Do You Want to Get Well – Part 2: 

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Entering the Deep, Life-Giving Restoration of God

Christian healing is one of the most misunderstood words in the Christian vocabulary. For many people, healing sounds like “getting fixed,” “getting over it,” or “getting back to normal.” But the biblical and theological vision of healing is far more expansive, richer, and more deeply hopeful than anything our culture usually imagines.

Healing in Scripture is not only about removing pain or reversing sickness. It is about restoring people into the life God desires for them — life marked by shalom, meaning integrity, wholeness, human flourishing, and the capacity to bring life to others. Healing is not an endpoint. It is a starting point. It is the means by which God realigns us with the goodness (tov) He intends to pour through us into the world.

This blog explores healing through four interconnected dimensions, each grounded in Scripture and Christian theology:

1. Somatic – Mind & Body

2. Social – Relationships & Community

3. Systemic – Structural & Political

4. Spiritual – Communion with God

These four dimensions help us recover a truly biblical, integrated, embodied understanding of how God heals and why He heals. Christian healing is integrated and embodied—God restores the whole person and the whole world.

And ultimately, they lead us to a beautiful truth: we are healed so that we may bring tov life to others.

Somatic Healing – Mind & Body

“He restores my soul.” — Psalm 23:3
“May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless…” 1 Thessalonians 5:23

The Christian story begins with a God who forms humanity from the dust and breathes life into us. We are not souls trapped in bodies. We are embodied souls — a unified whole.

Modern neuroscience and trauma research affirm what Scripture has long told us: That the body keeps the score

Our bodies store experiences. Our nervous system remembers. Our muscles hold tension. Anxiety sits in our chest. Grief sits in our stomach. Trauma echoes in our breath.

Christian healing recognises this.
It acknowledges that the body and mind are not obstacles to spiritual life — they are places where spiritual life shows up.

In Psalm 23, the phrase “He restores my soul” uses the Hebrew word nefesh, which means the whole embodied person — breath, life, consciousness, identity. God restores the whole person, not just the invisible parts.

Augustine speaks to this integrated understanding of self when he writes about the need for the human person to be “reordered,” for our inner life to be brought out of confusion and fragmentation into clarity and harmony. For Augustine, healing is the re-integration of the self under the love and rule of God.

In real terms, this means:

• Healing involves the body

• Healing involves the nervous system

• Healing involves emotion, memory, and sensation

• Healing involves thought patterns

• Healing involves integrating past wounds into a redeemed story

This is why practices like breath prayer, silence, somatic awareness, movement, and embodied spiritual disciplines help people heal. It’s why Jesus healed both bodies and minds. To God, they are inseparable.

When God heals the body and mind, He is not merely solving problems. He is restoring a person into His intended capacity –  to love, to serve, to create, to flourish.

Social Healing – Relationships & Community

As we say in AIFC ‘transformation happens in relationships’. Healing is never merely individual. It is always relational.

Jesus’s healings constantly restored people into community and belonging. A leper didn’t just receive clear skin; he received back his place in society. A bleeding woman didn’t just experience physical relief; she was brought out of isolation into dignity and connection.

In the Gospels, personal healing leads to relational restoration:

• Families are reunited

• Outcasts are welcomed

• The shamed are honoured

• The excluded are returned

• The isolated are embraced

Jesus healed bodies, yes — but He also used healing to dismantle shame, restore social standing, and reweave the torn fabric of community.

Modern psychology affirms this (as it catches up with the Bible): We are shaped in relationships, wounded in relationships, and ultimately healed in relationships.

Loneliness is one of the greatest health risks of our time. Community, belonging, shared life, and mutual care are central to healing.

The early church understood this. They called themselves the Body of Christ, meaning that healing flows through community –  through touch, prayer, affection, forgiveness, compassion, presence.

Social healing asks:
Where have relationships fractured?
Where have I withdrawn?
Where has isolation taken root?
Where do I need to receive love — and offer it again?

Healing restores our capacity to love and be loved. And from that place, we carry tov into the lives of others.

Systemic Healing – Structures, Oppression, and the Kingdom of God

Many Christians have a narrow view of healing — as if it only happens in the inner life. But Jesus’s ministry tells a larger story: healing also confronts systems of injustice.

