SID: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. I’m so excited about this show. My guest is going to teach you the missing message of Jesus. It’s there. It is in the Gospels. But it’s missing today, and that is Jesus came to heal the broken hearted. And you see, you can’t get everything God promises to you if you have a broken heart. And it’s my conviction in a broken world with a broken devil, with broken people, how do you expect to have a healed heart unless Jesus heals your heart. Now have you ever felt that something is wrong and you don’t know what it is? What a frustrating feeling. That’s what happened to my friend John McTernan. John, what was going on in your life? You’re a believer. You’re speaking before people. You’re not supposed to have a problem, but you do. What’s your problem?
JOHN: Sid, it’s internal and it’s kind of had to explain. But I felt a drain inside. I felt like a car going down the road on the interstate at 65 miles an hour and all sorts of power, speed, and yet it was holding back. There was a power drain inside of me. I could feel it. I knew something was wrong. I had brought it before the Lord for many, many years, and it just sat there. It didn’t go. I had no idea what it was.
SID: Okay. So one day he’s minding his own business, listening to a radio program and the light bulb went on. What happened?
JOHN: There was a woman being interviewed about, she was a psychologist, Christian psychologist, and she’s being interviewed about her research on children of divorce and how every one of them, virtually every one of them had a broken heart, and it affected them where they developed loneliness. That was an outstanding trait of a broken heart of a child from a divorced family. And it was like, bingo, my parents were divorced. I didn’t even know them together. They were divorced before I could remember. And I began to think, and I’m saying, broken heart, maybe that’s what I have. And I sought the Lord about it, and I prayed, and at that point, I didn’t know I had a broken heart. And if you, Sid, had come to me like let’s say years before that and you said, “John, I didn’t know you had a broken heart,” I would go, how? How would it be broken? I had no idea at all. And when I sought the Lord—
SID: You know, I’m reminded the Bible says, “The heart is the most deceitful thing.” Here he is a believer with a broken heart and he’s so programmed to operate with that broken heart he doesn’t even know it’s broken.
JOHN: That’s exactly right, Sid. That’s exactly right. So I knew Luke 4:18. And in Luke 4:18, that is the ministry of Jesus Christ. And we all know that he came to save us from sin. Right?
SID: Of course.
JOHN: But it doesn’t end there. When you look at Luke 4:18, it says, “And he came to heal the broken hearted, to deliver the captives, to open the eyes of the blind and to set at liberty them that are bruised.” We stop right at the salvation message. But if you look in the Bible, there’s a semi-colon, and right after it, it says, “The Lord came to heal the broken hearted.”
SID: There are many other areas that some have had a broken heart of. I mean, a divorced home, that’s enough. But there are a lot of other areas, like what?
JOHN: Sid, rejection, especially with children. I have come to see it’s much easier than we realize to break a child’s heart. Their heart is very tender and it’s very easy to break a child’s heart. But rejection, death. Death can really break a heart. I have found with women, abortion, devastating with breaking the heart. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, the military with men, women in the military now also. But that, what they see and what happens, can break their heart. We call it like post-stress, you know, the trauma and much of that is really a broken heart.
SID: But you know what? Just the peer pressure of a young child going to school and maybe they’re not so pretty, and maybe they hear someone laughing at them, they say nothing. But in a child’s mind, that’s enough to do it. So what was the revelation you had when you started praying?
JOHN: My mother had remarried. Now there is no way on my own I could remember this, because we’re going back now to when I was six years old. And my stepfather, I don’t think, I know he didn’t do this to be malicious. But he approached when I was about six years old about being adopted, and I had no idea what he was talking about.
SID: You thought he was your natural father?
JOHN: No, no. I had, my father would come and visit me, and he was a good friend. I knew him as Joe. I didn’t call him Dad or anything. I knew him as Joe. And my stepfather wanted to block out my father from coming, and he talked to me about adoption. I had no idea what he was talking about. Finally, it dawned on me. I had like a revelation that Joe was my father and this man was my stepfather. And I remember I said to him…
Child: When my name changes, can I still see Joe?
Man: No, you’ll have my name.
Child: No. My name John McTernan.
JOHN: And I knew right then and there the whole thing opened up. I understood perfectly at six years old and I knew if I told my father he would protect me from what was going on. It was a complete revelation, but it broke my heart.
SID: Hold that thought. When we come back, we’re going to find out what God did that so changed his life, that people don’t even recognize him. He doesn’t even recognize himself after his heart is healed by God Himself. But better than that, how about having your broken heart healed? Don’t go away.
