Don't Fall Prey to The Victim Mentality

Probably every one of us can remember a situation when we were young where we would have something happen to us that we thought was a great injustice. You know, someone breaks your toy and no one seems to care. The adults, oh, that's okay. No, it's not. They just don't seem to care. Or maybe you have a friend that you get blamed for something they did. And no one seems to understand, and you get the punishment. All of us can think of things like that that happened to us when we were kids. And that's the thing that caused this remarkable feeling of injustice. This is wrong. I have been wrongly treated. And what makes this right? What makes this right? Even as adults, of course, we feel that all the time. We can have that same angry feeling. We can have that same confusion, the same anxiety and fear sometimes when things happen to us because someone takes advantage of us. Or they mistreat us. Someone steals your checkbook. And it's amazing how violated you feel. You really feel violated. Of course, I've never had this happen, but I've talked to many people who have. If someone breaks into your house and you know they were in my house, they touch stuff, they open drawers, you know, and move things around, who were these people? And there's this great feeling of being violated. I've been abused here by people I don't even know. Or what if you have a friend, maybe someone in the church, that tells something about you that's not true, some rumor, and it passes on to other people, and then a whole bunch of people believe a rumor, and they think you're the worst person in the church. You know, why isn't the minister throw that person out? And it's not true. I've seen people actually leave the church over something like that. They get so overwhelmed with this feeling of, this is not just, I'm being abused here, I'm being misused, and this is wrong. It is wrong. Now, for some people, you have experienced abuses that are a whole lot worse than that. A whole lot worse than that. You know, we live with rumors, we live with someone stealing your checkbook. Some of you, even as children, experienced physical abuse where you are beaten by people, by adults. Unbelievable emotional abuse and sexual abuse. And it left something in you. It changed who you were. It changed how you view life. Because you were a victim. And there's a lot of people who are 40 years away from that and still experience an incredible devastation because of what they went through. Well, I'm going to talk about something today that is tied in with this, but is a little bit separate. Because we've all experienced some level of abuse. I mean, every time I think about something that has hurt me in my life, some abuse I've taken. You know, somebody lied about me and turned a friend against me. You've all been through that. I can remember when I was 15 years old, my dad told me I couldn't fight. Some kid picked a fight with me. So I didn't fight, but I wouldn't run. That boy beat me too. He couldn't fight. You know, I almost won because he almost wore himself out.

Man alive. It's a wonder I could see out of both eyes, you know, but I wasn't going to run. Well, you know, I felt abused for a while. But yeah, big deal. You grow out of it, right? You know, but for a while, that was like, man, that was a beating. And it was bad because there was like 15 other people standing around watching me get beat, you know. And my dad finally said, when I went home, he said, why didn't you like defend yourself? I said, why we shouldn't have told me that before. I might have warned him out a whole lot quicker if I hit back, you know. But that's minor. Okay, that's minor. Kids go through that. We grow, we come out of that. Some of you went through things that's not so easy to come out of. It's a whole lot worse than, you know, 15-year-old getting beat up. Now, in our society, there is something that sociologists have an interesting craze for. It's called victim mentality. Victim mentality. Now, these are people who may have suffered some real serious abuses on them or just the normal things that all of us go through. But they develop a viewpoint of life. Let me give you a few symptoms of victim mentality, because we're going to talk about this in terms of our Christianity. If you have a victim, if a person has a victim mentality, no matter how good things are, they can't disengage from the anxiety and fear and anger because they see themselves as victims all the time. Now, some of you may know people like that. Some of you have probably been like that at some point in your life. Everything's against me. Everybody's against me. And you see yourself as being victimized by people. You know, a person could do the smallest thing. They did that on purpose. Or maybe they didn't at all. Maybe the guy driving in front of you and jamming on his brakes didn't do it on purpose. Maybe he really wasn't after you. Maybe he spilled his coffee on himself. But in the victim mentality, we tend to see everything is happening to us because people are causing it to happen. They begin to define all relationships as people being either for them or against them. There's two types of people in this world. The people are for me and the people are against me. And a lot of times, the person is against you because they have a different opinion and we all have different opinions on things. That doesn't mean you're for or against person because you have different opinions. They also tend to see all the challenges of life as someone else's fault. I have problems in my life and somebody is at fault. It's somebody's fault that I feel this way all the time. It's somebody's fault that I have fear all the time. And it's somebody's fault that I feel anger all the time. Now, this is going to have repercussions as we talk through this that are very serious. They tend to crave attention. They also want people to suffer for what they've done to them. Sometimes even people that there's no proof that they did anything to them, but since you see yourself as a victim, I know that person did that on purpose and I want them punished. So they need punishment on other people. And they also tend to feel powerless and they are obsessed with their own feelings.

Because anxiety, fear, and anger are normally human emotions. Every one of us from time to time experiences anxiety, fear, and anger. But if we have a victim mentality, those tend to be our three major emotions. We're constantly, not constantly, but I mean regularly in anxiety, fear, and anger because look what people are doing to me or look at what people have done to me.

