The Setting
Now, just to remember the circumstances, it was the Sabbath day, and the Jews were upset about this man being cured.  They attacked the fellow, saying it was not permissible for him to carry his pallet on the Sabbath. But, the man answered them, "he who made me well was the one who said to me, ‘take up your pallet and walk.’

This fellow is interesting. The way that Jesus dealt with him can speak directly to where many of us can be, and if we’re not there, we can learn a vital lesson of where we might be and need not be, if we understand the dynamics of the Spirit in this matter.

The Question
Now, look at the story, if you will. "Are you in earnest about being well?" Here’s a guy who has been lying there, lame for thirty-eight years, waiting for some water to move because they believed it would bring healing.  Thirty-eight years!  You’d think he’d have forgotten why he was there after all that time. Every morning somebody had to take him there and leave him there with his mat, and they would come pick him up and carry him home again in the evening. It became a way of life: lying there waiting for the water to move.

So, Jesus steps over the many bodies there and comes to this one, and He says to him, "Are you in earnest?  Is your heart in this?  Do you really want to get well?  Do you want to be made whole?"

Wholeness, this is a strong word.  You would have expected his answer to have at least been a resounding, ‘yes’.  He doesn’t have to say anything more than ‘yes’. Instead, amazingly, he doesn’t really answer the question.

His Answer
He gave a despairing whine, amounting to saying. "I would be well now, it’s their fault, I can’t get to the water in time. When they bring me, they lay me way back here, look how far back I am.  I’m nowhere near the water.  It’s their fault.  And whenever the water does move, which isn’t very often, but whenever it does, I’m never able to crawl there, and nobody helps me get there…"

Jesus wasn’t asking him that. He asked, "do you want to get well?"  What Jesus gets in response to his question is the whining, despairing, sob of a victim of circumstances. 

It was the man’s way of handling his pain; he blamed other people. You can see it was a way of life for him; it is apparent in the verses we looked at.

After he is healed and he’s picked up his pallet and is walking, and he ought to be celebrating, what does he do when stopped by the Pharisees?  He blames the man who healed him for getting him into trouble! Instead of breaking out with his testimony to him who healed him, he says, "he who healed me told me to take up my mat and walk." 

He’s still seeing himself as a victim. He thinks that when bad things happen to him it’s someone else’s fault; and if good things happen to him, they’re someone else’s fault, too.

Seeing Ourselves as a Victim
It’s interesting isn’t it?  Our way of handling pain or confrontation is to see ourselves as the victim.  Always the victim.  In America we live in a society where we see ourselves as victims. This is how people in general seek to handle life.

They take the posture of a victim.  'It’s not my fault'; 'she made me do it', or 'he made me do it.'  One of the big laugh lines in television in recent years is "the devil made me do it."  Somehow everybody relates to that and laughs.

From the Beginning
This started in the very beginning if you want to trace it back. It’s the ancient way of handling pain: the pain of being wrong. Here stands Adam, and when God says to him, "what have you done?" what was Adam’s response? "Me?! It wasn’t me! It was this woman you gave to me; it was her. You gave her to me. She did this." Just refer to Genesis.  You’ve read it.  And what was Eve’s response?  "Me?  Not me!  It was the serpent."

It’s the most ancient way of handling our wrong and the pain that goes with our wrong to assume the posture of a victim and say, "they, she, he, made me do it."  The bad thing is that when we come into the Kingdom of God we bring along this trunk load of ways we’ve learned to deal with life. They are all ways of the flesh we’ve used while living in the darkness, but we continue to resort to them.  We think maybe God will bless our old coping methods now that we’re Christians even though we used them back in the days of our depravity.

Jesus calls us to repent of being a victim. Romans 5:17 says that through our being justified by the blood of Jesus, we now reign in life. We are not victims.  We are those who reign in life. We are kings in our circumstances.

So, if that is the reality, how does this victim posture surface in the way we live?

