“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” –Proverbs 3:23
“Search me, O God, and know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts.” –Psalm 139: 23
“I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power for us who believe.” –Ephesians 1: 18-19
Deficient or compromised love is always the central fact in heart healing. No matter how much one seeks to escape the past, the heart never forgets the unforgiven and unhealed. It is like a computer of the unconscious. In similar manner to a “bug” or “virus” in a computer network that can erase fifty years of financial history with one wrong number, or a single unpaid bill can mar a person’s otherwise near-perfect credit rating, the mind defaults to a relevant unhealed place in the heart when something in the present references past unresolved pain.
Guilt, rejection, and any other diseased or unnatural feelings are the first impressions to come into conscious awareness if some word, thought, or sensation today sends the mind backtracking to past injury. Early traumatic memories from pre-verbal times can be held as primal emotions or images, which reflect our view of the world before we could conceptualize, form phrases, and make associations. As these pre-language feelings are accessed, the person may find it difficult to express himself with more than an infantile cry or wail.
God also knows of generational events that are influencing the course of an individual’s life story. These “ancestral memories” may be supernaturally revealed to a person, so he can cooperate with God in breaking any negative or evil attachment from that history. This does not constitute “contacting the dead”. Rather, it is a way of redemption used by the Father to set us free from sins that affect our lives “to the third and fourth generation” (Deuteronomy 5: 8-10).
We know that surgeons who have accidentally touched a certain “random” spot in a patient’s brain have caused the person to relive a long-forgotten event as if it were present. How much more, then, can God the Father touch and reveal those root memories that need forgiveness and healing?
Time, as a creation of God himself, provides structure and continuity to our lives. God exists outside of time, however, as Jesus Christ is the same “yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13: 8). Contrary to popular platitude, time does not heal all pain resulting from love deficits. Pain is healed in God’s chronology, not ours, through the blood of Jesus Christ (Revelation 1: 5). He uses dissonant responses to events in the present as a warning that there are infected files in the hard drive of the heart.