There's an emphasis in their lives on the past, what has happened to me in the past. Now, it is naturally natural to feel hurt when somebody abuses you or does something bad to you. Or it's as simple as getting mad at you and calling you a name. You don't like that. Nobody likes that. And that's natural to feel that way. We're not talking about the normal reaction to something. We're talking about a state of living in which we see ourselves as victims. We're going to look at a story in the scripture today. There's a lot of stories in the Bible. You think, why are they there? This story takes up four chapters. A lot of space in the Bible is given to a story that you think, what in the world, what purpose this story have for me and my Christianity? And yet there's a lot of important lessons in this story. A lot of important lessons. A lot of important lessons. And it has to do with a victim mentality. Let's start in 2 Samuel 13. We're looking at David's family. One thing you'll realize when you go through the life of David, there are many great things he did in his life. There were other things that he didn't do so well. He didn't seem to be a great family man. And you see problems with his children. Of course, when you have more than one wife, you're going to have problems to begin with, right? It's not smart. But here we have an incident that happened in his family when his children were at least older teens or, you know, they were younger. They weren't 30 or 40 years old. So in adulthood, at this time, was considered much younger than it is now. So I mean, they're not 13 years old, but they're either older teens, early 20s, somewhere in there probably. Verse 1. I'm going to read this. I'm not going to read all this story, just a few bits and pieces, but I want to read a few verses here because they capture what is happening. After that Absalom, the son of David, had a lovely sister whose name was Tamar. And Amnon, the son of David, loved her. Now understand. You see, well, they're both sons of David, but they're half brothers. They're from two different mothers. So this is his half sister.

Now, you get families with half sisters and half brothers, sometimes the natural barriers that seem to be there between brothers and sisters aren't there. Amnon looks at his sister, his half sister, and he says, I'm in love with her. Of course, that's Absalom who's going to protect her because that's what older brothers do, right? Well, the man becomes so obsessed with her, they become sick. Verse 2, Amnon was so distressed over his sister Tamar that he became sick, for she was a virgin.

And it was improper for Amnon to do anything to her. But Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimya, David's brother. Oh, we have a cousin. Oh, this is such a functional family. Okay, so now we have a cousin getting involved. Now, Jonadab was a very crafty man, and he said to him, why are you, the king's son, becoming thinner day after day? Will you not tell me? He literally was losing weight, so much so that people were noticing it.

They knew he was sick. And finally, you know, his cousin says, what's wrong with you? Do you have some disease? What's going on here? Amnon said to him, I love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister. So Jonadab said to him, lie down on your bed and pretend to be ill. Oh, wow, this is a good solution.

And when your father comes to see you, say to him, please let my sister Tamar come and give me food and prepare the food of my sight that I may see it and eat it from her hand. So you know what Amnon did, thinking this was so wise, being a young guy? He pretended to be sick, where everybody knew he was losing weight.

And David, of course, comes and says, son, what's wrong? He says, I just can't eat, but I think if Tamar brought some food in and made some food for me, maybe I could eat some. So sure enough, Tamar comes over to his part of the palace, sent by David. She makes food, and Amnon sends all the servants out.

So let's go to verse 9. And she took the pan and placed them out before him, but he refused to eat. Then Amnon said, have everyone go out from me. And they all went out from him. Then Amnon said to Tamar, bring the food into the bedroom that I may eat from your hand. I can't sit at the table, send everybody away. I just go lay down and you just feed me.

You know, I'm just so sick. Tamar took the cakes, which she had made, and brought them to Amnon, her brother in the bedroom. Now when she had brought them to him to eat, he took hold of her and said to her, come lie with me, my sister. But she answered him, no, my brother, do not force me, for no such thing should be done in Israel. Do not do this disgraceful thing. And I, where would I take my shame?

What would I do? I mean, if this got out that I was raped by my own brother, half-brother, I would never get married. I would have to live in shame. And as for you, you would be like one of the fools of Israel. You're going to break the law. You know, the penalty for rape was execution. That was the penalty. She says, you know, you're going to break the law and you're going to end up in real trouble here. Now therefore, please speak to the king, for he will not withhold me from you.

Now that sounds strange, but sometimes half-brothers and half-sisters would marry. However, he would not heed her voice, and being stronger than she, he forced her and lay with her. Now the next statement is very indicative of men who do these kinds of things. Then Amnon hated her exceedingly, so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love which he had loved her. And Amnon said to her, her eyes had been gone, and she begs him, please don't send me away.

Just go to David now. Tell him what happened. Tell him I was here, and you know, it got out of hand, and he'll let us get married. But don't send me away. Don't do this to me. But he did. Absalom finds her, um, mourning, literally just sitting and covering her head with dirt. And she explains what happened.