It’s Their Fault
Let's start with the upper layer. I excuse my present condition, I’m not alive in my situation, my emotions are not spilling over with joy, because you see, it’s her fault. Or his fault. If my wife would only change, everything would be OK. Any marriage counselor can tell you that that’s the most frequent statement he will hear in regard to a marriage difficulty. That’s the number one opening line. When a husband comes for counseling, there’s nothing wrong with him; it’s his wife. If she would change the marriage would be fine. And vise versa.

Or, it’s my neighborhood where I live. If I didn’t live in this part of town, I could be successful. But, nobody could be successful in this part of town. It’s just the down part of town.

Or, it’s my boss that makes me mad. I’m normally a very gentle person, but whenever I get around my boss he absolutely drives me crazy. It’s his fault.

Everything was fine this morning, but on my way to work a guy jumped a light in front of me and he ruined my day. I’ve been mad ever since.

I was having a great day, until she said that.

Do you hear what’s going on in these statements?  I’m a victim.  It’s his fault.  He can control my whole outlook on life just by what he says to me. Something nice makes my day.  Something rude ruins it.

See, that way I don’t have to deal with my anger because it’s not my fault. It’s his. It’s hers. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t have to repent, I don’t have to put anything right, because he’s the one that’s got to get it right. I’m the victim.

Circumstantial Victims
Let’s go a little deeper.  We can perceive ourselves as a victim of the race we belong to. We excuse our passion and vehemence because it’s just the way we are; the way we were born. That’s our heritage. We’re not responsible; we’re victims because of where we came from.

If you had a family like I did, if you grew up the way I did, you’d be messed up, too. It’s not my fault. It’s the way I was treated as a child.

It’s my family’s fault.

If I had your education, I could have a good job, too. I didn’t have the opportunity. I’m disadvantaged. I'll  never succeed because I didn’t get a fair shake.

We see ourselves as the victim of our own past failures. Maybe you failed in some public way, maybe the whole church knew about it, and now you see yourself as a failure. You don’t see yourself as one who failed; you see yourself as a failure. There’s a difference, you know. To say you failed in some way, that’s one thing, but it’s quite another to say, "I’m a failure."

You declare bankruptcy. You drop out of life. You don’t look at it as some time in the past when you failed, but rather you see yourself as a failure.

Your marriage failed and you’ve been sitting there saying, "I’m finished, it’s over." What failed has become your downfall. In fact, the words that dominate your thinking now are, "if only, if only…"

"If only that had never happened, but it did, so here I am, stuck, and I will never try that again." So, "I’m not responsible for what happened. It’s because of what happened back then. I don’t have to handle it today; I’m unfortunate. What happened back there has led me to where I am today."

True Victims
And then there are the really tragic cases. There are those who are true victims, everything else stated until now is just our imagining ourselves as victims, but there are those who really have been victimized.

There are those who have been abused as children: physically, mentally, emotionally…it would be a rare listener of our cassettes that hasn’t been abused in some way as a child.  Pastors and counselors sit down with people like this.  What do they say when they are told about how a drunk driver wiped out an entire family of children and the parents came home to find their children laid out on blankets by the side of the road? What do they say to those parents?  Or, when they are told about how a drug addict just for ten dollars knifed your boy down. How senseless?

What Do You Say?
You’re the victim. What can be said to someone whose business partner has stolen all of the funds and disappeared, and everything is lost? What do you say to the pastor whose elder, who was his best friend, betrayed him and split the church and started another church right down the street? What about the wife who tells you that her husband has run off with another woman? What does a counselor say?

Biblical Cases
Cases like these are in the Bible. Did you know that?  David, whose best friend was Ahithophel, went over to Absalom’s side; he joined Absalom, David’s own son who was planning to kill him. David wrote the psalm at that time that says,  "My dearest friend, it’s you!  We who walked to the house of God together, we who ate our bread together, it’s you who betrayed me. If you’d been my enemy I’d have been ready for this. But, not you."

Can you relate to that?  You walk around with that black cloud of betrayal over you. It may have happened twenty years ago but you’re still feeling the victimness of it. Your life stopped when that happened. You stopped it yourself.

