8 Consequences of Ignoring Heart Healing

It is my deep passion to help people experience the power of heart transformation, which often begins with recognizing your need for heart healing. Every day, masses of people are manifesting symptoms that stem from neglecting the life of the heart. Meanwhile, the cornerstone of ministry that Jesus brought was healing to the heart and an invitation into a new journey.

If we don’t make some adjustments soon, we will continue to witness the consequences of neglecting heart healing. All throughout history, people have given resistance to the idea of experiencing healing to the heart. It has been replaced with growing in head knowledge, pursuing achievement and becoming content with relationships that are stagnant.

Our pace of life is so fast, we don’t realize what our hearts need until problems become so intense, we hit a nervous breakdown or some kind of sin issue takes over and sabotages our journey.

So if you are someone who wants more and is looking to live with freedom coming from the heart, realize that so much of culture doesn’t make room for this.

I wish this was only true with non-believing people. But we find a lack of emotional health and heart awareness in the body of Christ too often. When in reality, the church needs to be leading the way in what healing to the heart and emotional health can look like.

But it will take a cultural shift, where heart awareness, emotional health and relational health become a high priority.

There are consequences of ignoring the life of the heart that manifest in a variety of ways. Allow me to share eight of them that will keep occurring, unless we make a decision to change.  

1. You will become content with shallow living.

You cannot live emotionally heart healthy while driving full speed in a fast paced, performance based, achievement obsessed life all the time. Heart awareness takes a slower pace and making room for depth throughout relationships.

But over time, neglecting the life of the heart will leave you with lots of shallow interactions, with little meaningful connection. Live this way long enough, and you will be content with the shallow end. Surface relationships and even surface Christianity will become your familiar routine.

People who lack depth in relationship lack depth in how they process their own life. You bring to the table who you are and your relationships will be the product of what you cultivate.  

But when you live in the shallow end, the pain of your life goes underground. It never gets addressed. People never get to know the real you.

2. Your blind spots will keep growing.

When you live heart aware, you give God room to search your heart. In addition to this, your relationships become a sounding board for you to grow and become more aware of how God is healing your wounded areas. This allows for the maturation process to have its greatest work.

A lack of heart awareness in a culture will produce leadership fallouts and scandals that seem to take people by surprise. Those issues are a result of the heart not being tended to. The machine keeps on moving. The show must go on. Meanwhile, issues of the heart that are being neglected will eventually rise up to strike at the worst possible times.

3. You will not see others the way God sees them.

The snappy, quick cliches that come out of Christian’s mouths reveal the lack of heart healing they have experienced in their own life. Modern culture loves to throw fancy cliches at broken hearted subjects that have layers to them. In reality, many don’t know what to say, because their own hearts have not been worked on.

If you are hard on others about their struggles, it is a sign that you have not processed your own heart issues with God’s love. This is a sad consequence of people neglecting their personal heart healing journey.

If you want to build a greater compassion for others, don’t ignore your own issues or pretend they are not there.

People who ignore their own need for healing:

  • Get easily preachy to others when they are struggling.
  • Criticism and accusation becomes the dominant narrative.
  • The inner Pharisee rises up, with an appearance that you have no struggles.

4. Stress, busyness and overburdened living will be constant.

“I’ve got no time to deal with these issues!” people have said to me.

“My life is way too busy and this stuff takes too much work.”

When you ignore the life of your heart, brokenness goes underground. Stress rises and the fear factor takes over. Constant stress will become something you get used to, not something you overcome. There’s no room for pit stops and healthy reflection.

There’s little refreshment. You end up needing vacations after your vacations.

So the only way you end up reaching for help is when 911 levels of crisis arrive in your life. As soon as things look manageable, you go back to the fast paced insanity and forget what needs to be tended to.

5. You won’t get to the bottom of your anger issues.

Areas that God does not heal, can become platforms for anger to possess.

If you neglect the healing of your heart, those close to you can feel the anger you battle. It may not always lash out on them, but they can discern an angry presence about you.

Neglect the life of the heart and you will always believe your life is under constant pressure. With a life of pressure comes an irritability that will steal your joy and prevents a life of wholeness.

Over time, that anger will get transposed onto the world around you; leaving you more cynical and judgmental.

6. You will be more prone to getting sick.

Over many years, I have learned that we can live a much more physically healthy life when we:

  • Eat well
  • Exercise regularly
  • Sleep well
  • Cultivate strong relationships
  • Think healthy and address our emotional world.

Your body needs a great deal of care to function effectively. It becomes a reservoir of all your thoughts, beliefs and perspectives. Over time, certain destructive thoughts that become chronic, can have a major impact on the health of your body.

That is because God designed you to live in a prosperous state. But your beliefs and emotional health have a great impact on that. Your enemy looks to steal kill and destroy the health of your body with destructive thoughts that will erode your peace and sense of love.

If you want to increase overall physiological health, make sure you take care of your body. But part of that needs to be focused on helping your emotional heart to heal and gain strength in the love of God.

7. You will become numb, cold and even hard hearted.

Without equipping on how to process through heart healing, it can become so easy to numb out. This can lead to becoming cold and even hard hearted.

The storms of life are meant to be places where your heart engages greater depth in your relationship with God and the people around you.

But too many are numbing out and zoning out. If we are not careful and make some changes, the walking dead will begin to rise.

You were not meant to numb out or check out to the pain you face. God designed you to walk right through it with His strength and presence, so that you come out on the other side with greater strength, but also a more powerful heart to live out of greater compassion.

Otherwise, continual coldness will increase, giving room for a heart that doesn’t believe anymore.

8. You will become more vulnerable to addictions.

In the work I have done with addicts, the vast majority of them have had a hard time connecting to certain emotions of the heart. They are not aware of how certain areas of their heart are connected to their addicted struggle. Their mind and body have been conditioned to a habit, chemical or relationship as an addictive outlet for their pain and emptiness.

For many addicts, their first step to freedom is becoming more aware of what is happening in the life of their emotional heart. Otherwise, those empty places will look for relief in all the wrong places.

In many ways, our modern culture acts in very addictive ways. We seek for immediate pleasure, comfort or the easiest way out. Facing the healing that our hearts needs can become so foreign.

Addictions are clamping on to a growing percentage of believers. It’s time that we get honest about what we are facing and give God room to heal our hearts in a greater way.

Will you be willing to make a new decision for healing and freedom?