How Do I Wage War on My Self-Pity?
00:00:00.000 | [intro music]
00:00:04.560 | How do I wage war against my self-pity?
00:00:07.360 | Michael, a listener from Portland, wants help in the battle that he's facing.
00:00:12.800 | Pastor John, thank you for this podcast.
00:00:15.240 | I struggle with self-pity and often self-justify my self-pity by rationalizing it in my own
00:00:21.960 | head.
00:00:22.960 | Have you experienced this too?
00:00:24.520 | If so, what are the best arguments you've made from your own flesh to justify your self-pity
00:00:29.800 | and what biblical arguments do you use to make war against those selfish arguments?
00:00:36.560 | Pastor John, what would you say to Michael?
00:00:38.120 | Well, Michael asked, "Have you ever experienced this?"
00:00:42.760 | So let me put my answer to his question in an autobiographical form.
00:00:50.160 | Ten years ago this year, I took a leave of absence from the Zen pastoral ministry, and
00:00:57.920 | the reason I asked the elders and the church quite openly for this leave was to do what
00:01:03.920 | I called a "soul check."
00:01:06.500 | During that leave, I tried to be very specific in identifying my own characteristic besetting
00:01:15.400 | sins, and it became evident that they were an ugly cluster of selfishness, proneness
00:01:24.960 | to anger, self-pity, quickness to blame, sullenness.
00:01:32.000 | That's the cluster.
00:01:33.520 | And at the root of that was what I called selfishness, and selfishness had five reflexes
00:01:42.040 | that I could discern very clearly.
00:01:44.720 | I'll tell you in a minute why I call them reflexes.
00:01:47.920 | One, the reflex of expecting that I be served, thank you.
00:01:52.600 | The reflex of feeling I am owed.
00:01:56.440 | The reflex of wanting praise.
00:01:59.460 | The reflex of expecting that things will go my way.
00:02:03.540 | The reflex of feeling that I have the right to react negatively to being crossed in my
00:02:11.000 | desires.
00:02:12.000 | Now, the reason I call those five things reflexes of selfishness is because I don't premeditate
00:02:21.520 | any of them.
00:02:22.520 | They just happen in my head, in my heart.
00:02:25.360 | I didn't decide for any of those to happen.
00:02:28.800 | They just are there.
00:02:31.240 | That's how rooted our unmortified corruption and remaining indwelling sin and selfishness
00:02:42.200 | is.
00:02:44.560 | And I noticed as I kept my sin before my own eyes, I noticed that these selfish reflexes
00:02:54.720 | gave rise to four characteristic things that were manifest for others to see, not just
00:03:02.280 | in my head, but obvious.
00:03:04.240 | One, anger, the strong emotional opposition to the obstacle that just got in my way.
00:03:11.640 | Number two, self-pity, a desire that others feel my woundedness and admire me for being
00:03:19.740 | so mistreated.
00:03:22.240 | And that's the one Mike is asking about.
00:03:24.280 | And third, quickness to blame, a reflex to attribute to others the cause of my frustrating
00:03:32.120 | situation.
00:03:34.120 | And fourth, sullenness, kind of a sinking discouragement, moodiness, hopelessness, unresponsiveness,
00:03:41.840 | withdrawn deadness of emotion.
00:03:45.160 | That's the cluster of John Piper's besetting sins as I identified them 10 years ago.
00:03:53.380 | So what did I learn about the defeat of these monsters in that leave, which has, I think,
00:04:01.320 | I believe you'd have to ask my wife probably, had gotten me more victory in the last 10
00:04:07.480 | years than I had before.
00:04:10.600 | What the Bible showed me was that there was a disconnect between Christ's cancellation
00:04:18.680 | of my sins on the cross and my conscious willed opposition and conquering of my own sins through
00:04:29.360 | blood-bought, spirit-empowered effort.
00:04:32.720 | It was a disconnect.
00:04:34.720 | In other words, God blasted a pattern of passivity that had developed in me toward those particular
00:04:46.480 | cluster of sins.
00:04:48.440 | He forced into my face the biblical reality that canceled sins, that is, blood-covered
00:04:57.120 | sins must be killed consciously, with effort, by faith, in the Spirit, not coddled.
00:05:08.800 | And one of the ways God forced this discovery on me was to expose the inconsistency between
00:05:18.280 | the very active way that I fought sexual temptation and the fairly passive way that I handled
00:05:25.560 | the temptation to self-pity.
00:05:27.400 | Now right there's the nub of the matter.
00:05:29.520 | I had the unspoken assumption that sexual lust must be attacked directly, consciously,
00:05:40.040 | forcefully, with effort of my mind and my will, since Jesus said, "Tear out your eye,
00:05:45.960 | Piper.
00:05:46.960 | Cut off your hand if you have to," when it comes to the temptation of lust.
00:05:51.600 | But for some crazy, demonic reason, I kind of assumed I could not attack these other
00:06:00.520 | besetting sins in the same vicious way, and they would somehow just kind of dry up and
00:06:06.440 | disappear by some inner, unconscious work of the Holy Spirit, without any spirit-empowered,
00:06:12.480 | conscious, ruthless, vicious, angry, "God, I'm a life devil," effort to cut my hand
00:06:19.320 | off or gouge my eye out.
00:06:22.560 | But it became increasingly clear during this leave of absence that the link between the
00:06:30.800 | cancellation of my sin on the cross and the conquering of my sin was sanctified effort.