You can’t be blamed, can you? You really were a victim.  Life isn’t worth living; it’s not your fault; it’s their fault. They really did it to you. They are responsible for your miserable existence today. After what they did, you can never forgive them. Can you be blamed for your bitterness? You live in the memory of that time. There’s got to be some limit to love. 

Victimized or Victim?
Let’s get some definitions here. These people were victimized. But, what’s happened to them since is they’ve become victims. They find their identity in being victims. This is how they describe themselves, as a person that "that" happened to.  At one time they were a person that was victimized, but now they have declared themselves a victim and that has become their identity. That’s who they now are: a victim.

I suppose everyone listening to this cassette at some time in their life has been victimized.  It doesn’t matter how big the victimization was for us, at that time it was devastating.  But, some people, continue to dwell in that moment and they become a victim.  They find their identity based upon what happened to them back then.  All of this happening to them right now is because of what happened to them back then. They say that’s why they are the way they are.

Does God Love Me?
Somewhere, just below the surface, there’s this question in the victim’s mind, "does God really love me? If God really loved me, why did He let this happen to me?" You look across the room through the glasses of "the lie" and you see other people and you think, "God obviously loves them; more than He loves me; because He didn’t allow those bad things to happen to them."  And you live there on the outside of God’s family.  One thing that victims share is the belief that they are not responsible for what happens in their life; others are.

That’s the common denominator. They are not responsible. If they had been born in a different family, then they would be responsible.  But, no one can hold them responsible for what happened to them and now they can never be whole,  they can never be well, because it is some one else's fault. They don’t do life; it is done to them.  They are helpless; They are hopeless.  They are pawns in the hands of those who hate them.

Biblical Example
Do you remember Aaron, Moses' brother, when Moses went up on the mountain to bring down the ten commandments? He was gone for quite a while, six weeks or so, and the people said, "where has he gone to?" They said, "make us a god." Aaron collected their gold and made the golden calf. 

Then Moses comes down from the mountain and hears the sound of them reveling. He finds them like that and he asks Aaron, "what did you do?"

And Aaron says,  "Me? My Lord, you can’t blame me, you know what these people are like. You know how hard their hearts are. They brought me the gold and I threw it in the fire and out came this calf. It wasn’t me; it was them. They made me do it." He proclaimed himself a victim.

Result
Those who adopt this position of victim, will find themselves angry with everybody.  These people, we find them in churches, answer the altar call all the time, because they’re trying to get rid of their anger. They bury their anger; they’re bitter inside.

It turns into depression. They come forward and they ask for prayers for their depression.  Bless their hearts, it’s not what they think they want that they need. Their suppressed bitterness and rage is what they need to deal with.

When a person with depression goes to a psychiatrist, the first thing the counselor does is prescribe medication. But, in many, many cases the depression is a result of anger that is buried, and the anger is a result of self pity, and the self pity is a result of something the Bible tells us how to deal with: it is called envy. 

We envy a situation to be other than it is; or we envy an ideal that can never be achieved; or we envy some circumstance that will never be; or we envy the possible removal of something in our history that will always remain…envy creates self-pity, self-pity creates anger, anger creates depression.  Depression eventually leads to self-destruction.

How Do We Deal With It?
How do we deal with it? The Bible says lay it aside. 'Not my will, but thine be done' is the Christ attitude.  The result of referring to what’s happened to you, by referring to yourself as a victim, can result in irresponsibility.

In other words, after what’s happened to me, after what they did to me, I deserve to have this thing; or I have a right to fill this ache inside of me that they made. To fill it however I want to.

If she’d be the sort of wife that she should have be then I wouldn’t have to resort to these ways of coping.  So being a victim can create a justification of irresponsibility.  And let’s face it, that’s what’s behind addiction. All kinds of addiction: to soap operas, to food, as well as to alcohol and drugs, excesses in shopping sprees…what we’re saying is our heart is empty, we’ve got to fill it someway. 'There’s nothing inside of me. I’ll fill it with this, or with that.'  

