Hi, I’m Holly Christine Hayes, founder and CEO of Sanctuary Project, and welcome to God Today. I want to share a testimony I have of healing and how God met me in a moment that I never would have imagined. If you don’t know my story, I came out of a life of trafficking and violence and addiction almost twenty years ago. And as you can imagine, that life of pain and hardship and trauma left some very real scars on my soul and on my heart, and even on my body. And as I came to Christ and started to surrender my life and my will and my heart and my soul to Jesus, I realized that there was some more work I was going to need to do to heal. And I sought out a Sozo and some inner healing.
One of the first places I asked Jesus to come into in that Sozo work was childhood abuse, and I want to share this story today because I believe there’s someone out there who has suffered from childhood sexual abuse, and that God wants to completely heal and deliver you. I want to share what God showed me. Here I was in this moment of meditation and in a safe place with a safe person who was guiding me through some inner healing work.
And the Lord took me back to that moment when I was sexually abused as a child. Of course, this is the last place I wanted to go. These are the places in my heart and soul that I did not want to deal with. These are the places I wish I could just push under the rug and just call redeemed and move on. But God wanted to take me there. And He wanted to show me where He was in it. You know, in situations like this that are so horrific and so unimaginable, it’s hard to believe that Jesus could be there, but the woman I was doing this inner healing work encouraged me to ask Jesus, “Where are You? Where are You in the room right now?”
And I saw myself laying on the floor, a tiny child, four years old, and I saw my body covered in scars and cuts and stains and bruises. I saw my body covered in sin. Now I know that this was not my own sin. This was not something I chose. This was put on me by another person, but I saw it on my body. I saw Jesus and He was standing over me, gleaming white and righteous. He looked down on me and He outstretched his arms.
And in that moment, every scar, every stain, every cut, and every bruise pulled off of my tiny body and onto His. And I saw Him outstretched, standing there with every sting, every cut, every bruise, and every scar on His body, just like He was on the cross. And then in that same moment, He breathed out and I watched His gleaming white righteousness fall onto my tiny body below Him. You guys, this is what He did on the cross. Sometimes we like to think that the cross is just this place where Jesus took our sin, but He didn’t just take our sin. He took every spot, every sting, every bruise, every cut, everything that that person did to you. He took it on His body. He took it on the cross and He exchanged his gleaming white righteousness onto ours.
And so I want to pray for that woman today, who is still lost in unforgiveness, who is still holding onto those cuts and those stains and those bruises on her body. I want to ask today that you be reminded that Jesus paid much too high a price for you to hold onto those things on your body. I want to remind you today that He paid the price to give you His gleaming white righteousness on you. Thank You, Jesus, for what You did on the cross. Thank You. Thank You that it’s not just my sin You took – thank You that You take all sin for all mankind for all time, and You exchange it for Your righteousness. In Jesus’ name, amen.