00:06:40.800 | Now to be sure, the only effort that avails is blood-bought effort, spirit-wrought effort.
00:06:52.000 | But it is nevertheless a conscious effort of the sanctified will.
00:06:58.840 | Passivity in the pursuit of holiness is not what the Bible teaches.
00:07:05.000 | I knew that in relation to sex temptations.
00:07:08.120 | I was playing like it didn't exist in relationship to self-pity temptations.
00:07:12.040 | Oh my goodness.
00:07:14.000 | So here's the texts of what I mean.
00:07:16.440 | I mean, there's lots of them.
00:07:17.440 | I'll just mention two to show the connection between cancellation and conquering.
00:07:23.960 | In the death of Christ, we died to sin, Paul says, therefore put sin to death, Romans 8:13.
00:07:34.220 | In the death of Christ, we were forgiven, therefore now forgive others just like you've
00:07:41.080 | been forgiven.
00:07:42.440 | Clearly, if you just take those two cases, victory over sin, the death of Christ for
00:07:50.200 | my sin is decisive, but they're followed immediately not by the minimizing of human effort, but
00:08:00.280 | by the empowering of the will.
00:08:03.000 | Don't let sin reign in your mortal body.
00:08:05.980 | You have died to it.
00:08:07.100 | Don't let it reign.
00:08:08.860 | Forgive one another.
00:08:10.500 | In other words, God intends that my sanctification include conscious-willed opposition to specific
00:08:20.520 | sins in my life.
00:08:23.020 | I had applied that to sexual temptation, and I think with significant success over the
00:08:29.280 | last 40 years or so.
00:08:31.060 | But for some reason, I failed to apply the same brutal intentionality of sin killing
00:08:38.700 | to my selfishness and anger and self-pity and quickness to blame and sullenness.
00:08:45.040 | So I began to use the same strategy towards self-pity that I was using toward lust.
00:08:51.060 | Let me give you an example.
00:08:53.220 | I came home one Lord's Day evening, and I was tired.
00:08:57.140 | I was hoping to do something with my wife and daughter, who, Talha was still at home.
00:09:03.960 | And my wife and my daughter were on the couch with the computer watching something together.
00:09:11.660 | And they announced, "We're watching this, and we're going to watch this."
00:09:16.700 | And they didn't say anything about me.
00:09:19.060 | Poor me.
00:09:20.340 | Poor, hardworking pastor me, right?
00:09:24.580 | It just said, "We're enjoying this.
00:09:26.860 | Welcome home.
00:09:27.860 | Do what you want."
00:09:30.540 | My reflexes were immediate.
00:09:33.140 | Frustration, anger, especially self-pity.
00:09:36.980 | So with my new God-given resolve, I did with that temptation what I do with sexual temptation
00:09:47.620 | regularly.
00:09:48.620 | I said, "No, no, self-pity.
00:09:52.180 | No.
00:09:53.180 | Get out of my head.
00:09:54.180 | Go to hell where you belong."
00:09:56.620 | And I went upstairs to my study, and I waged war.
00:10:00.380 | Maybe 10, 15 minutes.
00:10:01.820 | I waged war, effort.
00:10:04.780 | I turned my mind and my heart toward the promises of God and the surety of the cross and the
00:10:12.140 | love of my Father and the wealth of my inheritance in Christ and the blessings of the Lord's
00:10:17.020 | Day that had just gone by and the patience of Jesus.
00:10:20.580 | And I held them there in front of my mind where I could see them, and I cried out to
00:10:25.940 | the Lord for blood-bought help.
00:10:29.080 | And I consciously, intentionally, consciously, intentionally, not passively, beat down—I
00:10:35.940 | beat it down—the anger and self-pity and blaming and sullenness as utterly out of character
00:10:43.940 | with who I am in Jesus.
00:10:46.300 | And I kept beating until they were effectively dead.
00:10:51.820 | So Mike, there you have it.
00:10:54.420 | You asked, "Do you ever experience this?"
00:10:58.220 | Oh my.
00:10:59.220 | Yes, I have shared your experience, and that's what the Lord taught me 10 years ago.
00:11:06.060 | I think if you were to ask my wife today, "Is Johnny different in that regard from,
00:11:14.100 | say, 20 years ago?"
00:11:15.780 | I think she'd say, "Yes, and I give God great glory."
00:11:21.860 | It's inspiring to hear you still reaching after holiness, Pastor John, and thank you
00:11:26.460 | for joining us today on the podcast for our feed, our archive, or to send us your own
00:11:31.980 | question like Michael did today.
00:11:33.940 | Go online to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:39.540 | How do we get into the position where God is 100% for me and never again against me?
00:11:47.220 | Is there a more important question for each of us?
00:11:49.340 | I don't think so.
00:11:50.580 | So how do we find a satisfying answer to that question, especially in a world that tells
00:11:55.420 | us that we are good enough or special enough to warrant God's eternal favor?
00:12:01.140 | And in a world full of religions trying to convince us that we can save ourselves, how
00:12:06.220 | can God be 100% for me and never again against me?
00:12:11.660 | That's the question.
00:12:12.660 | Next time, I'm Tony Reinke.
00:12:14.060 | We'll see you back here on Wednesday.
00:12:16.260 | [END]
00:12:16.760 | 1.5.1 Desiring God.org/AskPastorJohn
00:12:18.760 | 1.5.1 Desiring God.org/AskPastorJohn
00:12:20.760 | 1.5.1 Desiring God.org/AskPastorJohn
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