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Would you agree that often 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—is you?
If we’re honest, I think most of us will answer, “My biggest problem is ME!” Reminds me of the old song:
Not my brother, not my sister, but it’s me, O Lord
Standing in the need of prayer. (Standing in the Need of Prayer – Hymn)
At the core of most of our “issues” is our own self. We either create or exacerbate most of our troubles. Now, this really should come as good news, because we can do something about ourselves with God’s help. That means that 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 you free—free from error, free from bad choices, free from the consequences of untruth. If indeed truth sets you free, then the converse is true: Error keeps you in bondage. In any area of your life where you are in bondage, it is because you are believing something that is not true or refusing to believe what is true.
And yet, if you look around you, if you look in your own heart, you’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, denied the truth, just to mention a few. That 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. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own truth!
Satan, our enemy, is a masterful liar. He knows how dangerous truth is to him and his schemes. He can’t trap you if you know and obey the truth. He can’t get you off on the wrong track if you know the truth. He can’t tempt you to sin if you know the truth. Truth sets you free from satan’s power in your life. The last thing he wants you 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 you from the truth.
There are three things about truth that I want you to remember:
- Truth hurts. When Jesus asked a crowd “If I am telling you the truth, why don’t you believe me?”, they got very angry with him because he had just told them the truth about themselves, which was 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, and so, as is often the case when truth hurts, they wanted to kill the messenger.
Now, if they had 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 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 you free, but it can also hurt. If you refuse to take the pain of truth, then it can never set you free. Then you remain in bondage and the pain continues.
2. Truth heals. Yes, truth hurts, but it also heals. If you go to a doctor because you’ve been having very bad headaches, you don’t want the doctor to tell you that you have a simple headache when in reality you have an aneurysm on your brain. It might feel a lot nicer to hear that you have a headache—no big problem, easy to fix. But your only hope for healing is to know the truth and have an operation to relieve that aneurysm. Telling you anything less than the truth will kill you. Truth is your 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, running away from the truth. And she never will be able to heal until she faces the truth.
Truth hurts, but it also heals. And remember: It never hurts as much as you think it’s going to hurt. Our fear of the pain is worse than the pain itself. So, we run away from what we fear, instead of facing the truth, enduring the pain, and finding healing.
3. Truth sets you free! 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. Now, where do you 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.
That means, read about him, study what he said and how he lived. It is truth—truth sets you free. As you get to know Jesus better and better, the truth you will be learning will set you free from whatever it is that has you bound.
Jesus prayed for his disciples: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.” If you want truth, 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. They are 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, whatever it is that haunts you. Truth sets you free.
As I said at the beginning, 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 you’re in bondage to yourself, you are self-consumed, and when you are self-consumed, you are miserable. Self-absorption leads to discouragement and depression and every kind of dysfunction, yet we live in a society and culture that continually encourage 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. That’s when we find life and joy and peace.
Set Free from Self-Pity
One of the most common ways 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 awhile. The strange thing I’ve noticed about pity parties in my own life is that even though nobody comes and they are miserable affairs, 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?
Almost always, pity parties cause you to waste time. Isn’t it true that when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, you usually waste a lot of time thinking about how you’ve been wronged, how you don’t deserve what’s happened to you, 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 I was sorely tempted to feel sorry for myself because I worked for a difficult man who seemed to enjoy making my life miserable. 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 right 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.” And I just refused to wallow in that self-pity. Believe me, that was a change in the way I have often dealt with hurt feelings. But I just wasn’t going to let the enemy waste my time through a pity party.
Not only do pity parties waste our time, they also waste our energy. Self-pity just drains you. It is, of course, a very emotional reaction, and you spend a lot of emotional energy when you are feeling sorry for yourself. That means you don’t have energy for other things that are important. So, again, pity parties keep you from doing what you should do because you don’t have any energy left after throwing that pity party.
Have you noticed this? When you throw a pity party, your imagination runs wild. 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 this week to how often you start to have a pity party. And 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 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.