About Hearing E-Book

Heinrich and Hildegard Becker

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 149

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The purpose of this book is to give each reader courage to depend completely upon the Holy Spirit when praying with and blessing others and when practicing counselling. Through Listening. He knows exactly what each individual person needs and what can help them the most. 25 years of experiencing the working of the Holy Spirit have been woven into these accounts. Building upon Listening Prayer and Listening Blessing, we are led into Listening Counselling. This book is not one (a book) which should teach a method, so that we can learn how to counsel as if following a recipe, but shares the accounts of the miracles which we experienced as we were closely led by the Holy Spirit. How well he knows his children, how he lovingly brings to their attention what is hidden and can be a help to us. So that the Father’s children can finally enter and live in freedom.

Leseprobe

Heinrich and Hildegard Becker

About Hearing

Praying, Blessing, Counselling

Books on Demand

All first names given in the examples and incidents are changed.

When we speak of God in this book, we speak of God the Father, the father of Jesus, “Abba”, as Jesus calls him.

When we speak of Jesus, we speak of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father.

When we speak of the Holy Spirit, we speak of the Spirit whom Jesus has sent us as our helper and advocate.

All given bible quotes are taken from the bible translation of the “New International Version (NIV)“.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Introduction

About Hearing

Forgiveness

Starting Points

Practical Tips and Tools

Incidents

Epilogue

Preface

God knows us, God knows you!

That sounds trivial – at first. But when I bring to my mind that I personally know who the President of the Unites States is and that I know him or her, but he or she does not even know of my existence, then this statement gains significant value. When I furthermore envision that God so loves me that he knows countless details of my life, then this shall open my eyes for God’s interest in me. God the Father has billions of children, but he knows each one individually and personally. Moreover, God has chosen us before he created the world1, he has pondered over us for uncountable years, and he now wants to speak to us about what he has placed within us. All of our lifetime will not suffice therefor, as we shall see.

Unfortunately, a lot has gone wrong in our lives to this day. People have become guilty towards us, and we have become guilty towards them.

God knows you!

This statement can unfortunately make me believe that God has a long list with all my faults, my failures and my guilt; and that he catches me every time I do something wrong or when I have a bad day. And this list gets longer and longer every day.

But this is not the case! In the Gospel according to Luke2 Jesus tells us about his Father in the parable of the prodigal son. The strangest moment is when the son arrives at his father’s house, after his return – and the father does not accuse or settle up with him, but starts with the restoration of the son into his original status, without properly listening to the son’s confession. He tells him: “It is great that you are here again.” And he does not leave him in the olds rags in which he came, symbolising his slave status. He neither gives him the status of a hireling nor of a foreman nor of a servant such as Eliezer of Damascus3 who will inherit the estate if no heir is born. No, the father reinstates him into the status of a son, without any contribution from the prodigal son’s side.

Jesus says: This is how the Father is like. He is a Father who has time for me (!). He is not interested in my guilt, but in my trust in him. By the way, fatherhood (and motherhood) are the only “contracts” that are irredeemable. Marriages can be divorced, work contracts can be rescinded, and purchase contracts can be revoked. But parenthood cannot be rescinded. Parents can decide whether they want to have a child or not, but once the child is born they will “forever” remain father and mother to this child. How much more does this apply to God, the Father, who has wanted us ever since the creation of the world?

God knows you!

You know God, but he knows you better than you can imagine. Let us read Isaiah 43:1 et seqq. and let us replace the names of Jacob or Israel with our own names.

Verse 1: “But now, this is what the Lord says— he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel: ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.’ ”

Verse 5: “Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west.”

Verse 6: “I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth.”

God knows you!

This book tells about the experiences we have made with hearing prayer, hearing blessings and hearing counselling. The most astonishing fact first: Whenever we had time to listen to God, the Holy Spirit also had time for us. It is just as Moses experienced it: As soon as he entered the tent of meeting, God came to meet him in the pillar of cloud.4

God’s interest with his people and with every single one of us has always been to reinstate us into the life with him that he had initially planned for us. And God always acts individually with each of his children, he never acts the same, he does not use methods.

It is an honour for us to be present when God acts and gets involved with people. Would you like to be “infected” with God’s love and acting?

1 Ephesians 1:3-4 and similar in Jeremiah 1:4

2 Luke 15:11-31

3 Genesis 15:2

4 Exodus 33:9

Introduction

It is helpful to start with a definition what counselling is and what it is not. In her book, Martina Plieth5 explains the different scientific forms of psychology:

“Psychology is the science that examines the conscious processes and conditions as well as their causes and effects.6 It is the science of subjective life processes that are linked with objective ones.

