Pastor Bell's Words To Live By

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” (Isaiah 6:5 NIV).

Self-pity is a condition where one dwells in one’s misfortune and sorrows. It is characterized by a person’s belief that he or she is the victim of events and is therefore deserving of condolence. Self-pity is generally regarded as a negative emotion in that it does not generally help deal with adverse situations. It is always someone’s fault why this or that happened. It causes the individual to absolve responsibility by passing it on to someone else.

This is a negative emotion that goes hand in hand with depression and leads the individual to see themselves in a particular light.

In essence self-pity is a way of seeing yourself in a totally contradictory way from which God sees you. And the cry is usually woe is me!

God sees you as an individual with lots of potential, you see yourself as someone who is a failure and will never amount to anything.  God sees you as a great leader, you see yourself as someone never able to get beyond the first level and always walking in someone else’s shadow.

We are called to be persistent, resilient and to have a mindset that says ‘I will never give up’. Like Caleb and Joshua from the Old Testament, we must develop the same mental strength to say that the giants who stand between us and our destiny will be destroyed as we possess what God intended for us in the first place (Numbers 13:30).

Today if we develop a mindset where we see ourselves as victims rather than victors we will never aspire to the heights that God intended for us. So let us jettison self-pity and embrace that attitude that says ’I can do all things through Christ who give me strength’, and defeat the giants of Self and Pity.

Read Number 13