has taught you. You're a failure. You're not enough. You're a piece of crap. You're a loser. You're a reject. You're a lost cause. You're average. You'll never amount to more than your parents or more than where you're at right now. You’ve got to say no to that stuff. You’ve got to burn down those lies that, you're not a loser, you're not a reject, you're not a lost cause. You're not average. You're a man or a woman. You're a man or woman of God. You're a son or daughter of God. You're a son or daughter of God's household. You're a prince and a princess.
In God's kingdom, He's the king and you're the prince and the princesses that belong to him as his beloved royal children. That's who we are. Burn down the lies that pain has taught you. You'll always be addicted. You'll always be a failure. You'll always be at this level. You'll never be able to meet somebody that you really care about. And that really is is going to make your life so much better. I'm telling you, you’ve got to burn down those lives that are making you settle, burn down those lies that pain has taught you about yourself and start building your house on who God says you are above and not beneath. Blessed coming in and blessed going out. The seed of Abraham, new creature in Christ, reigning in life head and not the tail seated with Christ in heavenly places, far above all, principality and power. Burn down those lies that are telling you you're something less than that.
Burn down that false humility, burn down that pride, burn down that stuff that tells you you're less than who God says you are. All of that is all of that is is negativity. All of that is sin, all of that. We think we just have become the kinds of Christians, we got to wake up, stop being the kind of Christian that sees sin as just the physical behaviors that we do that that are bad habits or things that we've done that are breaking the Ten Commandments, because all of them, all of them have been broken. We've all broken them. Most of us have broken all ten of them in our head or in our mind or in our thoughts. Every day or several days in a row. Maybe you're on a losing streak if you broke all those commandments. But this is what sin really is now, is seeing yourself as less than who God says you are.
That's the sin that we should be repenting of. We should get on our knees and say, Forgive me, Lord, for doubting who you said I am. Burn down those lies. And you know what's next to be healed? Aim higher, aim higher. The Bible says, God said to Abraham, Look up and count the stars if you're able. Genesis chapter 15. Because if you can count the stars, that's how many descendants you're going to have. You're going to you're descendants are going to be more in number, more innumerable than the stars in the sky or the sands by the seashore. Aim higher because you're seated with Christ in heavenly places. Aim higher because we're more than conquerors through him that loved us. Aim higher because that's your destiny. And two more things I'll close with and we’ll pray. Step one, if we're going to heal the trauma within and unleash our destiny, acknowledge your pain.
Name it, call it what it is. Number two, invite Jesus to heal it. Number three, acknowledge that you’ve lived below your potential. Number four, burn down the lies. that pain has taught you. Number five, aim higher. Establish your destiny at a higher level. Aim higher because that's where Christ seated you in heavenly places with Him. And number six is the power and the miracle of forgiveness. You see, to heal from trauma, we have to forgive ourselves and we have to forgive anyone that has caused that in our lives.
Forgiveness is the highest manifestation of love and loving yourself in a good way, not self-love in a selfish way, but loving yourself in a healthy way. Forgiveness is the highest manifestation of healing, really healed. Forgiveness is the is the doorway to the greatest healings that will ever happen in your life. And sometimes we just treat forgiveness as it's something that we give to others, but we don't give to ourselves where we have to be generous to ourself in forgiving ourselves, and we will become generous to others in forgiving them. If you're stingy towards yourself, in forgiving yourself, you'll be stingy towards others. How you treat yourself is how you'll treat others forgiveness. Wow. It's the ultimate resolution of the problems caused by the wounds that were perpetrated against us. Forgiveness. It's the ultimate resolution to the problems solved by the pain that was inflicted upon us.
Forgiveness also restores your health. It actually permeates through the cells in your body science has proven this. This is medical, this is physiological, that forgiveness creates positive emotions. It creates kindness and freedom. It creates independent thinking, creates creativity, it creates meaningful connections. It creates open doors that no man can close. Forgiveness is the byproduct of deciding the things that happened to you in the past are no longer going to define you. The trauma you've experienced is no longer going to define you. Forgiveness is the exclamation point of your breaking out of what has contained you and what has limited you.
