Heart RehabSample

DRYING UP A BAD PATTERN

You encourage me, reader. Why? Because the very act of starting this reading plan demon­strates that you are striving to be intentional with the healing of your heart. You are looking for scriptural guidance to grow and flourish. Your purposeful pursuit of healing shows that you are open to how Jesus can stem the flow of whatever in your life hurt you and left you bleeding.

We see in Mark 5 how Jesus wants us to come to Him in our pain. A woman came to Jesus wanting to be healed. For twelve years she had suffered with an issue of blood and had grown tired of doctors and people saying there was nothing she could do. She had spent all her resources. All she could do was pursue Jesus and touch the hem of His robe.

Here’s a part of the story we can easily overlook: “Immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of the affliction” (Mark 5:29 NKJV).

If the sick woman who sought Jesus hadn’t been intentional about her healing and then experienced a bad pattern being dried up, we never would have known her story.

Look at Elijah in 1 Kings 17 when God tells him to go “hide by the Brook Cherith” where he will be sustained (verses 3–4). But then what takes place? “It happened after a while that the brook dried up, because there had been no rain in the land” (verse 7).

If Elijah’s brook hadn’t dried up, perhaps we never would have heard the story about his showdown on Mount Carmel. And he wouldn’t have needed to ask the widow for food and then seen miracles happen.

Is God trying to dry up something in your life in order to draw you, and others, closer to Him? Are you re­sisting it because the pattern you have, while painful, is familiar? What will God dry up when you pursue Him and touch Him? When you seek His face?

Sometimes it’s the hardest moments of our lives, the circumstances that don’t change, where God deals with our destructive patterns and brings our greatest healing.

Father, dry up any and every pattern that is not conducive to Your purposes. In Jesus’s name I pray, amen.