38: Obstacles in Inner Healing

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On The Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 38. We are continuing our discussion about inner healing today with a focus on some of the obstacles we might face.

[00:00:29] Stephanie: Before we begin, I just wanted to thank you, dear listener, for joining us. An easy way to support what we’re doing here is to subscribe to Deeper Walk’s On The Trail Podcast, leave a review, and share with others. Thank you so much.

Greetings, Father.

[00:00:44] Marcus: Greetings, Daughter. I know, the last couple times you’ve asked an icebreaker question, so I thought it was only fair if I asked the question this time.

One of the things people may not know about you is that you are a novelist in your spare time, and you wrote a beautiful novel that you shared with the family last Christmas, and are working on some other ones, and you go to conferences with other people.

You’ve got some friends who do this, so I’m going to ask: Out of your friendship circle you have in the last couple of years, what’s one novel that really stood out to you that you liked?

[00:01:13] Stephanie: Oh, one novel.

[00:01:15] Marcus: Or one author, start with an author. Then you can narrow it down.

[00:01:17] Stephanie: All right. First person who comes to mind is Nadine Brandes. She writes young adult books. She’s got dystopian historical fantasy and fantasy, and she is just a solid woman of God. She’s so fabulous.

[00:01:32] Marcus: She’s got nicknames for her kids on Instagram.

[00:01:36] Stephanie: Yes, her first child’s name is Halfling and it’s wonderful. She’s a big Lord of the Rings fan. I like a lot of her books for different reasons. One that sticks out to me a lot is Fawkes, which is about Guy Fawkes. Again, it’s a young adult, historical fantasy, and she does some interesting things with analogies with God.

[00:01:55] Marcus: Well, we could have a whole podcast just on novels you’ve read.

[00:01:58] Stephanie: How about you?

[00:01:59] Marcus: I tend to read historical fiction. Fiction novels are my favorite kind. Recently,  I’ve found this guy, Brian Godwa, who’s written Watch the Watchers and Nephilim and stuff like that.

It’s fun just to get in touch with things that are looking at the world a little bit differently, but still have a connection to the Bible at some level. So that’s been fun to see his take on all that.

[00:02:22] Stephanie: Fun. Thank you for that.

[00:02:26] Marcus: Perfect segue into talking about what we’re doing.

[00:02:31] Stephanie: Last episode we introduced the heavier topic of inner healing, and we’re just gonna go heavier today. But then we’ll come back out of it. So, first, why don’t we say where people can get more information?

[00:02:45] Marcus: When we talk about inner healing, the core book is Understanding the Wounded Heart. That’s the book that presents the Wounds, Lies ,Vows, Stronghold pattern, then talks about the four tools, and explains the R.E.A.L. prayer process. That’s the core book.

Connected to that is a little booklet called REAL Prayer: A Guide to Emotional Healing that was designed to be like The Steps to Freedom to go with. If you just want to walk somebody through the REAL prayer process, here’s everything you need to kind of get started with that.

And then if they want to go deeper, School of Ministry is where you can actually get trained on how to do this kind of prayer ministry. If you’re looking for help personally, just start at the website, go to under the “more” tab, go to referrals, and we’ve got a page with some networks that help you get started in looking for some help.

[00:03:32] Stephanie: So to be clear, we are not a counseling ministry. We don’t have counselors on a campus or anything like that.

[00:03:36] Marcus: Not taking people at this point. So, yes, just so we’re clear. The point of a referral network is to help people get started and looking. We can’t possibly sign off on everybody and say we vetted them completely because they’ve let us know that they do this.

[00:03:51] Stephanie: Very good. So as we get into this topic of inner healing, and obstacles we might face, let’s just start with: What are some of the typical obstacles?

[00:04:01] Marcus: You might appreciate this: the people that have the most trouble connecting to Jesus, and feeling like they get any kind of connection, are middle aged white males. Being someone who’s just past middle age, probably into my elder years, I could connect to that a lot.

People who have trouble getting their relational circuits in their brain on, who have trouble connecting relationally, period, are also going to have the hardest time connecting relationally with God.

One of the reasons that we like to start with gratitude and appreciation, and interactive gratitude and appreciation with people, is to try to wake up the relational circuits in their brain, because getting the RCs on really makes it much easier to establish a connection.

So a lot of times, one of the obstacles that people run into is that they’re trying to dive straight in to an experience and their brain isn’t really fully in a place to do that yet. I’d say that’s the first typical obstacle we run into is people have to wake up those relational circuits.

