Sermon quotes on healing
Ambrose of Milan
No one heals himself by wounding another.
James H. Aughey
Christ is the Good Physician. There is no disease He cannot heal; no sin He cannot remove; no trouble He cannot help. He is the Balm of Gilead, the Great Physician who has never yet failed to heal all the spiritual maladies of every soul that has come unto Him in faith and prayer.
Augustine of Hippo
Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.
Wendell Berry
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays. pg.99, “The Body and the Earth”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure.
Lord Byron
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.
John Calvin
It is a promise which eminently deserves our observation that all who are united to Christ and acknowledge Him to be Christ and Mediator will remain to the end safe from all danger, for what is said of the body of the Church belongs to each of its members since they are one in Christ.
Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Volume 2.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The soul is healed by being with children.
John Eldredge
A wound that goes unacknowledged and unwept is a wound that cannot heal.
Wild at Heart Revised and Updated: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul”, Thomas Nelson, p.106.
Barbara Fiand
Wholeness is brokenness owned and thereby healed.
Quoted in Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging.
Thomas Fuller
Health is not valued till sickness comes.
Keas Keasler
The great hope of Christianity is not that we get to escape all the suffering of the world, but that God is going to use us to be a part of his healing project…
Honey, We’ve Shrunk the Gospel, For the Kingdom (blog)
Robert Kellemen
No grieving; no healing. Know grieving; know healing.
God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting, BMH Books.
Helen Keller
All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.
Martin Luther King Jr.
As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.
Article: “Suffering and Faith”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and enobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
Nobel Lecture: “The Quest for Peace and Justice”
Martin Luther
This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.
Martin Luther
I do not deny that medicine is a gift of God, nor do I refuse to acknowledge science in the skill of many physicians; but, take the best of them, how far are they from perfection? A sound regimen produces excellent effects. When I feel indisposed, by observing a strict diet and going to bed early, I generally manage to get round again, that is, if I can keep my mind tolerably at rest. I have no objection to the doctors acting upon certain theories, but, at the same time, they must not expect us to be the slaves of their fancies.
Brennan Manning
In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.”
Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging, NavPress.
Mother Teresa
The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.
Andrew Murray
The more we allow ourselves to personally experience sanctification by faith, the more we also experience healing by faith. These two doctrines walk together. The more the Spirit of God lives and acts in the soul of believers, the more miracles He will work in the body. By this, the world will recognize what redemption means.
John Newton
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds, in a believer’s ear! It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, and drives away his fear.
Hymn: How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds
Henri Nouwen
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life, Ave Maria Press.
John Ortberg
To be fully known and fully loved is the most healing gift one human being can give another.
Blaise Pascal
Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.
Richard Rohr
If you do not transform your pain, you will surely transmit it.
N.T. Wright
The living God has come with healing and hope in Jesus Christ, has picked up the battered and dying world, and has bound up its wounds and set it on the road to full health.
The Road to New Creation, Sermon, Durham Cathedral, Durham, UK, September 3, 2006.
N.T. Wright
The living God has come with healing and hope in Jesus Christ, has picked up the battered and dying world, and has bound up its wounds and set it on the road to full health.
The Road to New Creation, Sermon, Durham Cathedral, Durham, UK, September 3, 2006.
Richard Plass and James Cofield
What often continues to shape our stories (interpretations) are the implicit emotional responses to our wounds. We must be willing to attend to our wounds and address the emotions embedded in our wounds. Because our story is held by God’s story, we can revisit the specifics of our wounds in light of what Jesus lived. Christ offers us a way of seeing that can transform the emotions embedded in our deepest wounds.
Taken from The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass and James Cofield, Copyright (c) 2014, pp.105-106 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Oswald Chambers
Only one in a thousand sits down in the midst of it all and says—I will watch my Father mend this. God must not be treated as a hospital for our broken “toys,” but as our Father.”
John Ortberg
The strangest thing happens when what we have most wanted to conceal is brought into the open. We don’t die. Instead, we often begin to heal.
Stanley Kunitz
How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?
The Layers
Marc Lewis
I see my past drinking as a behavioral problem, a learned response to dealing (or not dealing) with emotional pain and stress. Once I achieved the excavation of my wounds, I no longer lived with the same anxiety or sense of dread/guilt and shame.
The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 16–17.
Carl Jung
In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which gets rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Quoted in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung
Mal McKissock and Dianne McKissock
One of the greatest needs of all bereaved people is to have access to someone who will take a risk and be involved—someone who is not afraid of intense feelings, but who will encourage their expression, confident that this is part of the ‘healing’ process. We use the word ‘healing’ not to imply that grief is an illness that can be cured, but in acknowledgement that in the early days, weeks, months, years, every part of one’s being can feel raw, inflamed and vulnerable.
Anne Wilson Schaef
When we need these healing times, there is nothing better than a good long walk. It is amazing how the rhythmic movements of the feet and legs are so intimately attached to cobweb cleaners in the brain.
Wendell Berry
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
Mary Jane Moffat
Recovery is not a process we can will, but consists of experiencing many small deaths, the passing of significant anniversaries, until our identity is solid and natural in the pronoun “I.”
In the Midst of Winter, Selections from the Literature of Mourning, Ed. Mary Jane Moffett.
George Herbert
Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recovered greenness?
The Flower
Algernon Charles Swinburne
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
When the Hounds of Spring
Ashley Hales
Healing begins at the place of hunger.
Taken from Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much by Ashley Hales Copyright (c) 2009 by Ashley Hales. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Karl A. Menninger
Love cures people: the ones who receive love and the ones who give it, too.
Dick Ryan
Healing begins when, in the face of our own darkness, we recognize our helplessness and surrender our need for control… we face what is, and we ask for mercy.
Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) & River Tam (Summer Glau)
Shepherd Book: “River, you don’t . . . fix the Bible.
River: It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense.
Shepherd Book: It’s not about . . . making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.’” (Editor’s Note: This quote seems to be half-right, half-wrong, but worthy sermon fodder)
Firefly
Ayishat Akanbi
If you’ve decided your healing is dependent on other people acknowledging their faults you’ll still be waiting in your grave.
John Chrysostom
The fire of sin is intense, but it is put out by a small amount of tears, for the tear puts out a furnace of faults, and cleans our wounds of sin.
Brittany Burgunder
Sometimes the process of growth looks a lot like destruction and pain. But you’ll realize with time that you’re not breaking; you’re healing.
Goodreads, accessed July 4, 2021.
Christine Langley-Obaugh
We repeat what we don’t repair.
Quoted in Stark Raving, “We Repeat the Things We Do Not Repair,” Medium, April 2, 2019.
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