Note

Most of this material first appeared in my book,  How I Learned to Let God Find Me in the Good Times and the Bad: A Spiritual Memoir (published 2018).

Introduction

This article series, Parts 1 – 4, makes the assumption that you already know how to experience the Lord’s love directly, firsthand, for yourself, whenever you wish or need it.

 You see, it’s the regular, repeated, firsthand, experience of His love that SUSTAINS, NOURISHES, PROTECTS and HEALS you during your crisis —leading you to true victory that lasts!

If you don’t know how to experience God’s love whenever you wish or need it, please get my FREE Guide which teaches you in 2 clear, simple steps exactly how to do this.

And make sure you also get its extremely popular and encouraging accompaniment, ‘Relax Your Body’.  Pin this resource on your wall where you can easily see it when you need God’s help urgently, or at any time. And please share both resources with anyone you know who needs the Lord’s help, especially during a personal crisis.

 You see, when you go through a steep crisis in your life, simply seeking advice won’t cut the mustard. No. At this point you need to be able to directly experience the Lord’s LOVE whenever you want or need it.

Why?

 Because at the end of the day, it’s only when you KNOW deep, deep inside you that your are LOVED profoundly by the Lord just as you are —warts , crises, sins, weaknesses, negative emotions, and all —that LASTING  healing happens: physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional healing.

 And there’s another reason why this is hugely important: when you open yourself to the Lord’s direct presence and experience His love directly, you and the Lord become deeply bonded. Trust develops. You begin to feel safe enough to let the Lord truly become God for you. You allow Him to take full responsibility for guiding you through your crisis.

The Lord takes full responsibility for guiding you through your crisis and for seeing to it that you emerge from your crisis 

• victorious
• with your mental, spiritual, emotional and physical health intact
• stronger
• freer
• with a far deeper love for the Lord, YOURSELF, and others! 

And there’s one final reason why this is critically important: it’s only when you know how to experience God’s love firsthand for yourself —whenever you want or need to —that  the Lord can start to heal your ‘false self’.

And unless you allow the Lord to heal your false self, all the other problems that your crisis has already brought about will be far more difficult to overcome!   

The Really Good News for You

The really good news is that as you open yourself up repeatedly to God’s love, God himself undertakes the healing of your false self. (You see, your false self is too entrenched and strong for you to heal it yourself.) 

You therefore accomplish 2 things in one: overcoming your crisis constructively AND healing your false self at the same time.

It’s a precious win-win.

During my first steep crisis at the age of 35, in answer to my heartfelt plea for help, the Lord used a holy Christian woman guide to teach me the utter necessity of both things: i. e.

• how to experience directly God’s love firsthand for myself
• the need to allow Him to heal my false self

Note

At the very same time, and using my holy guide again, the Lord provided me with ongoing training in the Enneagram . This development was completely unexpected. In fact, the Lord seemed to have me directly in his sights: He used a co-author of the world’s very first book on the Enneagram (published just a few months before) to teach me this unusually accurate and impactful map of human personality.

The Enneagram was (and remains) a huge help in understanding the genuine giftedness of our ‘true’ selves and the roots, function, and drawbacks of our ‘false’ selves. For 26 years, I have taught the basics of the Enneagram theory to all the Christian women I’ve guided. Each one testifies to its huge help in genuinely understanding themselves for the first time —their false self as well as their true self —and the ways in which their false self influences their life negatively, while their true self influences it positively.

By the time, therefore, that the second steep crisis of my life descended (which is the crisis I cover in this article series), I was able to rely on all 3 of these things to bring me the profound healing and victory that I needed. I can assure you that the ‘signpost’ events I recount in these 4 articles could never have happened without, first, my understanding of the dire need to experience directly God’s love firsthand for myself; second, the need to allow Him to heal my false self; and, third, how to start achieving both these things!   

Understanding the Enneagram made everything even more deeply impactful.

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Recap of Part 1

In Part 1, I recounted how the Lord spoke to me through Psalm 44; how He used it to answer my heartfelt question: “Why are you letting me suffer like this, Lord?”; how He gave me His answer; the peace His answer gave me; but then how immediately the devil taunted me by telling me that I was imagining things and that I had not heard the Lord’s answer correctly.