And Absalom says, just don't tell anybody. You know, sis, just don't tell anybody. I'll take care of Amnon. He's not going to tell anybody, and it'll be okay. And what it says is that Absalom took care of Tamar for the rest of his life. He's a good brother, right? This is a good brother. This is the hero of the story.

He does the right thing here.

But what happens is something that Absalom does not understand. We don't either completely. Why? Verse 21 says, when King David heard of all these things, he was very angry. So, you know, it sort of got out what had happened. He can't hide something much in a palace. Probably before long, most of Israel knew, or at least most of Jerusalem, what had happened. Now, he's very angry, but he doesn't do anything. For reasons we don't know, David froze. Of course, you could come up with a lot of reasons. Do I want this scandal to be known throughout Israel? Maybe we can just let it go away. Or do I bring my son up on charges and I have him stoned in front of all of Israel. Do I kill my own son? Or maybe just put him in exile. He could have done that. He could have said, leave, get out of here, because a lot of royalty would do that. They would, okay, you got to go live in Egypt or wherever you can go, but you can't come back into Israel the rest of your life. He could have done that. But he didn't do anything. He seems to be, he's angry, but he's frozen. He doesn't know what to do. And two years goes by. And in the next chapter, it talks about how after two years, Aslollom just says, this is wrong. We know what the law is. We know what the law is. We know what God says you should do. So he says, I'm going to have a big dinner for all my brothers. And he has a big dinner for all his brothers, invites all of them. And he tells his servants, once Abnon comes in, you kill him. And they did. And then he came into the dinner and his servants killed him. Now David gets the message, but the message was garbled. And when it comes is that Absalom has killed all your sons. David is beside himself with grief. He's just lost all of his sons in his mind, murdered by another son. And then it comes in, no, no, no, we got it wrong. He only killed Abnon. Now here's the problem that Absalom realizes he crossed the line. He did not have the right before law, sort of what we're talking about, what was talked about by Mr. Coleman. Law does not allow us to do certain actions, because if you do, if you allow everybody to do those actions, you have violent chaos. So David had not taken action, but Absalom by law did not have the right to take action. So he knew that. He fled. He left the country. And he was gone from the country for three years. Three years he was gone, waiting, hoping. Can you imagine three years going by and don't know? Maybe one day some assassin from David comes and kills you, because that was pretty common in the Middle East. You know, you could flee, but assassins would be sent. But David wasn't that kind of man. But maybe he'll let him come back. He's not seeing his family, his friends. He's alone in another country where he is ostracized for what? In his mind. But I'm the one who was wronged. Tamar was wronged. How am I being punished when I did what was right? But he knew he hadn't completely done what was right, because he fled. He didn't have the right to kill his brother. So the hero of the story is now the bad guy. He's off by himself.

And so what happens is David suffers terribly from this. Look at verse 38 here, of 2 Samuel 13. So Absalom fled and went to Geshur and was there three years. And King David longed to go to Absalom, for he had been comforted concerning Amnon because he was dead. In other words, okay, the issue with Amnon is done. He grieved over him, but at least now I don't know. I don't have to decide what to do to him. I don't have to have my son stoned. So he grieved over him, and I went Absalom back. So he lets Absalom come back, and Absalom comes back. And weeks go by, the months go by. He's in Jerusalem, and David won't have anything to do with him. And now he lives with shame, the shame that my own father won't even let me come home. Now I'm walking around the streets, and people are saying, oh look, there's Absalom. You can imagine the rumors and the things. Some people come up to him and say, you know, what you did was right. Other people won't talk to him because, oh, what you did was murder. So he's in the middle of all this controversy, and David will not call him home. What's interesting here is verse 27 of chapter 14. Well, let's go to verse 25. This just tells us something. There is one weakness, so there's number of weaknesses this man has, but this is an interesting weakness. Now in all Israel, there was no one who was praised as much as Absalom for his good looks. From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him. And when he cut his hair of his head, at the end of every year he cut it because it was heavy on him. He only cut his hair once a year, but it was because it got so heavy. And it says, when he cut it, he weighed the hair of his head at 200 shekels according to the king's standard. Now there was a standard at the temple, and it is what they think was the king's standard, and they go back and forth. No one's quite sure, but let's just say it was either two pounds or four pounds. That's a lot of hair. So once a year, you know, you can imagine he's now a rock star. Absalom's home. You can imagine, hey, did you hear? Absalom had his hair cut way this year. Okay, I mean, this guy's become a celebrity figure. The man who took care of his sister, the man who was ostracized by his father, but he's the best looking man in Israel. Everybody agrees, and he lets his hair grow long so people would recognize him. Verse 28, And Absalom dwelt two years of Jerusalem, but did not see the king's face, for two years go by. Therefore Absalom sent for Joab to send him to the king, but he would not come to him. Now Joab is the right-hand man of David. He's his leading general. And Joab had actually argued to let Absalom come home, bring the family back together. Let's bury this thing. But David still won't bring Absalom in. I mean, he killed his son. One son killed another son. How do you deal with that as a father? How do you deal with that as a king?

