Free Grace Party: Escape to Reality Greatest Hits, Volume 3 by Paul Ellis Page B

prisons tumble, graves open, the dead rise, and the depressed
rejoice.
     
    A word after
     
    This was one of the first articles
I wrote for E2R, and it remains a subject I feel passionately about. Mental
illness doesn’t attract a lot of attention in the Christian media or
blogosphere, but that is slowly changing.
    A couple
of years ago, Joseph Prince released a book called The Power of Right
Believing . I read it and was delighted to find that it tackles the
predominant illnesses of our day, namely, mental illness and personality
disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and insomnia.
It’s a book full of stories about people who have been radically set free by
grace.
    My
favorite story in the book is the one about the minister from Oregon who was
assigned to provide counseling in a state mental institution. He entered a room
full of severely broken, moaning people. These patients were so far gone that the
minister couldn’t engage with them. So he sat on the floor and started to sing,
“Jesus loves me this I know.” He did this for weeks on end. Eventually, the patients
began to sing with him, and within a year all but two had been restored and
were discharged from the hospital. These broken people weren’t healed by a
song. They were healed by a revelation of their Father’s great love.
    One of
the problems with mental illness is that it can turn you inward and away from
love. You become introspective and sensitive to your triggers. Perversely, a
heightened self-awareness can actually make symptoms worse because it leads you
to rely on your own understanding instead of relying on Jesus. Cognitive
behavioral therapy succeeds when it breaks destructive thought patterns, but it
fails when it promotes self-examination ahead of Jesus-examination. He is the
Healer, not you. Transformation comes when we behold Christ and allow his love
and grace to break down our fears, addictions and afflictions.
    What
leprosy was to the first-century church, mental illness is to the modern
church. By that I mean it is our number one battlefield in our struggle against
all forms of sickness and oppression. This is not a battle we should fear. By
the grace of God it is a battle we can win!
     
     

14. The Christchurch
Earthquake: Four Questions Christians Can Answer
     
    An earthquake of magnitude 6.3
struck my hometown at 12:51pm this afternoon. I don’t live in Christchurch
anymore, but I heard about it straight away, while driving to the airport. Christchurch
had a major quake last September and about a thousand aftershocks since then,
so I didn’t realize today’s one was a serious disaster until I saw a photo on
an internet terminal at the airport. It was a picture of the Christchurch
Cathedral in ruins. This is the city’s most famous landmark and it had survived
last year’s bigger quake. Now it looks like a bomb hit it.
    At the
airport we heard the announcement that all flights to Christchurch had been
cancelled. On our way home we heard that there were likely to be many
fatalities and injuries. We prayed for God’s peace to be on the city and for
wisdom for the search and rescue teams. Already there have been a few stories
of miraculous escapes and rescues. But as I write this, some six hours later,
the number of dead is 65 and climbing.
    (Postscript:
The final fatality count was 185 and there were about 2000 injuries. New
Zealand is a small country so everybody was affected in one way or another. I
knew a man who was killed in the quake.)
    This
Sunday New Zealanders will go to church looking for answers. The pressure on
pastors to deliver a message of hope in the face of disaster will be enormous.
For some questions there will be no answers this side of eternity. We serve a
God of mystery and we live in a time of uncertainty. But here are four
questions that every Christian should be able to answer:
     
    1.  Is God judging
Christchurch?
     
    No, no, and a thousand times no!
After last year’s