The Loss of Self-Pity

Genesis 27:38 NIV

Esau said to his father, "Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father!" Then Esau wept aloud.

Do You Ever Feel Sorry For Yourself?

I have been limping for about three months now and I must admit that I have begun to wonder if I will ever walk normally again.  I have to hold the rail as I go up steps, I can’t stand very long before I have to sit in a chair, I stopped going door-to door inviting people to our church because of how badly my knee hurt.  Now I don’t want to feel sorry for myself but I have had a difficult time trying to see what good this limping has done for me.  Should I thank God for the pain I am suffering?  Is it wrong to pray for God to heal me?  What should I say when people ask me why I am limping?  Is there a right way for me to respond that lets people know that I am not feeling sorry for myself or can I be brutally honest about how frustrated I am not being able to walk very far?  What is the right way to deal with difficulties?

Perhaps you have faced these same questions and were not sure what you should do.  Should you complain to anyone about your troubles?  Is it Christian for you to be upset by your circumstances?  Do you try to be stoic about your hardships?  Maybe you are good at hiding your difficulties from others.  You pretend as if everything is ok when your world is falling apart.  Should you be commended for this?  When people ask you how your day went, do you automatically say, “Good” even if it wasn’t?  Is it better to be honest about how you feel and let people know when you are struggling with your problems than to keep them to yourself?  What is the best way to deal with your troubles?

Sometimes we can’t help but laugh at some of the actions people in the Bible have taken.  The story of Jonah, the unwilling missionary is one such example.  He famously tried to run from God when given the assignment of going to the pagan city of Nineveh to warn the people there that the Lord was about to judge the city for its wickedness.  Jonah did not want the city warned; he just wanted the people judged and so he fled.  When he ended up in the belly of a great fish, Jonah agreed to go preach in the city and the fish spit him out on shore.  After Jonah spent a day preaching that in forty days the city would be overturned, the people repented and sought the Lord’s forgiveness.  When God relented and did not destroy the people, Jonah in a huff went up onto a hillside overlooking Nineveh and angrily stewed.  Because it was blazing hot, God caused a vine to grow and provide shade for Jonah and this made Jonah happy.  But that night, God killed the vine and Jonah was left without shade the next day.  Angrily he told the Lord that he wanted to die.  Now isn’t this interesting.  He was sitting out in the hot sun by himself because he was mad God let the people of Nineveh live.  Rather than sitting comfortably in one of the nice homes in Nineveh, he stubbornly resisted the hospitality of the peopleand baked under the blazing sun.  He also was mad that God killed the vine that had given him some shade and for these two reasons the reluctant preacher wanted to die.  We know exactly what was going on with Jonah.  He was feeling sorry for himself and angry with God for not treating him better.  We might have even laughed at Jonah if we were with him for the little pity party he was having.  Of course, Jonah was only hurting himself we might argue.  What harm was there in him pouting?

The case of Lot is a bit more serious because of how his self-pity impacted his daughters and the generations that followed.  Lot was the cousin of Abraham who went on to become the father of two great nations.  His life took a turn for the worse when he and his cousin went separate ways.  Lot and Abraham each had great herds of sheep and goats but because of the difficulty finding grass and water for such large flocks, the shepherds of Abraham and Lot could not get along and fought over the limited resources they had to share.  To quell the infighting among the shepherds, Lot and Abraham decided to move away from each other and Abraham gave Lot the option of choosing first where to settle.  Lot decided on the fertile plain near Sodom and so he settled there.  Apparently, Lot gave up his shepherding eventually because he wound up living in the city of Sodom, married and had two daughters.  After perhaps two decades living in Sodom, Lot had become comfortable with his new life.  When God sent His two angels to rescue Lot and his family from the destruction that was about to come, Lot was hesitant to leave and he and his family had to be nearly dragged out of Sodom by the angels.  Although they had been told not to look back at Sodom as the fire and brimstone fell upon it, Lot’s wife did for some reason and she was turned into salt.