And he says, he sent Storm a second time, and he would not come. Verse 30, So this is Absalom, said to his servants, See Joab's field is near mine, and he is barley there. Go and set it on fire. And Absalom's servant set the field on fire. Then Joab rose and came to Absalom's house and said to him, Why have your servant set my field on fire? He's very lucky. Joab had a way of dealing with things violently, but he did not this time. I mean, he's the king's son. You just burned my fields down. You know, you just cost me a lot of my revenue. And Absalom answered Joab, Look, I sent to you saying, Come here, that I may send you to the king and say, Why have I come to Geshur or come from Geshur? It would be better for me to be still there. Now therefore, let me see the king's face, but if there is iniquity in me, let him execute me. He says, I want a fair trial. And if what I did was wrong, then let me be stoned. I challenge the king. Now, something's changed. We're going to go through this in a minute. What's changed? I demand justice. And if you have to, I'll take my punishment. But I demand to be seen before the king and my case will be heard.

And because Joab wasn't paying him attention, he committed a crime against Joab. I mean, burning another man's field, burning another man's property, is a crime. It was a crime then. It's a crime now. You can't go burn your neighbor's field. You can't go burn down your neighbor's house. It's a crime. He had just committed a crime. But his argument is, if I did something wrong and how I dealt with Amnon, then let me be executed. You know, bring me before the king. Let's see how he defends himself when he didn't act right away and kill his other son.

David accepts him. And what happens next is that Absalom decides it's not enough. What I have received, forgiveness and the understanding that there was extenuating circumstances... I mean, he's not brought the trial. David did not bring him the trial. It's not enough. Somebody has to pay. Lots of people have to pay for what I've gone through. Notice verse 1 of chapter 15. And after this, it happened that Absalom provided himself with chariots and horses and 50 men to run before him. You know, you knew when Absalom was coming to town because there were soldiers. There was a cavalry soldiers and there was chariots coming through. It'd be like jeeps and tanks rumbling in the town, and then he comes in on a big white horse.

You knew when Absalom was coming, with his hair flowing down to his shoulders as he comes running into town. He's a rock star. Everybody likes him. He's good looking. He's cool.

And here he comes, and he has a real chip on his shoulder. Now verse 2. Now Absalom would rise early and stand beside the way to the gate. This is outside of Jerusalem. So it was whenever anyone who had a lawsuit came to the king for a decision, that Absalom would call out to him and say, what city are you from? So think about all these people are coming in because daily the king would keep court in which he would make decisions that couldn't be made or for whatever reason in the local towns where the elders and Levites made decisions. They would come to him. He says, what city are you from? And they would say, your servant is from such and such a tribe in Israel. Then Absalom would say to him, look, your case is good. So he'd hear the case and write, but there is no deputy of the king to hear you. Moreover, Absalom would say, oh, that I were made judge in the land and everyone who has any suit or cause would come to me and I would give him justice. You can't go to David. Let me tell you about my brother, my half brother, who raped my sister and David did nothing. And then when I took care of it, wouldn't the right thing to do for him to be stoned? Isn't that what the law is? I didn't have him stoned. I just had him stabbed to death without any legal right. But isn't that justice? I know what justice is. I know what right is. I know what it is to be a victim, and you're a victim too. And if you go to David, you're going to be a victim. And he took everybody's discontent and his discontent and shared it until all this discontent built up and built up and built up until one day he had an army. He had an army in Absalom marched on Jerusalem and David fled. David had to grab some of his belongings and a few things and a couple of his wives and his army officers and ran away. And Absalom came in and set up his government and said, I'm the king of Israel. I know what justice is. I know what goodness is. Every step he had made along the way was outside the law of God. Every step. See, I understand. Don't you understand how he would feel? It seems like he should be the hero. But somewhere along the line, because he had been a victim, he let that eat inside of him until something's happening to him. And before we're done here, I'll show you something very interesting that he did. Well, what happened was, of course, David, finally, he and Joab, called the army of Israel together, and they marched on Jerusalem. Absalom came up with his army. He figured he could beat David, and of course he could not. And his army was beaten. And Absalom jumped on a donkey and was trying to ride away, got into an orchard of small low-lying branches, and his hair got caught in one of the branches. And the donkey ran off, and he's hanging from his hair, probably with armor on, so he just can't get out. And Joab comes up. I can just imagine what Joab says. I can just imagine what Joab says. Ah, there's the king. Now, David had ordered him. Nobody kills Absalom. Absalom is saved from all this.

David could not bring his own son to justice, just like he couldn't am not. It's my son, Joab. You can't kill him. Where's your father now, O burner of fields?