For people who are not sure what you mean by relational circuits. In RARE Leadership and other books, Jim Wilder and I have laid out a four-step level. It’s Jim’s model. He came up with it, I just named them. Level One is Attachment. Level Two is Assessment. Level Three is Attunement. Level Four is Action, or it’s the commander, the captain part of the brain.

So we’re saying that if your higher levels are not online, it can be much harder to make this kind of connection, so helping people get into that part of their brain first helps.

[00:05:34] Stephanie: Well, like you were saying before that, a lot of times where we struggle in interpersonal relationships, we’re going to struggle with our relationship with God, because he is a person. So this would be an obstacle in relationships, this would be an obstacle in inner healing, but also just normal, general, everyday listening prayer too.

[00:05:52] Marcus: Yes, it’s going to be the most common obstacle for just general listening prayer. The part of my brain that tunes into these things is offline, and if the part of my brain that tunes into these things is offline, it’s going to be very hard.

So to get into the brain science side of listening prayer, which could be a whole episode, just the brain science, what’s going on in your brain when you’re practicing this, Dr. Wilder calls this mutual mind. That is, at the Level Three, the Attunement level of the brain, is the part that can experience mutual mind with somebody.

So for instance, you and I make eye contact as we’re sitting here. You can kind of read, “Okay, where are you going with this?” Or you can kind of read, “Hey, that’s great. I’m glad you brought that up.” There’s a lot of non-verbals that take place. Well, that is all happening at this level three part of your brain, which is attunement.

So if that part of your brain is kind of shut down because you’re in overwhelm, it is much harder to connect relationally with God or with anybody else until that gets addressed.

[00:06:48] Stephanie: I like the analogy, I can’t remember if it was Jim or Chris or who uses it, but the analogy of tuning a radio or your phone reception, or getting your RCs on is like helping to tune that radio. It’s not that God isn’t speaking to you. it’s that you need to get yourself into the place to receive.

[00:07:06] Marcus: Exactly. It’s not that God isn’t speaking, but sometimes we have to get that dial tuned in a little more accurately.

[00:07:12] Stephanie: Any other typical obstacles?

[00:07:14] Marcus: That’s the first one I look for. The second one would be a spiritual obstacle. That is, is there something demonic getting in the way? Again, one of the things, when I say demonic, usually I’ve listened to their story by now and I have some kind of idea of, if they have situations in their past that would have opened the door to something demonic.

A lot of times what happens is we have to bind something, we have to deal with something at a warfare level that then opens up the door for them to be able to make the connection. There are times when the warfare has to happen before you can get to the next step.

[00:07:50] Stephanie: Can you tell the quick story of when you were hiking with Ben and there was a snake?

[00:07:57] Marcus: Ah, yes. We were in the Cascade Mountains visiting a family member who lived there at the time. Ben was young. He was seven or something like that. We decided to go hiking on the trail. He got ahead of me and there was a log laying across the trail. All of a sudden I had this flash in my head back to a sermon I had heard ten years before. It was a sermon from a preacher from Alabama, and he said how he was taught to always step on top of a log when hiking in the woods, and then jump across, because snakes like to sleep in the shade.

I’ve never run into a snake in the wild in my life. I didn’t know anything about this, but for some reason, I think it was the Holy Spirit, right? Yes. That story popped in my head and I yelled to Ben, “Hey, step on top of the log and jump. Don’t just step over it.” He did. I did. And then I looked back and, sure enough, there was a snake sleeping in the shade there. And I was like, “Well, why don’t we get a walking stick?”

I’ve often used that story to illustrate the Christian’s approach to spiritual warfare. That is, we didn’t go on a hike looking for snakes to whack on the head, but we knew enough about snakes to know where they like to hang out. And so it’s to look for them there.

In the same way, I’m not looking for a demon behind every bush. But I know where demons like to hang out. So when you listen to the story and you hear that they’ve got things in their story that typically attract demonic activity, you’re like, you know what? Common sense tells us we might want to look into that a little bit and see if that needs to be addressed.

Now I will also say, there are plenty of stories of people who connected with Jesus, and because of that, the warfare stuff got taken care of, and it’s gone the other direction too, but I’m just saying I have had times where we had to do the warfare stuff first before we could establish a connection with Jesus.

[00:09:42] Stephanie: Whenever I hear stories of having to deal with warfare first, I feel like there is some element of perspective correcting or healing happening. It exposes where the enemy has been active, and when that happens it’s very useful to the person to know, “Oh, that was the enemy.”

