PROGRAM W-1705
From my own experience, I believe I can accurately identify the most difficult person in your life: the one who holds you back and keeps you saddled with your past; the one who gets in your way of moving forward to do great things for God; the one who floods your mind with the wrong thoughts, continually sending you wrong messages about yourself. Do you know who I’m talking about? It’s you, right?
If we’re honest, we will all answer, “My biggest problem is ME!” It reminds me of this old song:
Not my brother, not my sister,
but it’s me, O Lord,
Standing in the need of prayer.
At the core of most of our “issues” is our own self. We either create or exacerbate most of our troubles. This really should come as good news because we can do something about ourselves with God’s help. That means we can be set free from ourselves if and when we decide to take God at his word and claim the victory that is ours in Christ.
The Truth About Truth
Jesus said, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
Truth sets us free—free from error, free from bad choices, free from the consequences of untruth. If indeed truth sets us free, then the converse is true: error binds us. In any area of our lives where we are in bondage, it is because we are believing something that is not true, or refusing to believe what is true.
Yet, if we look around us and look in our own heart, we’ll discover that frequently we don’t seek after truth. In the Bible we find that people suppressed the truth, exchanged it for lies, rejected the truth, refused to love the truth, and denied the truth—just to mention a few! This has been going on through all of history, and it certainly continues today.
In fact, in our culture, truth has become relative. Believe what you please, most people think, as long as it works for you. But that doesn’t change the truth about truth. We’re entitled to our own opinion, but we’re not entitled to our own truth!
Satan, our enemy, is a masterful liar. He knows how dangerous truth is to him and his schemes. He can’t trap us if we know and obey the truth. He can’t get us off on the wrong track if we know the truth. He can’t tempt us to sin if we know the truth. Truth sets us free from Satan’s power in our lives. The last thing he wants us to know is the truth as found in Jesus and the Word of God. Therefore, he throws up every roadblock he can think of to keep us from the truth.
There are three things about truth that I want you to remembe
1. Truth hurts.
When Jesus asked a crowd “If I am telling you the truth, why don’t you believe me?” (John 8:46), they got very angry with him because he had just told them the truth about themselves—that they were not of Abraham but of Satan. He told them that truth and, as you can imagine, it hurt their feelings and enraged them. So, as is often the case when truth hurts, they wanted to kill the messenger.
Had they listened and believed that truth, even though it hurt them greatly, it would also have set them free. But they were too shortsighted to realize that, and so they rejected the truth.
I find that there are areas in my own life where I reject the truth because it hurts. I recall a phone call I received where someone told me some truth about myself that was painful. My first reflex was to drown it in busyness—just get busy with all I had to do and forget it. I wanted to tell myself it wasn’t that important anyway. I wanted to think good things about myself and convince myself this information was not accurate. The truth hurt, and nobody likes pain. In fact, our natural reaction is to run away from pain of any sort.
Finally, I talked to myself and said, “Mary, this is the truth about you and you’d better face it and do something about it.” To refuse to face the truth—even though it hurts—is simply foolish, to say the least. Truth sets us free, but it can also hurt. If we refuse to take the pain of truth, then it can never set us free. Then we remain in bondage and the pain continues.
2. Truth heals.
Yes, truth hurts, but it also heals. If we go to a doctor because we’ve been having very bad headaches, we don’t want the doctor to tell us that we have a simple headache when, in reality, we have an aneurysm on our brain. It might feel a lot nicer to hear that we have a headache—no big problem, easy to fix—but our only hope for healing is to know the truth and have an operation to relieve that aneurysm. Telling us anything less than the truth will kill us. Truth is our key to healing.
Think of where you need some healing in your life. Perhaps it is healing in a relationship. I think of a woman I know who has difficulty in almost every relationship in her life sooner or later. She continually refuses to face the truth about herself, and she shifts the blame to others. Therefore, she never heals. She is in constant inner pain, struggling with relationships, going from one crisis to another, changing jobs frequently, and running away from the truth. She never will be able to heal until she faces the truth.
Truth hurts, but it also heals. Remember this: It never hurts as much as we think it’s going to hurt. Our fear of the pain is worse than the pain itself. As a result, we run away from what we fear, instead of facing the truth, enduring the pain, and finding healing.
3. Truth sets us free!
We can experience real, honest freedom! Everybody wants to be free, but there is a price to pay for freedom. It has never been cheap. But it’s well worth the price.
