HELLO EVERYONE!!! It's been such a long time since I've blogged. God is really doing some amazing things in my life right now; things I find hard to put in words. I'm sort of shocked that for 10 years, I went to church, read the bible, hung with Christians and I didn't get it..... It has been such an amazing display of the power of the gospel and the work of the Spirit. I don't think I have ever been so in love with His church and so in love with his word. I don't think I have ever loved people as much as I do now. That's kind of disturbing when I consider that these are two of the many clear distinctions of what the church looked like in Acts..... OK, I'll go more in depth at another time.
For now, I want to post something that God used to impact me tremendously early this year. I don't know who wrote it, but it is about self pity; something I dealt with for years. This helped me to really see that my problem was rooted in selfishness and my misunderstanding of the gospel. I constantly emphasize this in my blog and I don't think I do an adequate job of speaking this loudly enough...... If you don't get the gospel right, every part of your walk with Christ will suffer in direct proportion to that misunderstanding. As Tim Keller stated "The gospel is not just the A-B-C’s but the A-Z of Christianity." Getting a biblical understanding of conversion and the gospel was a great help in me realizing what was done on the cross. Christ became so much greater than I ever imagined and I realized how undeserving I am.... Read, think, repent, and enjoy Christ more fully.
The bitter fruits of self-pity
Self-pity leads to resentment, despair, and cowardice.
All problems that can be dealt with and solved in Christian counseling sessions are always due to the pride, self-centeredness and self-pity of the counselee.
If this proposition sounds harsh, unloving and crude, then I will propose that you listen carefully for the BIBLICAL evidence.
But it is important at the very outset to distinguish between organic illnesses (that do not make us sin) and spiritual and moral failures in man (from which man is held responsible to repent). I am seeking hereby to restore a right balance between that for which a counselee cannot be held responsible and that for which he is fully responsible, before God and society.
It is known for a fact that where there is said to be a medical problem, whether it is true or not, or where they have been classified as "mentally ill," self-pitying counselees invariably use this to excuse their behavior. They anchor themselves in this comfortable and convenient excuse. Their tendency, just like everybody else, is to find an external excuse for them that avoids any guilt devolving upon themselves. When they hear the physiatrist pontificating that they are ill, what else would they need?
On the contrary, it is found that once the counselee has realized that he is responsible for his present situation, he will begin to put his own life in order and little additional counseling may be actually needed.
Now it is both scriptural and crucial in our case to come to grips with the human situation, as fallen creatures in Adam. Pride and self-centeredness, our natural state in sin, include self-pity. It is when people cannot get their own way and feel frustrated in their designs that they can descend into self-pity, an ever-increasing spiral (unless confronted with and repented of).
They then may begin to display one or more of the many forms of "mental illness." But once they repent of self-pity, then all the rest of their troubles melt away. Self-pity leads to all the behavior patterns common to counselors.
The terms used in psychoanalysis and other related pseudo-sciences are actually descriptions of various kinds of sinful behavior arising from self-pity, such as we constantly find in the record of God's Word, beginning from the case of Cain: "My punishment is more than I can bear...".
No-one is a hysteric, or a schizoid or paranoid by nature. They are rebellious against God by nature (original sin), and therefore are behaving in an hysteric, schizoid or paranoid way.
There is only one situation that precipitates bad behavior. In a nutshell it is: "I can't have my own way." Adam was the first one to, if not express it explicitly, to act upon this philosophy of life. All men, fallen in him, act the same way.
This can be realized in three different situations:
1. "That which makes me happy has been denied me or taken away." This leads to resentment.
2. "That which gives meaning and purpose to life has been denied me or taken away." This leads to despair.
3. "That which enables me to cope with life has been denied me or taken away." This leads to cowardice and timidity.
And it is the outworkings of these three attitudes that lead to all forms of irresponsible behavior which psychiatrists have called "mental illness."
Christian counseling will seek to lay the cards on the table for the counselee to look at. It will endeavor to prove that such attitudes are all stemming from self-pity, loving self rather than loving God and neighbor, paying too much attention on yourself rather than self-denial, as the gospel demands of us all.
By the grace of God these corrupt attitudes can be broken down and replaced with godly and loving attitudes. In such breakdown, and in recovering from them, we realize how good they have been to us, for thus we are delivered from passionately loving ourselves (thus self-pity) to such an extent that we would want the world to revolve around us. But the moral order of things, of course, is not built around us. It is built around Christ.
The answer to self-pity is to see our worthlessness, but also to rejoice in God who graciously opened the way of reconciliation to Him through the blood of the cross. We should not pity ourselves, but the gospel says that God has pitied us, in Christ, who died as our substitute to bring us unto God (1 Peter 2:24; 3:18).
This does not mean that we deserved pity; it only exalts the greatness of God's unmerited love towards us; and if God so loved us, then we also ought to love one another (not only ourselves).