[00:10:01] Marcus: One of the benefits of doing warfare and inner healing together, I liken it to putting the pearls against black crushed velvet background. It really makes those pearls pop. Sometimes the warfare stuff provides that black background, so that when Jesus does the healing, it just pops all the more. And the contrast between what the enemy was trying to do and what Jesus just did becomes all the more obvious, and sometimes that can be very helpful to people.

[00:10:26] Stephanie: Yes, and in cases of sin or whatever gave permission to the enemy to be there, sometimes it’s also helpful so that they know not to do that again. They have a better understanding of, “Oh yes, this is where the snakes like to hide.” That just came to mind as you were talking about stepping on the log.

All right. Any other spiritual obstacles?

[00:10:43] Marcus: Take it maybe a step deeper. Last time, I told the story about the Ukrainian translator and a counterfeit Jesus showing up. Well, that might surprise some people because you’re thinking, you asked Jesus. If you ask for a fish, he’s not going to give you a snake. And the answer is, absolutely, that’s correct. And because he’s not going to give you a snake, if a snake shows up, you know where it came from, right?

That was a demonic insertion to try to interrupt the process. This is just a completely personal experience. I haven’t done a study of it or anything like this, but I have found about 25 percent of the time, it feels like people end up with a counterfeit first.

The pattern that I’ve noticed in a counterfeit of Jesus showing up and doing something is a couple of things. One is, the Jesus who shows up is unhelpful or is making it worse, or is often characteristic of the view of Jesus they had as a child. For example, like it was for the translator who saw the Ukrainian Orthodox priest show up.

As a little kid, she was not in that church, and when she saw it and it was a little bit spooky and scary to her, and so what showed up was sort of this spooky scary part of it. I’m not saying that they are, but from her perspective as a little child, that’s what it felt like.

[00:12:10] Stephanie: So false Jesuses who showed up, it’s not a treatise on, “Oh, if It was this denomination, that means this denomination is demonic.” That’s not what’s happening.

[00:12:17] Marcus: No, it’s not what’s happening, because I’ve had a false Baptist, false Catholic, false Orthodox. I mean, it’s not an indictment of the whole denomination, but their childhood Jesus, if you will, was off.

If somebody has a legalistic Jesus show up, that’s going to be much more common in the denominations that tend to have a legalistic issue. The craziest one was somebody who asked for Jesus to show up and literally saw a bug in a white gown, and I’m like, “That is the, okay, just tell it to leave.” We don’t have to test that. Just tell it to leave us. The backstory on that was that he had grown up in a home that saw Christianity as weird.

[00:13:00] Stephanie: It was an atheist home, right?

[00:13:01] Marcus: Yes, it was an atheist home that just saw Christianity as the weirdest thing ever, and so he grew up thinking of Jesus as the weirdest thing ever. And guess what showed up when he first asked for Jesus – this counterfeit thing that was really weird.

So that’s why I said there can be some benefit actually to having a counterfeit show up because you can actually correct something. It helps to create that correction in the scenario.

[00:13:24] Stephanie: It’s not that the enemy is winning a battle and getting in there and, “Aha, I stopped God from working!”  But God might allow the enemy to show up there because that’s something that needs to get dealt with.

[00:13:36] Marcus: The enemy may be trying to interrupt the process, but in the end, God uses it for good. So that’s what’s happening there.

[00:13:40] Stephanie: God is good. Are there any other obstacles about listening prayer you want to cover? What about from the prayer minister’s side? What might be some obstacles?

[00:13:46] Marcus: So there are mistakes I’ve made trying to to help people and there are common ones that happen.  One of the mistakes I made, especially early on, was I would try to push the person to the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to them, because I’m thinking, “Well, if we get the worst one out of the way, the rest will be easy.”

That’s not always what God wants to do. And so there are times when I can push into something that the person isn’t really ready to push into. That’s a common mistake that can happen and create problems. And even, honestly, trying to force that this is the right thing to be doing right now.

I met with one person who had a dramatic experience with Jesus, and the next time he showed up I just assumed we were going to go to another memory. Nothing was happening. I remember part way through, I had this thought in my head that I took as being the Holy Spirit which was, “This isn’t the only tool you’ve learned.” And I kind of laughed. I realized that.

We ended up actually going through and helping him get grounded in his identity in Christ in that session. There’s more things that you can do with somebody, so sometimes trying to force everything to fit into the common pattern can be a problem.

[00:14:54] Stephanie: When you find a tool that really works, there can be a temptation to be like, “I’ll use this tool for everything,” but that’s a good reminder that you have a lot of good tools.