Depth psychology is understood as a collective term for the subdivision of psychology that claims not to stick to the surface of the conscious soul life, but to penetrate into the subconscious and unconscious depth of the soul and thereby to put forward the “instinct-dynamic” relationship between one’s will and emotions. An exact definition of the term “depth psychology” is very complex because – as F. Dorsch rightly remarks – depth psychology has become science, therapy and philosophy at once.

Psychoanalysis can be understood as a “treatment originally developed at the end of the 19th century by Breuer and Freud to cure psychological illnesses” and can, if developed into depth psychology science, be categorized as part of the latter.

Psychotherapy shall be understood as the science of the treatment of psychological and psychologically induced illnesses with the help of psychological means.

What counselling means in its entity is not easy to determine and can only be defined with the help of examples. “

How can we perform counselling when God never does the same thing twice? When Jesus never performed the same miracle twice? Even his healings differed from each other and were individually tailored to the people concerned.

The answer is: There is no method. Just like Martina Plieth suggested, this book is an exemplary attempt to contemplate and to describe the essence of counselling from another point of view. Here is an observation that we have made in churches and in Christian environments:

It is wrong to believe that forgiveness and healing from wounds will just happen by itself when someone has decided to give his/her life to Jesus. That is not the case, as we can read in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” Fritz Rienecker

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explains: The translation from the original text does not say “all is new”, but „new has become“.On one hand, a complete restoration and healing of the previous life does normally not occur when a decision for Jesus is made. There are always exceptions, of course, as the example of Zacchaeus show - he made amends on a large scale

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.A great number of circumstances, living conditions and especially the past back until the earliest childhood and even pregnancy are not made new. We are hurt when our basic needs as babies, children and teenagers are not met, when love, appreciation, belonging and comforting are withdrawn from us, or when an early-child relationship to one person was not possible. We are hurt by a lack of care, affection, attention and recognition, and by rejecting, depreciating statements, by comparisons and by abuse of any kind. We are most hurt by the people we love most: by parents, siblings, friends, our partner, teachers or other important authority persons.Determinations suffice to affect us sustainably. “You are like your father” is what my mother used to say in a deprecatory tone when something in my behaviour reminded her of her divorced husband. This hurt me every single time because indeed, I am the son of my father and I therefore have some of his character traits. I finally found the right reply: “You have chosen him, not I.”Unfortunately, we are often not aware how these emotional and psychological damages affect our lives today. These experiences are sometimes buried deep down within us, so they are no longer accessible for our mind and our emotions. Ignoring and suppressing them is not a long-term solution because physical and psychological illnesses often force us to deal with past occurrences.These injuries will not disappear after a decision for Jesus Christ. There are astonishing descriptions about miracles that happen when somebody gives their life to Jesus: somebody was promptly freed from his drug addiction, or healed psychologically and physically, or a depression disappeared, etc. But we have never heard of anyone who was suddenly cured from all negative incidents in their life and who was promptly empowered to do all positive things. If people are not aware of that, then spiritual growth is difficult or even impossible. Confession and pronounced forgiveness or otherwise granted forgiveness are almost unknown tools in Christian counselling today. We have therefore decided to include a chapter about forgiveness. The reference to “hearing” is only indirect, but the answer to “why forgive” still remains unknown to many people.Some people tend to pretend spiritual growth, or they view their life with Jesus as a spiritual exercise. Others view their decision for Jesus as a kind of life insurance that cannot do any harm. Or people feel that nothing in their lives has changed for the better and then are deeply disappointed, frustrated and turn away from Jesus.