Joab killed him. Devastated David. What a tragic story. There's a lot of lessons we can learn here. Some are from David. Some are from Absalom. And I want to talk about Absalom here, because I think he's such a tragic person. What happens when we develop a victim mentality? Once again, I'm not saying we don't have emotions because we've been abused or mishandled or mistreated or something bad has happened to us. Bad things happen to all of us. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are terrible. I mean, there are people in this congregation. There are people in Murfreesboro who have gone through terrible abuse. There have been people that have had people come in and killed their members of their family.

You think, how do you get over that? Good question, right? Because you have to.

How do we deal with that so it doesn't destroy us? Well, let's look at a few things we learn from Absalom. First of all, a victim mentality causes us to become frozen in time. You freeze into the moments of when you were abused, and you never get out of them. You relive them over and over. You relive the emotions over and over. The brain works by association, so it doesn't take much. If you go every day and you spend time thinking about some horrible thing that's happened to you, and you think it over and over and you keep replaying it like a movie, because it's terrible and those emotions keep swelling up and swelling up and swelling up, you know what happens after a while? When you get out of bed in the morning, guess what's the first thing the brain does? It finds that because that's what you've been thinking about, and it pulls it up. You can't get away from it after a while. You've trained your brain to keep bringing up the pain. And we never seem to heal. We just stay in the pain. I mean, there's certain things that you will feel pain about, pain just over for the rest of your life. But you don't live in it. You have moments of pain, but you don't live in it. To live in the abuse is not what you've been called to. Understand that? That's not why you've been called. Let's look at Jesus' very first sermon, Luke 4. Luke 4.

There are certain kinds of abuse that takes a lot of love and time and counseling to work through. But there's also just the everyday things we all go through. And it is true that a victim mentality is becoming very, very extent in our society. Somebody's wrong. Somebody's hurting me. Somebody's doing this to me. And so there's this anxiety and this fear and this anger, and people don't even know why. Look what Jesus says here in his very first sermon. He gets up the synagogue and reads these verses from the Old Testament. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. This is Christ's commission. He says, this is what I've come to do. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of the sight to the blind, and set at liberty those who are oppressed and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Jesus Christ says, I am here to teach you how to be healed from your oppression, to be healed for what has damaged you. We are not to stay in the past, but it's not easy to come out of it because you're damaged by it. We must be healed. And that means we must go to God. We must live lives of prayer and study into the Scripture to connect to God so that we have this relationship with God. It's not just, oh, we talk about a relationship with God. No, we're praying to Him and we're finding His word here and this conversation is taking place and in it, a healing takes place. I mean, it's not like this. It's a long-term project, you and me. We're all pretty messed up. It's a long-term project. And yet Christ said, this is why I came because you're all projects. We're all the projects of Christ. This is what He said to do. God sent me to, well, oh, you're messed up. I am here to do this. This is why I'm here. This is why you are here. This is why you're in this congregation right now. You've been called to let this happen in your lives. David, of course, abused people and David was abused. David knows all this from every side imaginable. There's an interesting psalm in Psalm 19.

You and I must learn to live with the reality that bad things in this world happen to us. And we can either be controlled by those things or we can be controlled by those things. Or we can turn to God and let God help us heal from those things and live a different life.

Psalm 19.14. David says, Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. If God really is our strength, if God really is our Redeemer, we will begin to refuse to live in the abuse. It is no longer our identity. That's no longer who we are. We are somebody else. Now, that's still part of it, isn't it? I don't mean you deny that it happens. It happens all the time. And when it does, what do we feel? Anxiety, fear, or anger are all three of us at the same time. We experience those things. But that shouldn't be our state of being, that that's the way we are all the time.

Because we have a Redeemer and we have a strength, and I want my meditation to be acceptable to Him. He doesn't want you to live in the sins somebody else did to you. Think about that. Oh, God wants me to live in the sins that have been done to me. No, He doesn't. Right? He's freed us of our sins, but He's also in the process of freeing us from the sins somebody else did to us. We're in a process of being freed from that.

Now, to do this means you have to start taking responsibility for your own thoughts and emotions. You and I ultimately are responsible for what we allow ourselves to be obsessed with. And I can tell you, I mean, I want to ask for a raise a hand, I'd raise my hand. How many times have I been obsessed because somebody hurt me? Lots. Until you realize this is stupid.

Because you realize half the time they really didn't mean it. Or if they did, big deal. Let's just go have a beer together. Right? Unless it's really bad. And then you say, I must move on because I'm not going to live in that person's sins. He came to break the power of our sins. He came to break the power of other people's sins over us, too. We have to disengage from this and realize what God is doing and where He's taking us. And it's not easy. You know, it's easy to get to say this. Believe me, I know just from many, many counseling, it's not easy to do. No one expects anybody to do this. Oh yeah, I'm going to go do this. But we learn it over time. We take responsibility. It's interesting. Let's look at the verse before this. In fact, let's go to verse 12. Verse 12.

This is interesting about the concept of responsibility. Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret fault. David says, okay, I have to take responsibility for myself. So sometimes it's my fault. So what about my fault? Now let me make a caveat here.