[00:14:59] Marcus: Yeah, it’s the hammer and the nail principle, right? I’ve got a hammer now, everything looks like a nail, and that can be a temptation. Then there’s this other problem of wanting to take control of a situation because I feel out of control.  Somebody starts to share something, and I’m starting to get nervous, and now I want to take control and make this happen the way that I think it should happen.

That can make a variety of problems. I could make suggestions about, “Well, why don’t you picture Jesus doing this,” and you want to stay away from those kinds of things.

So there’s a lot more depth we could go into on this, but this is just kind of, I call this kind of a flesh reaction. There are things that I do in my flesh to try to take control of the situation that aren’t really being Spirit led. And those things can also get in the way and create problems.

[00:15:47] Stephanie: Well, this is a crash course and very good. I really encourage anyone who wants to learn more, if you are a prayer minister, or you’re interested in becoming a prayer minister, explore the resources that Dad mentioned at the beginning. If you’re really passionate about it, consider looking into the School of Ministry and the prayer ministry certification.

Let’s draw back up into maybe a more, I don’t want to say surface level, but we’ve been in the very deep end of the pool here. At Deeper Walk, we have a lot of resources to help people who want to go deeper, into that deep end of the pool, but, for the everyday person, do you have any practical insights here?

[00:16:27] Marcus: Well, if you think about these obstacles to our healing, if you stop and think about it, they’re actually the obstacles we tend to run into with almost everything we’re doing: trying to get close to God, trying to be more spiritual, to be a better Christian. And that is, our relational circuits are offline, and we’re like, “Why can’t I ever seem to connect with God?”

Well, a lot of times it’s because I live my whole life with my relational circuits off and I need to learn how to get those back on. You’re like, “Well, how do I do that?” A quick tool is CAKE: Curiosity, Appreciation, Kindness, Eye contact.

We have a whole lot of training on what to do with relational circuits. Same thing with spiritual obstacles. Sometimes I’m stuck, and because I’m in bondage, I need a tool like The Steps to Freedom in Christ. I need to go get free from some things in my life.

It’s not just that these are obstacles to inner healing. These are things that can affect everything that we do. And same thing with the flesh. The flesh, by definition, basically  is that part of me that doesn’t trust God. And because there is some part of me that doesn’t trust God, I’ve got only one option. That is, I’m going to take control of this.

You can see how that gets in the way of everyday things in our lives all of the time. So in a sense, I’m just taking our everyday obstacles that we run into, applying them to this. I find this fairly typical with deep-end-of-the-pool issues, that a lot of times, what’s happening when you’re in the deep end of the pool, is it’s just making these everyday issues more dramatically clear.

Everybody deals with this at some level, but in this case, it’s just obvious that if we don’t deal with that, we’re not going to get anywhere. And so I think that those things all connect. I think that there may be more relevance here than some of us think.

[00:18:04] Stephanie: Very good! We’re coming up to the end of the episode. Any final thoughts?

[00:18:09] Marcus: I have lots of thoughts.

[00:18:12] Stephanie: We will have many more discussions in the future.

[00:18:14] Marcus: This actually is bringing us to the end of our series, so I just kind of wanted to wrap up. We moved from resilience right into connecting with God as one of the ABCs of resilience. Connecting with God and listening prayer, to really connecting with God in our darkest moments and our darkest memories,  and realizing with all of these things, there’s a natural progression here.

One of the things I’ve learned through the years is a lot of folks grow their intimacy with God through their emotional healing journey. That is, you don’t have to get past all of your emotional healing stuff before you can be close to God. A lot of times it is as you’re pressing in to those places that are hard in your life and you’re bringing Jesus into those specifically.

One of my favorite old stories is My Heart, Christ’s Home. It’s this idea of thinking of my life as a house, and I’ve invited Jesus in, and he lives with me. But there are rooms in my house where I’ve never brought him. I haven’t let him in here. Sometimes these points of pain in our past are like those rooms in my house where Jesus hasn’t really been let in there yet.

This is what we’re talking about at some level: in discipleship, I want to be a whole-hearted Christian. I want to be completely surrendered to God. I want to be all his. What keeps me from getting there? Well, one of the obstacles that keeps us from getting there, is that we have these rooms that Jesus hasn’t been invited to yet.

So it just makes sense that the more that we can build a connection with Jesus in these specific rooms that our walk is going to go deeper, and we’re going to see more intimacy, and I don’t have to be all the way through with my journey for that to begin happening.

[00:19:59] Stephanie: Thank you for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk. International is a nonprofit organization and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official trailblazers who commit to donating $25 or more per month. We invite you to consider becoming a trailblazer.

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