Program W-1706
Jesus said we must know the truth, but don’t you find that often we don’t really want to know the truth about ourselves if it hurts? It’s so easy to shift the blame, offer excuses, or become defensive when someone brings us face-to-face with ourselves! But when we refuse to know the truth, then we choose to remain in bondage—to ourselves, no less!
Seems to me the sensible thing to do is face the music, as much as it might hurt, and then let the truth set us free. Jesus is truth, and the Word of God is truth. These are essential in our search for truth.
We’ve seen how self-pity is a self-induced bondage, and we need to be set free from self-pity, as well.
Now, I want to examine being set free from hurt feelings.
Set Free from Hurt Feelings
This is more a female problem than a male problem because we women were created with more sensitive natures, and we feel things more deeply than most men do. What is the major reason we women are prone to get our feelings hurt so easily and so often? May I kindly, but clearly assert that it is because we see far too much as being all about us. Let me give you some examples:
- You walk into a room where you don’t know many people. You feel very conspicuous and out of place, and because no one walks up to you right away to greet you, you take it personally and figure no one wants to talk with you. Your feelings are hurt.
- A good friend makes a comment that you interpret to be critical. Instead of talking with her about it, you retreat with hurt feelings and allow it to damage your relationship.
- A business associate hasn’t returned your calls. You’ve left three messages the last three days. You have always felt that this person doesn’t like you, and this just confirms it further. Your feelings are hurt.
- Your boss asks you to re-do a report and make some changes and corrections. She says you need to improve your writing skills and gives you some specific criticism and suggestions for improvement. You take it personally and consider it an insult to your intelligence, and your feelings are hurt.
- Your husband comes home from work and has very little to say. Your questions seem to irritate him rather than draw him into a conversation. You interpret it to mean that he doesn’t like to talk with you and you wonder if he still loves you. He has hurt your feelings.
- You learn that a friend at church had some other friends over for coffee and you were not invited. Your feelings are hurt.
- Someone says, “You look nice today,” and you think, “You mean, I don’t always look nice?” and your feelings are hurt.
Do any of these sound familiar? These are some everyday examples of self-inflicted pain that we can so easily heap upon ourselves when we allow our feelings to be hurt. True, there are times when we can legitimately claim hurt feelings. But I wonder what percentage of the time our feelings are hurt because we were overly sensitive, rather than because of someone’s harmful intentions or bad motives towards us.
We are very prone to jump to conclusions based on the look on someone’s face, the tone in someone’s voice, their body language, their choice of words, etc., and we very often assume that they are sending us negative messages—that it’s all about us.
Recently I learned about a woman whose feelings were hurt because no one sat at her table at a ministry function. She assumed that no one liked her, so she put her coat on and was ready to go home. She remarked that it was just like high school, when she was often left out. Baggage from her past still haunts her and causes her to think that it’s all about her, when there was a very logical explanation as to why no one sat at her table.
Another woman told me that she didn’t feel welcome in a certain group because she didn’t know the people at her table and they didn’t talk to her. Well, if the truth were known, they were probably all sitting there thinking the same thing: “Here I am at this function and nobody will talk to me, so nobody likes me, and I just don’t fit here.” It’s all about me!
I know we all have to make an effort to be friendly and make people feel welcome. But, my dear friends, we have also got to make an effort to stop taking everything personally and being so insecure as to think that all these little things—which we consider slights—are all about us, and that people are deliberately sending us negative messages. As I’ve often said, people are not thinking about us nearly as much as we think they are, because they are thinking about themselves!
I’ve discovered in my own life that anytime I am self-focused, whether negative or positive, I am in for pain and misery. That’s what Jesus meant when he said if we want to find our life, we must lose it—we must die to ourselves and be alive to Christ. It is not a punishment or a sacrifice to lose our life and find it in Christ, but rather it is for our own good and our own happiness. We are our own biggest problem. We need to be set free from ourselves!
Growing Up Emotionally and Spiritually
To be able to recognize our weaknesses and confront our failures is a sign of both spiritual and emotional maturity. To live in denial is a sign of immaturity. We have to grow up both emotionally and spiritually, or we will simply continue in the same patterns and they will get worse, not better.
As I grow spiritually with God, I also grow emotionally. Have you ever thought about that? The two go hand-in-hand:
We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:11-14)
Are you the equivalent of a 40-year-old person still drinking from a bottle? A person who has been a Christian a long time, but you haven’t trained yourself for solid food? How miserable is that! Here are five ways to be set free from yourself:
1. Start an intentional campaign to “grow up in Christ.”
Choose one area where you need to grow up:
- Stop being lazy; get moving on what you know God wants you to do
- Stop shifting the blame; accept responsibility
Pray daily that God will deliver you from that immature tendency. Pray that you will learn how to train yourself to eat solid food and become mature. Pray specifically to be set free from that bondage. When you make progress in one area, move to another.
2. Interrupt thoughts of yourself with thoughts of Jesus.
Become very aware of what you are thinking and, as soon as you realize you’re heading into the it’s-all-about-me pattern of thinking, start singing a good song, quoting a scripture, and praising God for his goodness. This will not be easy to do; you will have to pray for God’s strength to do it. But once you start to practice this, you are going to be amazed at how much lighter your load is, how much more joyful you are, how brighter the world seems, etc.
3. Resist the enemy who is trying to entangle you and hinder you by making you self-focused.
Say to the enemy—out loud if possible, “Sorry, but I’m not having a pity party today so take off the party hat and go find someone else. I refuse to feel sorry for myself! I don’t have time, and I’m not wasting that energy.” The Bible says that if you will resist the enemy, he will flee from you.
4. Get busy doing something constructive.
Don’t just sit there; do something! This is one time you need to get involved in constructive activity that will take your mind off of your hurt feelings and shut down that pity party.
5. If you have something against someone else, either go to them and get it out in the open, or put it behind you.
There are times when you need to go to the person who has hurt your feelings and get some issues out in the open. Here’s a good suggestion:
- Write down on a piece of paper exactly what is bothering you, how your feelings have been hurt, and what you would like to say to that person. Put that paper in a safe place for two days and, during those two days, pray about what God would have you do.
- After two days, get the paper out, re-read it, and ask for God’s wisdom. If you still believe you should go to that person and settle this thing, then decide how to tell the truth in love, make sure you’re not acting in anger nor simply self-interest, and then go to them at an appropriate time.
- If you’re not willing to do that, or it no longer seems that important, tear up the piece of paper and say to the Lord, “I’m putting this behind me; it is in the past and you will take care of it from this point on.” The worst thing in the world is to keep brooding about it. Either do something or put it behind you.
Don’t let the enemy steal the work that God wants to do in your heart. If God is saying, “I want you to grow up in this area; I want to set you free from yourself,” then determine by God’s grace to grow up in Christ and learn that everything is not all about you. It will set you free!