Is God actually kind? Do you want to discover God’s Kindness? In this episode Gina has a conversation with Dr. Joe Johnson about the love of God the Father, and the importance of healing heart wounds. “Papa” Joe is the Founder and Director of Heart of the Father Ministries. A pastor of 45 years, Joe has a Doctor of Ministry from Fuller Seminary and teaches Pastoral Care and Counseling and Inner Healing at The Master’s Institute Seminary.
Loved by the Father
Gina:
I have an amazing guest today, Dr. Joe Johnson, known by many as Papa Joe. Joe has a doctorate in ministry from Fuller Seminary. He teaches on pastoral care, counseling, and inner healing. He’s been a pastor for 45 years. Welcome Papa Joe. Tell us about your story.
Papa Joe:
I grew up in a little town in Canton, South Dakota, youngest of eight children, the first one born in a hospital. We were a Lutheran family. I went to a Lutheran high school, Lutheran college, Lutheran Bible school and Lutheran seminary. Then I interned in the “Lutheran holy land” of Norway. There are a lot of Lutherans in Norway. I am a kingdom person, especially after having been with John Wimber at the Fuller seminary. In the eighties I discovered that there was a seminary in the world that offered a healing course and you won’t find many.
He taught the kingdom. I say I’m a kingdom person, an apprentice of Jesus. My job description is different in many ways. I’m semi-retired but at the elder stage of maturity, my job description is to be a free agent of joy. I’m a seven on the enneagram. There are many things I could share about my own healing. I call it a sacred wound that shaped my ministry. It was the death of my father when I was seven. I think that our biggest gifts come out of our biggest wounds.
I didn’t know that I had a father wound until 20 years later when I was teaching a class on death and the five stages of dying. I wrote a letter to my dad, things I would have liked to have shared with him, and I shared in the class, and we all did as a part of the assignment. Then I got in touch with some things I was missing in my life. We don’t know what we’re missing, because we didn’t ever have them. It’s called a wound of absence. That’s my heart’s passion.
Recently my hearts passion is also to spread joy. I have a network of people all over the world in a way. I see myself as a Facebook pastor. I’m a pastor, you mentioned you’re a pastor. We don’t get to change that. That’s a calling. I am grateful, because I don’t have a congregation that I serve, but the ministry that we started about 15 years ago when I went part-time at this church I was serving at in Huntington Beach, California. Then I could do this kind of ministry more.
Gina:
I would love for you to share your story a little bit and unpack that. I think that’s really powerful that you said, we don’t know what we’re missing because we’ve missed it. God’s kindness towards us is such that He won’t reveal those things really until we’re ready. That’s His love and His loving kindness. I would love for you to share your journey and what that was like for you. How He brought you to that place of discovery and then that healing you received.
Papa Joe:
Jesus is always tender towards our weakness. I know that, but I need to know it every day. I started learning about inner healing in 1974, reading a book by Francis McNut. He was a pioneer and his teaching was, healing doesn’t just happen in a tent, everybody gets to do ministry. I started pursuing prayer. Then in 1978, I attended a meeting of Christian therapist. These are charismatic, mainly Catholic charismatics therapists, doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, doing healing prayer ministry.
Gina:
It’s so easy, depending on the spiritual culture we’ve been raised in, to put Jesus, God and healing in a box. Jesus heals differently every time, because we often want a formula. If you are somebody who got saved in the Jesus movement and got saved, healed, delivered all in one swoop, then you feel like that’s how everybody gets healed and you don’t have patience for process. If you’re someone who got healed through a process, but God was present in that, you have a hard time believing that healing could happen fast and immediately.
Again, we don’t know what we don’t know. We’re stuck in our own experience, but there’s something really powerful. I got saved in the Calvary season, in the late eighties, the tail end of the Jesus movement. Psychology at that time was considered evil. That’s the enemy. I understand that pop psychology, there was some wonky stuff there. As humans, we tend to be grand pendulum swingers. We like to throw the baby out with the bath water. If there’s something that makes us uncomfortable.
I love the fact that here you are grown up as a Lutheran and then you are in seminary being taught by John Wimber and then you’re reading this book and now you’re with a bunch of charismatic Catholics doing healing ministry. I’m so excited for our listeners to hear that. If we’re in the kind of charismatic world, we think healing happens this way, or if we’re in a conservative place. God is not a respecter of person, His Spirit’s gonna move and He’s gonna meet us, because He loves us and His love is pursuing. He is going to accomplish those things for His people.
Papa Joe:
There are different streams of the Church that are all through the Holy Spirit. Early on when I was 19 years old, I had an experience with God’s presence. Every Sunday at church, we would confess the creed called the apostles creed. And I believe in The Holy Spirit, but Holy Spirit didn’t come out of the creed a whole lot, because The Holy Spirit is a person. And I think that’s important for our walk that we get to know each person of the Trinity.
Gina:
We tend to gravitate towards the expression that we feel the most comfortable with and we kind of tend to lock the others, keep them at arm’s length.
