Healing Your Church Hurt Quotes

“Here is where it leads us. And let me make this clear: there is nothing that happened in that wounding experience with that church that is worth what is happening to you now.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“Every human soul is different. We are all shaped by both experience and design, by callings and the way our gifts mold our inner lives. Every soul has a bent, a drift, a way it wants to go. And when hard times come and the inner person writhes in torment, the soul reaches for what it thinks is anesthesia, for something to medicate the pain.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“Life has meaning only in the struggle, Victory or defeat is in the hand of God, So let us celebrate the struggle.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“The confirmation of history is that we are not called despite our wounding and betrayal; we are wounded and betrayed because we are called. And God yearns to make your pain redemptive in your life.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“As you forgive, you are allowing God to clean up the mess and start making your life right again. The demonic taunts are coming to an end. Peace is returning. Perhaps relationships are even being restored, and your faith is rising.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“Your horrific time of trouble offered you truths about yourself, windows into your own soul, and maps to the terrain of your inner life. Wise people learn to gather this intelligence to help them conquer themselves and then to live in loftier ways.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“There is no such thing as perfection in a church. Instead, what you should be looking for is a covenanted body, a leadership team that has the goods for coaching you in Christ, and a place where you can invest yourself - from cleaning toilets to teaching what you know to ministering in song.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“When church becomes for us an anointed have, when the grace is flowing and all is well we become sentimental...we remake people into what we need them to be. We are not wise in our love, prudent in our commitments, knowing in our fellowship. And so the evil comes and we are first amazed and then destroyed and then knocked off our axis as if never to return.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“You must not think of them [Hebrews 12 Cloud of Witnesses] as perfect saints who never suffered as we do. Instead you must see them as the flawed and the betrayed and the wounded who simply chose to live above the programming of their pain.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“It is as though there is a splinter working its way to the surface, only this splinter is in your soul. And just as the skin wants a foreign object gone and pushes it out, the soul wants to be healthy and will not leave you in peace until you stop drenching it with the poisons of your feelings about the past.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“There is no such thing as perfection on earth and certainly not in a church.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“The very gifts God has given us, the very calling on our lives, is about investing our gifts into the lives of others in order to lift them to their purpose.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“The Bible teaches repeatedly that we each have a destiny—a specific calling and/or purpose—that is determined in advance by God.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“We had hoped. It is what we say on the other side, when our vision is shattered and we feel ourselves to be fools for trusting in something we couldn’t even see.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“It is not enough that the mess is cleaned up, like a house being prepared for company. We can only be satisfied when the condition of our hearts that led to the mess in the first place is challenged, healed, and turned onto a healthy, Christlike path.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“But the truth is, when it comes to emotional pain—the pain that registers inside—the greatest damage is often the thing that continues to resonate when the feeling of the pain subsides. It is that message that the pain tells us about ourselves and about the meaning of our lives.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“You are destined for your hardships because you are destined for great works of God.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“The loftiest statement of your cleansing and redemption—after all the pain you’ve endured—is that now you realize what God was doing and you can get on with that high calling for your life.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“Hard times are painful, but also redemptive—meaning that in the hand of God they accomplish good things in our lives.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“It may even be that you can find absolutely nothing redeeming about the people who have wronged you. Perhaps the only hook of compassion you can find is to pity them in their sinful state. Whatever the case, if you can find even the smallest opening of compassion for their lives, that charizomai spirit of mercy and grace can flow in. Forgiveness can reign and you will be free.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“When I look at those I want to forgive, I strive to not see them in evil terms, but to find the compassionate narrative behind their hurtful actions against me.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“It is time to let them go. Open the cages, tell them you’re sorry, forgive them as Jesus forgave you, and burn that trophy room to the ground.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“God will not free us until we free others.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“If forgiveness is nothing more than a rearranging of our feelings, we have no defense against this. But if forgiveness is a formal process of sending sins and wrongs away from us and placing them upon Jesus on the cross, we have a barrier between us and the darkness that tries to come back in.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“The solution is to forgive, to let go of the bait in that trap and pull yourself free.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“The more you rehearse the wrongs against you and the more you stay in that trap, the more the syringes of bitterness release their toxins into your soul.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“But you will always be tempted and you need to know this. The devil is trying to shape your life with wounding and offense in order to keep you from a life defined by the purposes of God.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“Facing the reality of that painful season when it felt as though you were in a sandstorm with no skin is the key to becoming whole now.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“A man is known by the company he keeps. We all know that we can tell a great deal about people by looking at those they call friends. It is also true that we can tell a great deal about ourselves by what our friends do when we hit hard times.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People

“What we want and need in our bitter, rebellious times is God, but unwilling to turn fully to him, we reach for idols and forfeit his intended grace.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Healing Your Church Hurt: What To Do When You Still Love God But Have Been Wounded by His People