After escaping the destruction of the cities of the plain, Lot and his two daughters hid in a cave.  The text says that Lot was afraid of living in the village of Zoar where they originally fled and set up camp in the cave.  What probably the daughters thought would just be a temporary stay became a permanent home.  It seems that at some point Lot must have known that it no longer was a risk for him to leave the cave and yet still he remained, year, after year after year, keeping himself and his daughters isolated from the rest of the world.  His daughters, feeling the heaviness of growing old without children made the perverse decision to get their father drunk so that he could get them pregnant.  The children they bore became the founders of two nations, each wicked and pagan.

What do we make of Lot and his decision to hole up in a cave?  Certainly his cousin Abraham would have welcomed him with open arms and he could have lived like a king with Abraham and his clan.  Lot and his girls would have been safe and could have rebuilt their lives.  The daughters might surely have had real husbands and a normal family life.  Lot apparently never recovered psychologically from the destruction of his home and the loss of his wife.  It wasn’t just Lot’s wife who looked back at ruin of Sodom; Lot too became as stiff as a statue psychologically after leaving it behind.  Did self-pity destroy Lot’s personality?  Was he incapacitated emotionally due to feeling sorry for himself?  It is not a stretch to think that perhaps Lot gave in to despair and dragged his daughters down with him.  Did he not see how sad they were not having husbands or did he just ignore all the signs, all the comments they made alluding to their disappointment.  That is what self-pity does to us.  It makes us so self-absorbed that we can’t see past our own wounds.  Those we love become shadows for us; vapors in our insulated world of hurt.

Our world is tragic, we must face the facts.  Sin has brought death to every corner of life.  Yet that does not mean we have to feel sorry for ourselves.  Paul said that we are to do everything without complaining.  Do everything without complaining or arguing, (Philippians 2: 14) That seems nearly impossible even for the most upbeat of us.  There is so much to complain about in our lives!  The waiter doesn’t pay attention to our order, our back is giving us trouble again, the traffic is bad, we have an aunt with cancer, the kids aren’t doing their chores, work is too demanding.  There is in Hebrews 2:10 something that must be examined with great reverence. In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. (NIV)  The Greek word translated “perfect” has as its primary meaning, “completed” or “finished”.  Christ did not need to become more holy than He was.  What temptation did though in making Christ resistant to sin and fit to follow the Father in every way, suffering also did in making Him resistant to self-pity and self-absorption!  He became through His suffering completely trusting in the Father to do what was right with His life.

Self-pity and its weaker cousin, feeling sorry for ourselves are the disciples of atheism.  If God has said that He is making everything in our lives turn out for our good, self-pity is a rejection of that promise and a rejection of God.  And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28 NIV) Why would I feel sorry for myself if I know that the result of what I face today will end in something far better than what I had before?  It would be incredible for a child to cry about getting a million dollars when he expected a nerf gun.  What sort of fool would feel sorry for himself if he were given a great mansion rather than a small shed to live out his life?  Jesus never complained about any of His suffering because He trusted the Father explicitly!  If I face an illness, God will work it for something good.  If I am poor, God’s riches will be poured into me.  If my family is struggling, our Lord will put it together better than it was.  When we complain and feel sorry for ourselves, we throw Christ off the throne and sit there in His place judging Him and His care for us.  Self-pity is open rebellion against God and to keep feeling sorry for yourself means you don’t think the Lord is good or reasonable despite his promises to take care of you.

Certainly we feel the pain of suffering and sorrow and no one can make light of the horrors so often found in this world.  Terrible things happen and we face them too.  Surely Christ wanted His friends to stay with Him as He suffered the anguish of what was to come while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We also need our friends and our friends need us when the evil of sin and Satan crush us.  That does not mean though that we need to feel sorry for ourselves and wallow in self-pity. Let go of your frustration that others don’t treat you fairly or respect you like they should.  Quit feeling sorry for yourself and turn your thoughts to Christ who is taking care of you.   We have a God who is within us giving us strength and in all that we face, the love of Christ will turn it for our good and we will see soon enough that He has blessed us beyond measure in every way.  All great and joyous men or women of the past have faced sorrows and painful experiences and been mistreated but they refused to feel sorry for themselves.  Their greatness was realized and unveiled the moment they decided God is good, that He loves them and that in the end He can be trusted with their lives despite how others treat them or think of them.  Do you believe God loves you and has your best interests at heart?  If you do, then be glad He has you right where He wants you to be!