So-called “backpacker Christians”. They know exactly what happened in the past and they keep on carrying their backpack filled with serious incidents throughout all their lives: false determinations by their parents, rejection, or spiritual, emotional and physical abuse of every kind. But they do not know where to put it. Even if they can forgive their tormentors - the fact of their lost childhood or their forced choice of profession remains. The following illustration shall describe these circumstances:I am walking along the path of my life with a heavy backpack. A bus stops at my side (= Jesus) and offers to take me on with all I am and all I have. I happily accept the offer. But the question is will I enter the bus with my backpack or let Jesus take my backpack off me? If I continue carrying it, then I keep on carrying my burden in the bus (!) and I might even hurt others with protruding objects such as sticks, bottles, umbrellas, etc. Or could I take something out at each stop? Remaining in this illustration: Many bus passengers do not even know they are carrying their burden-backpack, or they view that as normal. They think: “Isn’t it great that the bus carries everything?”, but in fact they still carry the heavy backpack themselves.In other cases, shame prevents that these injuries can come into light. People often think that what happened to them never happened to anyone else, and that the incident must remain concealed. But the story of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden shows: God did not initiate the separation from Adam and Eve. Both hid because they felt ashamed.There is a good illustration why ignoring and suppressing does not work on the long term. Imagine you are sitting in a boat on a lake. Your injuries and the shame about them are like a beach ball. You press the ball under water with all your power so nobody can see it. (One way to cover your injuries and your shame is by doing so-called good deeds.) But sometimes, in a moment of negligence or weakness, the ball slips out, and you immediately press it under water again. But at some point, your arm will weaken and you will no longer be able to keep the whole ball in hiding. When people grow old and their emotional and physical power weaken, we can often observe changes in them that are quite unsettling. There is an English proverb that gets to the point: “Getting older means getting better or getting bitter.”

Blocked Christians: They do not know where the problem is. But it is a fact that they do not experience growth, they are somehow stuck. Neither as children nor as teenagers and not even as young adults, are we able to deal with the insults and hurt we experienced from our closest friends – we usually push these experiences aside. Therefore, they block us and catch up with us as long as it takes us to face them. Mostly, we only face them when our body has already reacted with diseases and when we have to deal with the “why”.Psychology or psychoanalysis can help finding the causes. This is often a very long (and expensive) process. Psychology or psychoanalysis can reveal, but they cannot eliminate or even heal.A biblical example is the story of the rich young man. “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?” he asked. Jesus answered: “Keep the commandments, love God and love your neighbour as yourself.” “All these I have kept,” the man answered. What Jesus replied has the following sense: “Then I can tell your weak spot. Your trust is based on your possessions, not on your relationship with me.” – But the young man did not want to acknowledge that.Sometimes, these blocked people are intentionally kept ignorant or encouraged in their wrong attitude with statements such as “In today’s world, there is no visible intervention of God. You must bear this, it is your burden.” But Jesus says that his yoke is easy and his burden is light

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.

Increase of addictionsA very interesting article

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by Shari Langemak explains how addictions develop. Only recently, researchers of Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, have found out that Facebook has similar effects as chocolate, sex and alcohol have. All of these do not only make us happy, but we absolutely want to have them again. The cause is a complex neural network in the brain that is vital for humans and animals.Basically, three brain functions are linked in this “reward system”: sensory perception, emotion and memory. This makes them the workshop of our learning mechanisms. What is fun will be stored. Addiction expert Mr Falk Kiefer, medical Vice-Director at the Central Institute for Emotional Health in Mannheim, Germany, explains: “We live in a world that is poor in rewards. Among millions of sensory perceptions that reach our brain every minute, we do not only need to recognize those that point to possible dangers, but also those that point to possible rewards.”Our nervous system filters unconsciously, but at all times. Therefore, we quickly manage to find the next fast-food shop or our children in the milling mass of an amusement park. Instead of processing every sensory perception individually, our brain scans the perceptions for familiar characteristics. For example, it might scan for “little brownhaired girl with glasses”. As soon as we find her our neural network gets started. Our body’s own happiness hormones, the endorphins, are set free. Similar to the addictive drug opium, they have pain-relieving effects and make us happy. The brain delivers intoxication for our own body if we do something useful. Eating, sex and social contacts are rewarded in every human and in many animal systems. They contribute to survival and to maintenance of the species.The reward system in our brain marks this positive emotion so that it does not just disappear. The messenger substance dopamine marks this emotion and thus contributes to the reward-based learning processes. “Dopamine is set free with every positive experience. Thus, not only the stimulus, but also the situation is marked”, explains Kiefer.But this originally vital mechanism can turn to be dangerous. Addictions have their origins in these reward systems, especially the addiction to alcohol. Addicts are running the gauntlet on a daily basis: ads, bars, supermarkets and even old friends – almost the entire environment is a signal in the reward system for alcohol. And it remains there for a lifetime. “The reward memory cannot be deleted”, warns Kiefer. This is why these patients are always in danger of falling back into their addictions, even after many years of abstinence."The statement in the last two sentences – that, by the way, we do not agree to – leads us to our next observation:

We tend to take facts for the truth. We would like to explain that as follows:A good example is the story of Sara and Abraham

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. Fact was that Sara was 90 years old and far beyond her menopause. But the truth was: She conceived Isaac because God wanted her to. Another example is the story of the daughter of Jairus

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