When Jesus healed the sick, cast out demons, or raised the marginalized, He was confronting the systemic realities that oppressed them. Healing in the Gospels is an announcement of the Kingdom of God, which always stands over and against the “dominant order” of exploitation, exclusion, and dehumanisation.

Jesus’s healings said:

• This person matters

• This exclusion is unjust

• This oppression is illegitimate

• This system is not reflective of God’s reign

• This community must be re-ordered around justice and compassion

Healing is therefore political — not in a partisan sense, but in a Kingdom sense.
It is about restoring dignity where the world has stripped it.
It is about confronting dehumanising systems and proclaiming a new way of being human. It is about liberating people from the structures that steal their flourishing.

As we spoke of in a recent blog, The City of God, Augustine argues, is shaped by rightly ordered love — including love of neighbour expressed through justice, mercy, and advocacy. Healing therefore calls us beyond ourselves into:

• Reconciliation work

• Compassionate justice

• Lifting up the poor

• Challenging oppressive systems

• Participating in God’s restorative mission in the world

If we ignore the structural dimensions of brokenness, our healing remains incomplete.
But if we embrace them, we become participants in the healing work Jesus began and entrusted to His church.

Spiritual Healing – Communion, Formation, and Life in God

At the centre of Christian healing is communion with God.

Every wound, every fear, every trauma, every anxiety ultimately finds its deepest healing not in technique or strategy, but in presence — the loving, healing presence of God.

Spiritual healing is the re-alignment of the heart with God through:

• prayer

• worship

• Scripture

• repentance

• forgiveness

• spiritual direction

• communion

• confession

• silence

• formation

This is not about “religious activity.”  It is about returning our hearts to the One who made us, loves us, and heals us.

Christian Spiritual Formation (CSF) frames healing as the work of the Spirit in restoring persons into the likeness of Christ –  emotionally, relationally, morally, vocationally, and spiritually. People are healed so that they may take their place within the Kingdom, equipped to serve, love, and bring life.

For millions today who are turning or returning to God, spiritual healing becomes the doorway:

• from shame to belonging

• from fear to rest

• from confusion to clarity

• from emptiness to purpose

• from brokenness to calling

Healing reconnects us to God — and from that communion flows every other dimension of healing.

Why Healing Matters – and Why It Isn’t the End Point

Healing is never the finish line.  Healing is preparation for calling. Christian healing is never merely relief; it is preparation for calling and service in the Kingdom of God.

Throughout Scripture, God restores people so that they may step into His purposes:

• Abraham is restored so he can become a blessing

• Moses is healed of fear so he can lead people out of slavery

• David is healed so he can shepherd God’s people

• Peter is restored so he can strengthen and lead the church

• Paul is healed so he can proclaim the gospel to the nations

God always heals with purpose.  Healing produces tov –  life that multiplies life.

You are not healed just so you can feel whole.
You are healed so you can become a vessel of wholeness in the lives of others.

Your Healing Becomes Someone Else’s Healing!

Henri Nouwen reminds us:

“We are not called to cure the world’s wounds, but to walk with those who suffer them.”

This is the heart of Christian counselling.

You don’t need to be perfect.
You don’t need to be finished.
You don’t need to have it all together.

You simply need to be willing.

Willing to let God shape you.
Willing to let Him redeem your wounds.
Willing to walk with people who need presence, compassion, guidance, and hope.
Willing to step into the sacred calling of healing others as God heals you.

Your story, your scars, your growth — none of it is wasted.
God uses wounded healers to bring wholeness to the world.

 

A Call to Action: Step Into the Healing Work of God

So here is the invitation to you – gentle, holy, courageous:

What if part of your own healing is discovering that you were made to help others heal?

What if the very places God has restored in you become the places from which you serve?

What if 2026 is the year you step into a calling marked by compassion, purpose, and holiness?

If your heart beats a little faster as you read this… pay attention. Sometimes God whispers calling through curiosity, resonance, or longing.

You are invited to explore what it might look like to train as a Christian counsellor – to participate in God’s healing work in the lives of others and to become a vessel of tov in a world aching for hope.

aifc exists for this very purpose: to form, equip, and release Christian counsellors who bring healing, restoration, and flourishing to individuals, families, communities, and systems.

If you are sensing that gentle nudge… if something in you says, “This is me. This is for me. This is what I was born for”… then we invite you to take the next step.

Your healing is not the end. It is the beginning of your calling.