Papa Joe:
Each one has its own charism. There’s a charism in the Catholic church and the Eucharist and charism of Pentecost. Each one has a special gifting. It was good to know that healing is much more than physical healing. There’s healing of emotions, which I taught and experienced. I was at this conference with Francis McNaught actually in 1978 and I got to know him then and became a good friend. I don’t know if you know of his book on healing.
It’s way back in the seventies, he was a Dominican priest, great preacher. And he got married and stopped being a priest, but continued his healing ministry. But I was at this meeting and there’s a medical doctor, a proctologist, he’s praying, he says, “I think you need a healing for a father wound.” I said, “I had one prayer for that. I’m old. I’m good.” That was really the beginning.
There’s a lot more here. Then when I’m in Norway, ministering, father’s love is really special for me. I go to Norway every summer and teach at a conference and I spend the whole week just praying with people. One thing I do for example, if anyone has had a father or a mother wound in their life, I have some women come up and minister, mother wounds.
They come up to them and bless them with mother wounds. Then I have other men help me minister, a father’s wound. We need second chance dads. As fathers and mothers, we’re not enough to have the fullness of God’s father’s love. So we need others. And I’ve had many second chance fathers in my life, I’m very grateful for. Another thing that happened to me in the 80s.
When I look at my life, each decade, I could identify a move of the spirit of my life. In the 80s, I was learning about ministry of healing. All of us are gifted of the Spirit. We can all function in the ministry of inner healing or all kinds of healings. But some ways in which we have a special calling or gifting. I had a person pray over me and they said, “Joe, you have a gift for healing broken hearts.” I embraced that and I kept learning about it and still learning.
Encountering God’s Love in our Pain
Gina:
Earlier, you alluded to, it’s through our wounds that we experience some of the greatest intimacy with God and healing. It’s also through our wounds that we find the thing that is going to be our gift and how we expand the kingdom and how we impact. The woman at the well, that intimate conversation with Jesus that He could have gone and preached to that town on His own. But He chose to have an encounter with this woman, and then she was able to carry that and go spread the things that she received. The things that we are able to receive, freely receive so freely give.
Papa Joe:
I like her way of being an evangelist. I think people are afraid of the word evangelism. All she did was tell her story. “I met this person. You gotta meet him.” That’s what we do. We share our story of what God’s doing and the intimacy we have. In a way, every day I wake up, “Lord, what are you gonna teach me?”
Gina:
It is an adventure. One of the things in my podcast, little themes pop up in different seasons. In season 2, in my life, God was teaching me a lot about expectation and how to have great expectation, but not impose my design on that expectation. How to hold on to hope for the things that God is moving and working and redeeming and restoring, but surrendering the road to that and that process. God showed me, especially talking about father wounds, that it’s okay that it’s a journey. It’s the layers of an onion.
God and His grace will take us as deep as that is good and healthy for us. His loving kindness will take us so far. And then a few years later, something else will bubble up, the enemy will come in with accusation at that point. “What’s wrong with you? You should be over that by now.” But it’s actually God’s grace and His love and kindness. At 46 or 47, four or five years ago I had been in a prayer conference that I had gone to with a friend, and someone in a prayer team came out and ministered over the room.
Somebody came up to me and he put his hand on me, prayed and knelt down and said, “There’s men that have hurt you and you need to forgive them.” I remember at the time I thought, “You don’t know me. I have a great relationship with my husband.” Then names started popping up. At that time it was people I’d worked with in ministry, it didn’t have to do with my father. It had to do with just other things and pain that I was carrying. I knew that there was hurt there. I didn’t feel bitterness, but I didn’t realize that unforgiveness was still there. God brought me through that.
A good six months later, I was sitting in the service and Chris Venan, who is from South Africa and just carries the heart of the father in a really powerful way, was a guest speaker and he was teaching on “God is Father”, a powerful message. I remember sitting in the service and praying for my other friends who all have different levels of absent fathers. I’m praying for my friends. And then towards the end of the message, the Lord brings back to mind that moment at that conference. “There are men that have hurt you.” And I was like, “We dealt with that.”
I was sitting in the front row, I’m on staff. I’m the program director of the morning. I’m having this conversation with the Holy Spirit, “We’re good. We’re good. We’re good, right?” I still have the piece of paper. I had a little note card and I wrote down, “Is there more? Show me.” Not 10 seconds later, I’m just sobbing in the front row. Just a mess. I’m embarrassed. I’m pulling my hair down. I’m trying to figure this out. I don’t know where it’s coming from.
Then Chris had ended his message worship had started. Then he got back up and he had a couple of words for the room. One was for a man who was in a prodigal situation. Then he said that there was a woman or women in this room that were unwanted. As soon as he said, “unwanted”, I lost it. I was just a mess. I was looking around, my husband was not there. He was playing at another church that morning. My friend and brother Justin was leading worship. I didn’t know where to go.
I scurried out and went up to my office and in the middle of the church offices, by myself, no one there, I walked in my office, I put something down and I came out and I just blurted out, “I need to forgive my dad.” I stood there by myself, just sobbing and forgiving my dad. I processed it while I was sitting there. I wrote on that note, “Lord, is there more? Show me.” It was almost like, when people talk about their life flashing before their eyes, it was like all these moments of the Lord processing, forgiving my mom, and even forgiving my dad. There was this mountain of forgiveness that I never actually faced.