Forgiveness Journey

Hebrews 9:22 NIV

In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

How Is Forgiveness Working For You?

A number of years ago I went whitewater rafting with some friends.  We were going through a particularly rough stretch of water when we came upon a bend in the river where a giant boulder stood at the turn.  The water was rushing fiercely through the gorge there and despite our river pilot in the back urging us to with our paddles turn the raft to the left, we didn’t make it and we came barreling into the boulder.  The force of our impact cause one of the guys at the front of the rubber inflated raft to be catapulted into the air and he went flying ten feet in the air backwards and into the pool of water behind us.  At that moment, we watched in shocked disbelief as he shot past us; we were going one way and he another.  We were suddenly going on separate journeys, us sliding upon onto a rock and down the river and him soaring through the air and back into the chaos of the swirling caldron of white-water.

All of us are on journeys; some going one way, others a different road.  There are those heading for higher education, others not interested in further schooling.  Some are building families, others prefer to stay single.  Many are trying to save all the money they can, still more looking for ways to spend it.  There are those wanting to connect with as many people as they can, others would prefer to be left alone.  Some like to take it easy, others would rather work hard.  Sometimes we decide what journey we take, other times the journey decides who we are.  You might be on a journey of honesty and integrity or a journey of fraud and corruption.  Our journeys may be similar or quite different but every one of us is on a journey and eventually it will bring us somewhere.

It seems that the Bible has described a pair of journeys that between which we all must choose.  The first is the journey of Sin and the other of Forgiveness.  Sin is what the Bible calls the “broad road” and many enter through it. (Matthew 7:13 NIV)  The journey of Forgiveness is narrow because few choose to take that path.  Sin is your default direction.  All are sinners and come short of God’s glory.  The result of being sinners is that we die in our sin.  The other journey is that of forgiveness.  Acts 10: 43 declares that from ancient times, the Lord has been telling us through His prophets that we can enter a journey of forgiven sins.  All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name." (NIV)  The Bible throughout declares that one day and now it has come to pass, our sins would be taken from us, as the Psalm puts it, “as far away as the east is from the west.”  Through Jesus dying on the Cross, that has happened.  Paul in Ephesians 1:7 lists two results of Him dying on the Cross.  In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace… (NIV)  We are no longer slaves to sin and sinning and the guilt of our sin is removed.  We are now free to live completely in line with God and our lives immersed in Him.

Sin has a devastating effect upon our personality.  It leads to confusion, frustration, bitterness, depression, anger, selfishness, pride, discouragement, stress and worry.  The sins we commit always damage us and the long range effect cannot be calculated for it is too immense.  The sins others commit injure us terribly and we are mangled by both ends of sin.  What Christ has done by pouring out His blood on the Cross is begin the work of making us holy and free of the damage sin has caused us.  He is “redeeming” us, taking us out of it.  Because we have lived in a world of Sin and that is all we know, we are like a frog slowly cooking in a pot of water growing hotter by the hour.  We have never known life without the damage of sin and so we are not conscious of all it has done to us.  The Bible says that what Sin brings us is death…psychological death, social death, emotional death, mental death and eventually physical death.  The miracle of all time is that God decided to put an end to the destruction of Sin by placing all the sin of the world upon His Son Jesus Christ and letting the Sin itself die in His crucified body.

This of course may be “old hat” to you.  You understand the Cross and God’s work with Sin but here is something that must be considered profoundly in regard to sin forgiveness.  Jesus declared that our determination to forgive sins is linked to God’s generosity in forgiving our sins.  This is underscored in the model prayer He taught us during the Sermon on the Mount but given naked expression in Matthew 6:14-15.  For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (NIV)  There is an undeniable link between our forgiveness of the sins of others and God’s forgiveness of our sins.  Often it is thought that if we don’t forgive the sins committed against us, then God won’t forgive our sins.  But then, what is the point of Christ dying on the cross if not to put away our sins...if it is really dependent on what we do?