Just because, and I'll try to say this, I know there's children here, but children who are abused. The abuser will tell them it's your fault. It's a lie. So that's not what we're talking about here. But if you're a grown adult and you're all upset because someone beat you up and stole your car and you see yourself as a victim, but the reason someone beat you up and stole your car because you were downtown Nashville on a Saturday night and you know you'd been in the bars till one o'clock in the morning and you were, we used to call it snookered, but that's, it's snookered? You were snookered.

And you were snookered, right? Is it snookered? Snookered is a pool game. You were snookered. And the reason they beat you up and stole your car was because, you know, you vomited all over him, okay? Let's, whose fault is this? If you weren't there, wouldn't it happen? This is what I mean by responsibility. Well, yeah, but they shouldn't have done that to me. What were you doing there to begin with? What were you doing there to begin with? That isn't what Christians do. So this sense of responsibility not only goes from, okay, I'm responsible for my emotions. If somebody else has sinned against me, I can't let them control me, as hard as it is. There's the other aspect, wait a minute, there are times in my life, I'm just going to have to be honest. I'm going to have to say, well, maybe I sort of have some fault in this. But like I said, I want to be very careful because victim, I mean, perpetrators will try to make the victims feel like they're at fault. I'm not talking about that. You know when you had something to do with it, and you know when you don't. He says in verse 13, keep back your servants also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Don't let me be controlled by my own sins. Don't let me be controlled by the things I do that are wrong. This is the sense of responsibility. This is a whole other sermon in itself. That we need to take a certain responsibility for ourselves. Now, once again about children. What I'm talking about here, as adults, we can reason this out. Children cannot reason this out. Children cannot reason this out. Children's emotions are based on reactions to everything that happens around them. So if an adult abuses them, it must be their fault.

How do they have no ability to reason that out? This means, by the way, we must teach our children, our grandchildren, that there is an objective, definite meaning to right and wrong. It is not based on your feelings.

I mean, how many times does someone break the laws of God and you meet them and they're a nice person? I mean, they're sort of easy to get along with. They're nice, you know, and you say, well, they're a nice person. I think God loves them. I think it's okay. Well, God loves them. That's not the point. Yeah, but God wouldn't judge them because they're nice. That is a subjective view that there is no real law. It's a subjective view that there is no real law. But understand, people with victim mentality believe that the rules don't apply to them.

Second point. They don't believe the rules really apply to them because it's not their fault. Somebody else made me this way, therefore it's not my fault. Believe me, there are—you know how far this goes? Some of the most despicable criminals in history have said it's not my fault. It was the fault of because—and they'll have a thousand reasons. I know a lot of it is because they were abused. It's not my fault. If I would have had the same privileges of everybody else, I would have turned out this way. No concept of responsibility. Children have to understand their exact rules, and they have—those rules are objective. They are not based on anybody else's feelings. It doesn't matter if your younger brother comes up and kicks over your Lego castle that took you a half hour to build. You cannot pick up a toy truck and smack you up alongside the head. You do not have the judicial power to do so, and the punishment doesn't quite fit the crime. Now, haven't mommy come do something to him? Of course, she's not going to hit him alongside the head with a toy truck, right? But the judicial—what the person did was wrong.

There are standards, and we can't go beyond those standards because of her feelings. Everything that Absalom did was outside the standards of God that had been given to Israel because of the way he felt. And yet, I understand the way he felt. If it was my sister, I would have felt the same way. So I understand. He's not really the hero. He seems like he should be the hero. The point is, driven by anger and anxiety and fear and eventually hatred, he would do anything. Think of the hundreds of men who died in Israel because of him. He murdered his brother. He burned down Joab's fields. And hundreds of men died because he had him convinced, I'm the only one who can teach you what justice is. I'll make sure you bring, when I'm king, I will pick you to... Well, what happens when everybody comes out and expects to be in the right? You realize what would have happened when he first started going through cases? Because you know what? When you pick this one, there's always someone over here you're, what, ruling against, right? So half of his cases, half the people, would want to kill him. But you promised us. See, there really was no concept of justice. There was just now emotions. That's all that was left.

And no real concept of what law or justice is.

And that's why we have to make sure children begin to understand they are responsible for their feelings. And that's not easy. And they're not wrong. You just have to control them. Okay, put your hands together and take three big breaths.

Feel any better? No. Well, at least you're not screaming anymore. I've done that many times. My wife says, good, I'm glad you're doing that. No, I mean with the kids. Actually, I feel like I have to do that sometimes. Mine is, I'm walking out of the room for a minute, okay? I'm okay now. With the kids, it's put your hands together and take some big breaths. I'm still upset, but you're not screaming. I say, oh yeah.

We learned we can't be controlled by the way we feel.

Victim mentality breaks that down. Because another thing that happens, this is the third thing, victim mentality, we are driven, or people, when we have that, we're driven by need for vengeance. And many times, the one abused becomes an abuser.