What is it that has you bound up? What fears? What anger? What bitterness? Do you really want to be free? If so, you’ve got to find the truth.
Where do we look for truth? Jesus said in John 18:37, “The reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” He also told us that he is the Truth. John wrote that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. That’s a very good starting point—Jesus. Look for truth in Jesus.
This means we need to read about him, and study what he said and how he lived. It is truth, and truth sets us free. As we get to know Jesus better and better, the truth we will be learning will set us free from whatever it is that has us bound.
Jesus prayed for his disciples: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). If we want truth, we must stay in the word of God. I was praying with a woman who is facing a satanic onslaught. She has baggage from her past and many things that would keep her in bondage. I urged her to cling to the Word of God and keep her mind focused on Jesus. This is the truth that will heal her and set her free. She admitted that it has been difficult for her to read her Bible. That is not surprising because the enemy will do anything to keep her from the truth of God’s Word.
Think about what truth will do for you. It will set you free from whatever binds you—free from your fears, your past, and whatever else haunts you. Truth sets you free!
As I’ve mentioned, most of our troubles are because we bring them on ourselves or we allow them into our lives. We truly need to discover where we are in bondage to ourselves and ask God to set us free. You see, when we’re in bondage to ourselves, we are self-consumed; when we are self-consumed, we are miserable. Self-absorption leads to discouragement, depression, and every kind of dysfunction. Yet we live in a society and culture that continually encourages us to be self-consumed.
Jesus said if we want to find our lives, we have to lose them. It’s one of the great paradoxes of the Christian life: We find by losing; we live by dying—dying to ourselves; getting ourselves out of the way; becoming intentional about losing ourselves in service to others; and making an effort every day not to be consumed with ourselves. This is when we find life, joy, and peace!
Set Free from Self-Pity
One of the most common reasons we are in bondage to ourselves is because we keep throwing pity parties! You know what I’m talking about—those occasions when we feel sorry for ourselves for some reason or another, and we wallow around in that self-pity for a while. The strange thing I’ve noticed about pity parties in my own life is that even though nobody comes and they are miserable, I keep having them! Why would we inflict such misery on ourselves? The truth is, pity parties are pitiful!
One of the most common things that hinders and entangles believers, and keeps us from running our race, is self-pity. I believe the enemy has this flaming arrow honed to perfection, and many of us are very vulnerable to self-pity.
Think of how the enemy uses self-pity in your life. When you are feeling sorry for yourself, what are some of the usual outcomes?
1. Pity parties waste our time.
Think about it: When we’re feeling sorry for ourselves, we usually waste a lot of time thinking about how we’ve been wronged, how we don’t deserve what’s happened to us, and how bad things are. Pity parties take a lot of time away from other important activities.
I remember when I first learned that I didn’t have to throw a pity party. I got home one evening and was sorely tempted to feel sorry for myself. I had planned to get some work done that night but, instead, I started the pity party. I sat down in my favorite chair and decided, “I’m not going to do anything tonight; I have a right to just do nothing. After all, I’ve had a really rough day. I wasn’t treated well today.”
Then it dawned on me what was happening: The enemy was trying to keep me from doing profitable things by tempting me to throw a pity party. So, I said—out loud—to the enemy, “Not tonight! No sir, I’m not throwing a pity party tonight!” I refused to wallow in that self-pity. Believe me, that was a change in the way I have often dealt with hurt feelings! I wasn’t going to let the enemy waste my time through a pity party!
2. Pity parties waste our energy.
Self-pity drains us. It is, of course, a very emotional reaction, and we spend a lot of emotional energy when we are feeling sorry for ourselves. That means we don’t have energy for other things that are important. Pity parties keep us from doing what we should do because we don’t have any energy left after throwing that pity party.
3. Pity parties cause our imagination to run wild.
Have you noticed this? You start thinking about what someone has done or what has happened, and it grows in importance. In your mind it becomes a lot worse than it really is. You lose your perspective. That, of course, causes you to over-react to it.
We need to be set free from self-pity—set free from ourselves. I want to encourage you to pay attention to how often you start to have a pity party. As soon as you recognize that tendency, talk to yourself and say, “STOP! You don’t have to throw a pity party.” Then start reciting all the things you have to be thankful for—and see how quickly that pity party peters out! Thankfulness will drive out self-pity and keep you from all its harmful consequences.