Paul cements this relationship between God’s forgiveness and ours in Colossians 3: 13.  Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (NIV)  It is established by Christ and the Apostle Paul that all Christians are forgiving people.  They put up with the quirks and difficult behaviors of those in their circles and they forgive or “show grace” as it literally is, to those who treat them badly.  Now the Greek which Paul used to give us this teaching is a bit tricky.  Literally it reads, “As also the Lord showed grace to you, so also you”.  To show grace to someone is a bit broader than to forgive the sins of that person but it includes it.  The primary teaching here is that as Christ has done for us, the same is to flow out of us to others.  If that does not happen, then we have to ask what is wrong with us.

There is a most fascinating teaching found in Hebrews 9:22ff.  In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness...But now he (Jesus) has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself…so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. (NIV)  Paul here declares that forgiveness of sins is not possible without the shedding of blood.  That means that I cannot, even if I wished, forgive a single sin of any person, regardless of how good or bad I view that one—good or bad.  It is beyond the scope of my ability!  So why does Christ and Paul insist we forgive sins?  There is only one explanation.  Through Christ’s death on the Cross, He brought us into His redeeming work.  He made us the freer of slaves.

Christ’s poured out blood upon the Cross completely altered the moral landscape of the world.  Every sin, before that, was irrevocable…it could not be removed and had to be punished.  If you sin against me, whether it seems important to us or insignificant, it was a deadly sin and we could not change its impact upon the one who sinned.  Paul stated this clearly.  “For the wages of sin is death…”  (Romans 6:23a NIV)  Before our Lord’s blood shedding, I could not help you out of your sins against me, even if I wanted to do so.  I could not wave it off and say “no big deal” because it wasn’t for me to decide.  God’s law said the sin brought death and that was the end of the matter.  But with Christ’s death and His loving forgiveness through it, I now can forgive the sins of anyone that has hurt me or offended me.  I am joined with Christ through His poured out blood in the work of forgiveness.

Consider this one aspect of sin.  Each sin has a devastating impact upon the personality.  One sin wrecked Adam and Eve and if you multiply that ten thousand times, there are layers and layers of damage in each of us.  Forgiveness is God’s way of healing us and making us whole.  Somehow, God uses us to bring forgiveness to those we encounter and it is no small privilege or responsibility.  Every forgiven sin is a removed sin.  What does this mean?  Forgiveness as a Biblical teaching is not me accepting whatever you have done wrong to me and saying, “No big deal!”  Forgiveness is the removal of sin in an actual way.  The word Jesus used in saying we are to forgive the sins or “transgressions” of others means “to put away”.  In other words, we do something with the sin, at least as far as it is connected to us.  Of course, that is only possible because of the pouring out of Christ’s blood.

Here is a crazy analogy on the part we play forgiving sins.  When Jonah began his journey running away from God, the Lord did not let him go very far before he sent a gigantic storm to get his attention.  It was a blazing light of chaos for everyone on board the ship…not just Jonah.  The only way the storm could be shut off, it was discovered, was to throw Jonah overboard.  Jonah knew it and he convinced the sailors it was so.  But no one wanted to actually toss Jonah into the raging sea…they felt badly about it.  We are like that with forgiveness.  We don’t want to let go of the sin.  We prefer to nurse it, coddle it, relive it and cling to it.  God though tells us to toss it away.  Forgive it.    Meanwhile, for the sailors and for us, the storm continues to rage.  The damage of sin keeps increasing as we hold onto it.  Only, when by the power of the blood of Christ, we toss the sin away does God stop the storm it creates.  Jonah, the one who caused the storm, also began a new journey when he was thrown into the sea.  He was in fact rescued and given a new life by being tossed overboard.  When we forgive the sins of someone, we in a way rescue that person.  We give him or her a fresh start.  A forgiven sin stops being an active sin; it is a crucified sin and is no longer able to damage either the one who forgives it or the one who has had the sin forgiven.  It is a new journey when a sin is forgiven…a journey of peace within and without.  We can either refuse to forgive a sin and continue being damaged by it, or forgive it, and be set free from it.  Somehow, in a way only God can explain, when we forgive a sin we join Christ in His work on the Cross and by His blood, keep the sin from hurting us or others anymore.