How to Look at the Hurting
Your best friend keeps running back to shallow, sexual relationships. Your adult son seems like a shell of himself, silently battling addiction. Your spouse feels like he’s slipping away, as he gives more and more of himself to work. Can you think of a loved one whose hurtful life choices demonstrate their own woundedness within? Maybe you try to share truth with them, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. Do you ever wonder if your prayers for them meet the same fate? The gospel offers hope and practical help for us as we walk alongside the hurting people in our lives.
Look on the Hurting with Grace
All of us are prone to wander—prone to dig broken cisterns for ourselves and turn to many things other than Jesus for our worth, identity, peace, and pleasure. Yet, we’re tempted to look at others’ choices from a vantage point of superior judgment. When, in reality, we are on equal footing, and must remember the grace we have undeservedly received from the Lord. Consider Titus 3:4–6,
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.
Judgmentalism in our hearts emanates an odor easily perceived by the nostrils of the hurting. If we don’t closely monitor our pride and submit it to the kingship of Christ, we’ll do the opposite of what we hope to do. We’ll drive wedges in relationships and hang heavy millstones of heretical legalism around already-stooped necks.
Remembering God’s grace to us and our desperate need for Jesus positions us to properly apply the help that the hurting truly need. They need him. They need the freedom and hope of the gospel. They need to see Jesus accurately reflected in us as we kneel beside them and dress their wounds with the gospel, not emotionally cross to the other side of the road like the priest and Levite did (Luke 10:30–36).
Look Beyond the Behavior
Our behavior reflects truths that we’re believing about God, ourselves, and the world around us. Even when people we love make choices that are hurtful or confusing, the gospel can give us lenses to see past the surface.
Instead of choosing the self-protection of relational distance, or a perfectly-worded comeback, we can enjoy the peace that comes from waiting on the Lord who is our defender and our shelter (Ps. 62:5–7). As God’s beloved children, we have access to the perfect counselor at all times. We get to carry our wounds to him and receive genuine help and healing. And we don’t have to ask the hurting around us to settle for anything less than that. The world’s latest guru and our own human wisdom pale in comparison to the Way, the Truth, the Life. Jesus truly is and has all that we need.
The story of his life, death, resurrection, and current reign may seem disconnected from your friend’s dating woes, your brother’s battle with alcohol, or your spouse’s workaholism. But it isn’t, dear friend. Jesus is the solution to life’s problems because he is the only one who can heal our heart—the wellspring from which everything else flows. Ask him to give you the perseverance to “stay at the table,” even when cutting out the uncomfortable calls to you like the Sirens’ song. As you rest in your identity in Christ, seated securely in him (Eph. 2:4–7), may he grant you eyes to see the heart-wounds that are likely fueling the harmful choices, and the courage to give the needed gospel medicine.
Look Forward to Christ’s Return
Suffering naturally draws our attention downward. When the people we love most are hurting, it can feel all-consuming. We naturally want to “fix it,” to offer solutions and see them take effect quickly. When we don’t see change, it’s so easy to feel discouraged and hopeless. But we serve the Creator and consummate head-lifter. He gently raises our chin and reminds us to plant our gaze on him.
It serves us well to remember that God operates on a completely different timeline than ours. When God declares in Isaiah 55:8–9 that his ways and his thoughts are infinitely higher than our own, that includes the ways in which he will write the beginning, the middle, and the end of your loved one’s story. We cannot fathom the details of the ways that God will bring about the glory that he deserves. But we can trust that it absolutely will happen.
There’s an amazing promise directly before God’s declaration of supremacy in Isaiah: “Let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (Is. 55:7). Our compassionate God abundantly pardons those who genuinely turn to him. You can trust God’s character, even when you can’t see his plans unfold.
Whether you plant gospel seeds or water them, whether you feel knee-deep in the miry clay or feel too far away to be effective—keep trusting the only One who can make things grow (1 Cor. 3:7). And remember that one day all things will be made new! We watch with anticipation for Christ’s return, and while we wait, we ask the Spirit to give us a heavenly mindset. Only he can grow within us a godly balance of caring for the hurting in the world and peace in knowing that this is not our forever-home. So we look to Jesus, because only he provides us with gospel lenses to rightly see those who are hurting.