We will only accept people who support us. There's only two types of people in the world, the people against us and the people for us. And most people is against me. So, you know, I get a few people around me that are for me, and they all agree with me. What did he do? He gathered discontented people together to an added army. And when they weren't discontented, he lied so that they were discontented. Once again, way outside the wall, by lying. But I want to show you what I mean by this, by going to 2 Samuel 16. 2 Samuel 16.

Verse 20.

So, Absalom goes to one of his advisors, who I cannot pronounce.

I think it's Hithafil. So, he goes to Hithafil. Whatever his name is.

And he says, give advice to what I should do. Now, here's what he does. He's just conquered Jerusalem. David is fled. He says, what should I do to show everybody I'm king and that I've gotten rid of that dirty rotten David? I finally avenged Tamar. What should I do? And here's what he told him. He says, go to your father's concubines, whom he has left to keep the house, and all Israel will hear that you are abhorred by your father. Then the hands of all Israel with you will be strong. So, they pitched a tent for Absalom on top of the house, and Absalom went into his father's concubines in the sight of all Israel. Here's what we'll do. We'll let everybody know how much David hates you. David took his wives, but he had to hear them, and he left some concubines behind to take care of the household, you know, the palace. Pitched a tent here on top of the house, which everybody in Israel can see. And one by one, we're going to parade those concubines into the tent where you are, and everybody's going to know what you're doing. The rapist became a raper. The abused became an abuser. It's all he could think about until he became it. And there's one of the great problems where we are controlled by abuse.

How many people who abuse children are abused as children? And it's amazing to me. It goes back generations. Well, we never heard about anything like this about the 1920 or 1930 or 1940. That's because it was considered so horrible no one would talk about it. Or Uncle John might find himself strong enough, too, for doing it. And so abusers become abusers. We have to be real careful. If we get absorbed in the sin of others, we can end up committing a like sin in the way that we treat people. I just find that... I think, how does he get there? Okay, Absalon, you're my hero! And then how does he get there?

His pride, his hatred, the fact that as a victim he no longer had to live by the rules. Those are somebody else's rules. I'm the victim here. I make up the rules. And so he ended up as the ultimate abuser himself.

Let me just mention a couple things that this healing from God involves.

As I mentioned before, you cannot allow... I do this, too. We do this. I mean, everyone saw you think of something that happened 30 years ago, and all of a sudden you get this feeling of anger or upset or hurt because of something that happened to you. Of course you do. Memories are attached to emotions. When the memory comes into the conscious part of the brain, it creates the emotions that go with it. But we can't live there. We have to say, no, that's not me anymore. Someone did that to me, but that's not me. I am here and now and this time. Or what we do is we actually let people who may have abused this 30 years ago abuse us today. That's all you're doing, as you're letting them continue to abuse you.

I've talked to people who someone hurt them, did something terrible to them, and then they died. And they can't get over the fact that they died because, like, well, the person died and they never said they were sorry. And every day I just think they didn't get theirs.

They didn't get their punishment.

We can't let somebody control us out of the grave. We can't let somebody control us because they did something bad to us. When it comes out, we have to think about it, let it go. Know who we are as the children of God. Know who you are as the children of God.

Let that be your motivation. Let that be who you are. I read something once. It was from a long title to the book. Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, Research, and Principles of Life. But this was written by a doctor. He says, The moment I start hating a man, I become his slave. I can't enjoy my work anymore because he controls my thoughts. My resentments produce too many stress hormones in my body, and I become fatigued after only a few hours' work. The work I formerly enjoyed is now drudgery. Even vacation ceased to give me pleasure. I can't escape his tyrannical grip on my mind. When the waiter serves me Porterhouse steak, it might as well be stale bread and water. I teach you the food, and I swallow it. But the man I hate will not permit me to enjoy the taste. That doesn't justify what people do. It doesn't make them right before God, by the way. We just have to choose to say, You can't control me.

We choose to say that. God Almighty is my God, and you can't control me. I am being healed by God.

And whatever people do to me, over time I can be healed, and we will be totally healed in the future. This is just a process we're going through to total healing.

Over the years when I've done counseling with people who are abused a lot as children, there's some amazing thing I watch in some of them, and where they have to accept that that person is not going to receive any punishment in this lifetime. They got away with it.

And they can't have a relationship with the person because the person refuses to repent. You can't have a relationship with somebody who won't repent, right? Even God won't have a relationship with us when we refuse to repent. So it's like they feel lost. I can't have punishment and retribution, and I can't have a relationship. What do I have? That's a horrible place to be. And in that, they always come to that point. I can't get justice, and I can't get repentance. It's exactly where Absalom was at one point. He couldn't get justice out of for Amnon because David wouldn't do anything, and he couldn't get Amnon to repent. Amnon didn't care. He hated her now. What do you have? If you don't have justice or restoration, you have nothing. And then I watch this happen, and the person says, but I'm okay. I pray for them now because I want God to bring them to repentance because I hate to think of what happens to appear before God in a sin. That's when I know they're healing. That's when I know they're healing. The spiritual viewpoint that says, okay, I can't have retribution. I can't have justice. We all want justice. Justice is good, and I can't have relationship, but I will simply pray for repentance because if God doesn't bring that person to repentance, someday they stand before God. And they are judged for their sins.