I had to deal with that quick moment of shame in, “Gina, you’re 48 years old. You’re a leader, you teach this. What’s wrong with you?” But I had to turn away from that voice and turn towards the invitation. Because that’s where the healing and the freedom and the restoration and the redemption is. Little did I know that a year later my dad and his journey of Alzheimer’s began.
God called me out of my job. I started driving down once a week just to get him out of the house and to take him to lunch. Over the course of this seemingly horrific disease that was starting to rob him of himself, I was receiving a dad in the middle of that. Getting restoration of that relationship and redemption in that relationship. I have had more relationship in the last three years of that journey of him being in the most vulnerable place, of being able to change his diapers and put him to bed, and answer the same question 50 times. It’s all part of it.
That goes back to that great expectation and that trust and belief that God is who He says He is. He came as in Isaiah 61, to bring good news, to open prison doors, to set the captive free, to bring oil of joy for mourning, garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. He has come and He is going to accomplish these things, that in Him all His promises are yes and amen. But the journey to those promises, we need to surrender and trust.
Versus “all things work together for good, for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose” we repeat those like a parrot and sometimes even flippantly. We hurt each other with those verses, but it’s in moments like this, where you go, “It’s true. It’s true.” That’s what redemption is. It’s messy. It’s excruciating. It’s hard. It requires something of you. It requires surrender, requires letting go. But the beauty in it, and the power in it is phenomenal.
Papa Joe:
I bless the healing that Jesus has done in you Gina. I bless your heart to say, “Please forgive me, Lord. And I forgive.” I would just also say, I apologize to you for anyway, in leadership too, where you were not perceived as a woman. I want to apologize to women who, their dads may never apologize. Just on behalf of them I ask for forgiveness. The Holy Spirit gave you that grace to forgive.
Sometimes the hardest thing to forgive is ourselves. Sunday I was with a small group and a woman shared how she was really shamed by her parents. I said her name, “I apologize to you for all the shaming and it’s so wrong.” She started to tear up. One thing you did is that you forgave out of the pain. Sometimes we forgive just to stop the pain, because it hurts so much. The healing is deeper, if it can be in the memory and realizing, this really hurts. I forgave my dad for dying, part of my healing and the way of releasing him. Obviously he didn’t intend to do that and it was just releasing him to the Father.
Gina:
This is such a big deal, because our ability to receive healing for those things radically impacts our ability to receive from God, the Father, to receive His love, to hear His voice, to respond to Him. It’s important to note that we live in a broken world, humans are imperfect, the best father is going to inflict wounds. There’s also shame, if I had an amazing dad, I don’t dare admit that I have a wound from him, because that is somehow betrayal.
That’s not what this is about, this isn’t about accusation. This isn’t about punishment. This is about recognizing those things in us. What is a stronghold? Stronghold is when we partner with, come into agreement with a lie, something that is contrary to what God says about who He is and what God says about who we are. Those oftentimes are set up as self protection mechanisms. We grow up and experience, things happen and don’t happen or we are disappointed, or we’re hurt or we’re violated in some way. We set up these walls and we go, “Okay, you’re not safe, therefore God’s not safe.”
We build these little strongholds and they’re meant for self protection. The problem is, the very thing that we’re trying to construct to protect us can also be the thing that’s keeping us from the greatest healing and that’s Jesus. We have the authority to tear down all those high things that have been exalted against the knowledge of God, but it requires us to recognize them and identify that they’re there to begin with.
It’s an important thing to know that it’s okay to say you’ve been hurt even by an amazing loving dad who just did the best he could, and to forgive of that and receive that healing and move on. It doesn’t require a big confrontation, he probably doesn’t even need to know it’s more for you, between you and God. Going “I didn’t realize that this was here and I need to deal with this so that I can come closer to you, God.”
Papa Joe:
Part of your healing also is that you blessed your dad big time by caring for him. We bless our fathers and bless all the goodness that’s in them. I shared on that, healing the wounds. We have wounds and with the wound comes a lie. And then when we make vows, which is, “I have to” or “I’ll never” for example, “I’ll never need love. I’ll never be like my dad. I have to be strong. I’m on my own.” And these vows are agreements with a lie. They become strongholds, if we look to them rather than Jesus. But they helped us survive.
The strongholds need spiritual power. Just renounce “I break the power of that stronghold of, I have to be strong or I’ll never trust.” There is healing for trust. I think one healing is a broken truster. To trust God or to trust ourselves or others. That’s just another way to describe what the healing is. Inner healing is when we stop living from the heart, when we are wounded just to survive and maybe close our hearts.
We close our hearts, we need forgiveness for that. But when Jesus heals, it brings to life the part of us that stopped living. We learn to live from the heart that Jesus gave us. I’m so grateful for all the ways that I’ve seen Jesus do that for people and for me and for you. What a gift forgiveness is. How you allowed yourself to be broken, or to feel how broken your heart was, what you missed out on.
Check out Heart of the Father Ministry
Check the rest of this conversation Breaking Lies and Agreeing with Truth
Check out the Dwell Meditations
