Woah, Jesus

Recently, my general attitude towards life has been fighting off the offensive.

I have plenty of reasons to be offended. By human terms, anyway.

So when dealing with a harsh blow again today, I began to seek the Bible for something, anything that would soothe my aching and hurting heart. Something that would say "Bethany, you are so kind, so good, and you don't deserve this."

That's not really Jesus' way, though. I should have known that.

The first verse I was drawn to is Matthew 16:21-23 where Jesus is explaining to the disciples that he must suffer horrible things at the hands of the chief priests, elders, and teachers of the law and they will kill him and on the third day he will rise. Peter, never one to hold his human feelings in, says 'No way. This can't happen to you, Lord.'

What Jesus says is this: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns."

Woah, harsh words, right? I'm pretty sure Jesus isn't allowed to say that.



But I think what Jesus is saying is that gross, self-centered, purposeless human self-pity that keeps us from completing God's work is of the devil, straight from Hell. Yep, that sounds like a big dose of Truth headed straight for my heart.

Jesus never accepted sympathy from others because no one understood His purpose...nobody accept God himself could give sympathy to Jesus.This is simply because nobody else was concerned with God's plan!! They were all thinking about their stupid human concerns, which we should know only get in the way of what He's trying to do. Maybe the whole Satan thing wasn't too far off, eh?

When I look at self-pity in the context of counseling and psychology, God has revealed (yet another) new Truth concerning this. (PS- praise God for his creation of the human mind) Self-pity produces no change. Self-pity encourages the counsellee to continue to seek sympathy and more reasons not to change.

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).

The danger of self-pity is imminent in my life. When I am in the middle, when I am tossed aside after always being there, when I am forgotten by close friends, when I work so hard and yet still have nothing to show, when I am prepared for a task and yet still fail, how easy it is to indulge in a little self-pity, which I absolutely admit I have done more than once this week. I am tempted to think/believe when my Christian brothers and sisters have extend sympathy, "You're right, what I have on my plate is too hard" which is dangerously close to, "God has given me more than I can handle" This, brothers and sisters, is sin. Pure and simple, this is a slap in our Creator's face. It needs to stop...

I must say that all in all, writing these notes are often more therapeutic to me than I intended them to be for others.