And number seven is really simple Stop quitting. If you want to be healed from trauma, you got to stop quitting the process of healing. Most people quit when they face resistance, whether it's resistance to their appetites or resistance to exercise or resistance to working things out with your family member. We listen, we we got to stop quitting when we face resistance, we got to stop caving into resistance. We have to choose our pain. We're going to have some pain. We can have the pain of our regret and the pain of our trauma that we stick with, or we can have the pain of resisting it. And disciplining ourselves to think at a higher level. The pain of regret or the pain of discipline.
You see, resistance is what separates us from who we used to be. Resistance is what launches us into greater strength in life. You only get stronger from what you resist. If you meet resistance with pushback. Boy, if we pushed back on resistance, the way we push back at our boss, at our work, or with the way we push back at a family member, the way we push back at things when somebody's giving us feedback because we don't want it. We're defensive. If we would just use that defensiveness against resistance, use that defensiveness against the limitations in our lives, let's start getting offended at what's limiting us. Let's start defending ourselves against what's keeping us boxed in to some limited version of ourselves.
Who's out there ready to receive and ready to have your healing from trauma and launch into your destiny and your breakthrough, breakthrough into your destiny? Come on. Are you ready? Let's do it. Let's start burning down these lies. Let's get to this place where God can truly fulfill all that He created you to experience. Acknowledge your pain. Let's just pray this together. Say in Jesus name, I acknowledge my pain. I acknowledge the trauma from abuse, the trauma from this accident I was in. Whatever the trauma is, whatever comes to you, whatever comes to your mind right now, just acknowledge it. And if nothing comes your mind, just say:
I welcome whatever trauma is hidden in my soul that I need to be healed from. I open myself up to it. And now Jesus, come and reveal it and heal it.
If you know what it is, you reveal it and he'll heal it. If you don't know what it is, he'll reveal it and heal it. So just say:
Jesus, reveal it to me and heal me from it. And Jesus, I invite you into this area of my life. I acknowledge that I've allowed this trauma. We're healing right now. I acknowledge that I've allowed trauma to keep me below my potential. I admit it. I admit I've settled for less than all that you created me to be. I invite you to elevate me to who you created me to be. I admit the sin of accepting inferiority in my life. Accepting less than what you have for me in the name of Jesus. And now, Lord, thank you for giving me eyesight to see the lives that I need to burn down. Thank you for the understanding. Thank you for the understanding to see the lies that have kept me in bondage. In the name of Jesus, I fall away from those lies and I fall in your arms as my Heavenly Father to heal me of the trauma in my life. And I forgive myself for being less than I forgive myself for settling. I forgive myself for being limited. I forgive myself for letting trauma contain me. And I break out and I aim higher to Your purpose for my life, for it is in Christ that I find out who I am and what I'm living for. You're the shepherd of my soul. Jesus. Lead me into your purpose for my life. Amen.
If you prayed that rejoice, it's time to celebrate. It's time to thank God. It's time to just breathe out what you had inside of you. And breathe in this new freedom, this new healing and breakthrough into your purpose and destiny. If you've never received Jesus, would you reach me right now? Just pray this:
Jesus come into my life. I believe your blood cleanses me from my sin. From this day forward, I'm a child of God. I believe you rose from the dead. I'm a child of God.
If you prayed that if you believe that get this book. It's free. You can download this anywhere in the world. The Power of a New Life. It's the next steps in this journey of faith with God. You'll see it on the screen or you'll see it in our comment box. Or you can go to lifechangerschurch.com/salvation and you can download this book for free anywhere in the world. The next steps in this journey with God. And the next next step is to see you at Think Like a Champion podcast or see you right back here at our Sunday service. God bless you. It is well with your soul. Expect things to turn around for good. Amen.