What is everyone's favorite game? The Blame Game! While it's exceedingly popular, it's very dangerous. It keeps us from facing reality and making things right. How does it work?
When things go wrong, we feel guilt, shame, frustration, fear, and we get the rude awakening that we are powerless. These unpleasant emotions give rise to a strong fight or flight response. But how can we fight? Feeling hopeless is terrible, so we will ourselves to believe it was someone else's fault and focus our anger on them.
We can blame our parents (after all, they didn't meet our needs or raise us right), our friends (they aren't there enough for us), our recovery (it's not working), Satan ("the devil made me do it"), and, when we've run out of others to blame, we turn on GOD. Why did HE allow this to happen to me?
As long as we're angry, we feel powerful. So long as we come up with all sorts of reasons we're not at fault--someone else is because they should have fulfilled their purpose better, we feel more competent than they. Seeing their guilt clearly lets us be superior in our own eyes. Feelings of power and superiority are very pleasant feelings.
The pleasure, however, is deceptive. It is built on a lie straight from hell--the same lie satan, the father of lies, used when he rebelled. He just kept on blaming GOD, and tempts us to do so. If he can get us to abandon GOD instead of returning to HIM in repentance, we may drown out our painful emotions for a time, but we will be consumed with anger and discontent, unable to face life as it is. We'll carry an ever-increasing burden of unresolved emotions, further damage our strained relationships with others, strengthen our compulsions until they totally enslave us, and lose all sense of GOD and HIS Love for us. That's part of the price we pay to play the blame game.
Don't take anyone else's inventory, their faults are theirs; concentrate on your own because you have enough of them. Find your own defects, then confess and make amends for them, and walk the road to the Glorious Liberty of Freedom with the children of GOD. Start today!
Dear Father, forgive me for blaming others, especially YOU, for my failures. Help me, Dear LORD, to be honest--to search only within--that I may see reality clearly and find YOUR Forgiveness and Strength to change my life that I may become more and more like YOU. It is only in YOUR Mighty and Precious Name that I Pray LORD JESUS. Amen.
Reading Psalm 37:9-29 this morning….
When things go wrong, we feel guilt, shame, frustration, fear, and we get the rude awakening that we are powerless. These unpleasant emotions give rise to a strong fight or flight response. But how can we fight? Feeling hopeless is terrible, so we will ourselves to believe it was someone else's fault and focus our anger on them.
We can blame our parents (after all, they didn't meet our needs or raise us right), our friends (they aren't there enough for us), our recovery (it's not working), Satan ("the devil made me do it"), and, when we've run out of others to blame, we turn on GOD. Why did HE allow this to happen to me?
As long as we're angry, we feel powerful. So long as we come up with all sorts of reasons we're not at fault--someone else is because they should have fulfilled their purpose better, we feel more competent than they. Seeing their guilt clearly lets us be superior in our own eyes. Feelings of power and superiority are very pleasant feelings.
The pleasure, however, is deceptive. It is built on a lie straight from hell--the same lie satan, the father of lies, used when he rebelled. He just kept on blaming GOD, and tempts us to do so. If he can get us to abandon GOD instead of returning to HIM in repentance, we may drown out our painful emotions for a time, but we will be consumed with anger and discontent, unable to face life as it is. We'll carry an ever-increasing burden of unresolved emotions, further damage our strained relationships with others, strengthen our compulsions until they totally enslave us, and lose all sense of GOD and HIS Love for us. That's part of the price we pay to play the blame game.
Don't take anyone else's inventory, their faults are theirs; concentrate on your own because you have enough of them. Find your own defects, then confess and make amends for them, and walk the road to the Glorious Liberty of Freedom with the children of GOD. Start today!
Dear Father, forgive me for blaming others, especially YOU, for my failures. Help me, Dear LORD, to be honest--to search only within--that I may see reality clearly and find YOUR Forgiveness and Strength to change my life that I may become more and more like YOU. It is only in YOUR Mighty and Precious Name that I Pray LORD JESUS. Amen.
Reading Psalm 37:9-29 this morning….