Once a person reaches that point, they're usually very, they're moving in such a direction that their life changes. But it is hard to reach that point.

1 Peter. You know, sometimes we have to realize in all this, God brings good out of it in your life, in my life. 1 Peter 2, 19.

He says, he's talking about a type of abuse here. It's, you know, like I said, I guess you could create hierarchies of abuse, depending on how much damage they do to us. But this is a type of abuse that can be, it can cause a lot of pain and suffering. For if this is commendable, if because of conscience towards God, one endures grief, suffering wrongfully. What credit is it, is it when you are beaten for your faults and you take it patiently? But when you do good and suffer and take it patiently, this is commendable before God. Wow, okay. So I do something right and I pay a terrible penalty for it. I keep the Sabbath and lose my job. I do what is right and somebody lies about me and ruins my reputation with my friends. What do you do? How do we live with that? He says, before God, you take this patiently and He commends you for this. He'll take care of this for you. A boy in the short run is no fun, is it? He says, now wait a minute, listen to this next statement. For to this, you were called for this. What? Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Called to take wrong? Now once again, there's no problem with somebody commits a crime, putting them in jail. I mean, I'm not talking about... He's talking here specifically about somebody has mistreated you because of your Christianity, which is going to happen. Sooner or later, someone's going to mistreat you because you're Christianity. And He says, take it patiently.

He says, for this you were called because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should follow His steps, who committed no sin, nor was the seat found in His mouth, who when He was reviled did not revile in return. When He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously, who Himself bore our sins on His own body in the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness, by whose stripes you were healed. For you were like sheep gone astray, but now have returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. He says, bring always this back to the abuse Jesus Christ went through so that you and I did not have to suffer what God's law requires, which is our death. All that abuse was for our sins. And that's what's amazing. He says, think of that example. He's being abused in ways that I hope I never have... Well, I can imagine that kind of abuse. He didn't want to be spit on. He didn't want to be slapped around and punched. He didn't want to be beat. He didn't want to be crucified and stabbed. He didn't want all that. But He did it willingly. He took all that abuse for the very people who were doing it, and for us. He did that for us. He says, always go back to that.

And remember, He knows what it's like to be abused. When you go before the throne of God, and you say, Father, I've been mistreated. This has happened to me. This is terrible. Jesus Christ says, I understand. I understand. That's the kind of relationship God has for us. I think one of the reasons... This is my personal opinion. It's not theology of the church. My personal opinion, one of the reasons for all the torture He went through was so that we can go, and He can say, I understand. This is what you go through in Satan's world. I understand. I came down and went through it, too. I went through it so you know that I understand.

Now, that changes everything.

That changes everything, if we can wrap our minds around it. You see, all of us have been victimized. Satan has victimized every one of us in ways we don't even know. That's another sermon I'm working on. How we've been manipulated by Satan in ways that we can't even understand. The deception that has taken place. God's called us to break out of that, to see things clearly, as much as we can, but because it takes His Spirit to lead us there. We can't do it on our own.

Because we have corrupted human nature because of Satan, you and I abuse each other. We've all heard each other. We've all done things to each other that we should not have done, said things. But we are to grow out of that and forgive each other. God has called us to break that cycle, to break away from the bondage of sin, but to break away from the bondage of other people's sin. Understand, He wants to... We know that. He wants to break the bondage of sin over us. We talk about that every year at the Spring Holy Days. We talk about throughout the years, we talk about throughout the year. I don't think we talk enough about He wants to break the bondage of sin that Satan and other people have perpetrated on us. That's a bondage also. That's a bondage we didn't do. That's a bondage somebody else did to us. He said, bro, I want to break that away too. I want to take all that off of you.

Let's finish by going to Colossians 3. So that means we don't live in the past, even though the past catches up to us every once in a while. Those thoughts, those emotions, we break away from it. We live in the presence knowing that we're still a work in progress where God is changing us and God is healing us. And we're moving towards a future when we will receive complete healing. Verse 1, Colossians 3, If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above where Christ is. Look where Christ is and say, that spiritual life is the life I want to live now. Now, there's nothing wrong with physical things, and physical things are good. They're made by God. But we need to be living a spiritual life in this physical world. Realizing it's temporary and realizing it's not worth living in what has happened to us, but living in the now and for the future. He says, set your mind on things above, not on things of the earth, for you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. And that means everything that anybody's done to us is dying for us. And when Christ, who is our life, appears, then you will also appear with Him in glory.