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Part 2

‘Testing the Spirits’

I began, therefore, to ‘test the spirits’: 

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God…

1 John 4 NIV

I asked the Lord for a quick sign. I asked God to give me a clear and quick confirmation that I had heard His voice correctly.

I don’t practice or recommend anyone do this under usual circumstances. But in this particular case, I felt I truly needed a confirming sign from the Lord right away.

Here is how I recorded this episode in my diary:

I want to be absolutely sure that this statement (Jesus’ word to me that ‘I have chosen you for this suffering’ and His promise to me that He would heal our family) comes from Christ (the Devil tempts me to doubt it for a little while). 

My diary entry then goes on to record the manner in which I presented my request for confirmation to the Lord. I remember this entire episode as though it were yesterday.

Here is how my diary describes it:

“God, you know the anguish Satan is putting me through now, causing me to doubt whether it was really You that spoke to me so clearly this morning in Psalm 44, in the chapel. You know how great is my pain already Lord, with my husband’s betrayal. You know suffering, Lord, better than anyone, so You know how I feel now. Would you please let me find a scripture right away in the Bible that will confirm your promise (i.e. the Lord’s promise of healing for our family as well as His word to me that He had chosen me for this suffering)? You know, Lord, that I don’t usually do this but would you let me open the Bible to the place You wish to use as confirmation? “

Then, begging the Lord for faith, I opened the scriptures and alighted on the first chapter of Paul the Apostle’s letter to the Philippians.

I read as far as the twenty-sixth verse and then stared in disbelief at the words that followed shortly in the twenty-seventh verse:                 

…I shall know that you are unanimous in meeting the

attack with firm resistance, united by your love for the faith of the gospel and

quite unshaken by your enemies. This would be the sure sign that they will lose

and you will be saved. It would be a sign from God ·that he has given you the

privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well. ·

 

Philippians 1:27 - 30

The Jerusalem Bible, Reader’s Edition (My emphasis)

The last lines were music to my soul:

…he has given you the

privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well.

I spent a few moments trying to digest what I had just read. To my human mind, it seemed too good to be true.

Yet, when all was said and done, I knew I had the faith to accept that God answers our sincere cries for help.

My Confirmation Arrives

I understood that this was in truth the confirmation I had asked the Lord for. Here it was, plain as daylight!

1. God had indeed given me the privilege of ‘believing in Christ’. I could therefore regard my belief in His promise of healing as genuinely coming from Him, since I knew that the Lord IS the One who heals us (Exodus 15:26) and that He turns away no one who asks for healing.

2. Earlier, as I had prayed Psalm 44, God had told me that He had ‘chosen’ me for this suffering. Paul in his letter to the Philippians now explained that our suffering is for Him!

3. Furthermore, Paul explained that our suffering for Him is to be viewed as a privilege! 

4. God had given me, Jan Weel, the privilege both of believing in Him and of suffering for Him.

I knew for certain now that I had heard the Lord correctly when He had said:

‘I have chosen you for this suffering’.

The Lord had graciously given me the confirmation I had needed and asked for.

And since my request for our family’s healing had been born directly out of those words of the Lord to me that He had chosen me for this suffering, I knew that this scripture verse also represented confirmation of His promise of healing for our family.

I had heard the Lord correctly on both counts!

 My diary entry records this event as follows:

I get total confirmation that I heard God correctly when I read Paul’s letter to the Philippians —finally alight on Philippians 1:27-30. 

In the next 7 years of struggle with the Evil One, it would become clear to me that in fact the Lord attached a very special significance to this verse. On three specific occasions, He would go to great lengths to remind me of it, each occasion representing a critical point in my journey through my crisis from pain and evil to lasting victory and resurrection. 

The Critical Role of Prayer of the Heart

None of this progress could have taken place had I not made the decision to hear the Lord speaking to me personally right in the midst of my crisis.

And I couldn’t have heard Him speaking to me with the clarity He did unless I had made the conscious effort to put aside special time in order to enter into His presence and receive His healing LOVE! Love brings with it mutual trust; and it’s this trust allows you to open up a genuine conversation with the Lord. It’s in this ongoing, intimate conversation that you are able to hear Him speaking to you clearly 

I want to assure and encourage you that it’s well worth discovering how to enter into the Lord’s presence so that you may experience His healing LOVE and also gradually discover what He wishes so passionately to TELL you!