Healing From Life's DisappointmentsSample

From the outside, she looked fine. But her X-rays revealed a far different story. Our 15-year-old had severe scoliosis, a curvature of her spine that affected her rib cage and posture, and that would make leading a normal life nearly impossible. The X-ray revealed that she needed surgery, and soon.

As with our daughter's scoliosis, sometimes the very worst conditions are the ones few people ever see. Sometimes our bitterness makes leading a healthy, godly life nearly impossible.

On the outside, the waters at Marah looked fine, but there was something wrong with that water, something that only God could fix. God, whose name is Jehovah Rapha, our healer, devises an unexpected way to heal that water. In verse 25, He shows Moses a tree, and when Moses casts the tree into the water, the water is made sweet.

Don't miss that! God uses a tree to fix the bitterness in that water! Throughout the Scriptures, the tree represents the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross provides the main form of healing that we all need most: healing from sin. That tree, the cross, means we get to live! With it, Jehovah Rapha heals us of our most profound bitterness, just as He healed the bitter waters of Marah.

1 Peter 2:24 puts it perfectly, "who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed."

God doesn't want us in bondage to our anger over life's disappointments. God doesn't want us stuck in bitterness. God wants us to be free.

We can be confident that God fully understands and cares about us no matter what we face. His Word tells us that He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds (Psalm 147:3).

C.H. Spurgeon summed it up when he said, "Hearts are broken through disappointment. Hearts are broken through bereavement. Hearts are broken in ten thousand ways, for this is a heart-breaking world, and Christ is good at healing all manner of heartbreaks."

Bring your disappointments to the tree, to the cross of Jesus Christ. Bring your bitterness to that cross. And see how Jehovah Rapha, our healer, can turn even the most bitter life sweet!