We’ve come to the expectation we can just come forward in the church and be prayed for and we’ll be zapped out of whatever is hindering us. But, that isn’t anywhere in the scriptures. In Galatians 5 it says clearly, 'if you walk in the Spirit, you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.'  

Whenever your flesh would call itself a victim, if you’ll walk in the Spirit of Christ who you really are, Christ does not have a problem with being a victim.  Was there anyone ever victimized as Christ was on the cross?  For your sin, not his. You don’t hear Jesus crying he’s a victim. No, he says, if you take up your cross and follow him, you’ll lay down your life for another.  Not as a victim at all.

Sometimes we become suspicious of others. We say, "I’ll never let this happen to me again." Then we spend our lives trying to figure out how to avoid ever having this happen to us again.  So, we don’t trust anyone. 

But, watch, Jesus comes to establish His kingdom. He’s not just saving you to heaven, He’s establishing His reign in your life here and now. A kingdom that is characterized by love. The question that he presses to every believer is: "are you in earnest about being whole? Now?"  We are to shuck off all the shackles from the past.

Biblical Examples
So, what do you do with this when you say I’m a failure in life?  What do you do about all your past sins?  The big ones? Do you realize how persons in the Bible messed up completely?

Moses, for example, in order to fulfill his call from God, murdered a man. And instead of facing it, he ran off for forty years. What a waste?  Forty years.  In seeking to fulfill the call of God he became a murderer and ended up in the Midian desert as a sheepherder. Failure?

Abraham, what about him?  Here they go into Egypt.  He turns to his wife and tells her to lie. The lily livered coward hides behind his wife’s petticoat. If you think Abraham himself would be in danger because of her being his wife, how much danger do you think she would be in without a husband? Oh, talk about failure. What kind of wimp is he?

He’s called the father of our faith. But, think about it. What would you do if he was a member of your church and he did such a thing?

And speaking of that, what would you do with David?  He’s probably the worst of the bunch. He had already written most of the book of Psalms, he was in his early fifties, and what happened?  It’s not just the affair with Bathsheba, there's the murder of her husband Uriah.  Uriah had defended David on more than one occasion. They were close, part of a special band.

David not only committed adultery with his friend’s wife, and tried to trick him into going to bed with her so his sin would not be uncovered, but he arranged for Uriah to be murdered.  This was David.  What a sick, rotten tale.  Only the Holy Spirit would put that in the Bible about our hero David.

What about Peter? With oaths and curses he denied that he ever knew the LORD Jesus Christ and then he turned and saw that Jesus was listening to every word. The LORD looked upon him. The only way you can relate to this is to say, if that was me or if that was a member of my church, what would we do with it?

When we read these events in the scriptures, are we able to imagine what we’d do if this happened in our church?  What would you do if Peter was one of your pastors. These were real people. They believed God and this is what happened.  Everyone of them were candidates for obscurity. No one is ever going to listen to them again.

Grace Greater Than Our Sin
But, the love of God, the energy of God’s grace and His pardon, is greater than our sin. Greater than our worst sin. Can I put it like this?  It’s our sinful pride that would think that we have finally sinned a sin that is bigger than God’s love.

We think we have committed a sin bigger than His grace and pardon. God used every one of these people. What He did with these people changed the human race.  Now, I don’t in anyway condone your failure, anymore than I condone my own failure, but I will exalt the grace of God and I will exalt his power. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.

Life Without Pain?
But, what about being a victim? In the twentieth century of the United States, we’ve got an idea that life should be painless. It is generally believed today that if you live a painless life, in terms of circumstances, you are unusually blessed of God. Painlessness is associated with God’s blessing. We are terrified of pain. We are the sedated nation.  If you go into a drugstore the walls are lined with every possibility of sedating you, and those are the legal ones.

If we’re in pain we have to do something to stop it.  But, why?  If the red light comes on in our car, we don’t try to smash the light to get rid of it, we know to check to see what is wrong with the engine.

Single Vision
Now, make no mistake about it, this world we live in is in a state of rebellion. We live in a cosmic rebellion.  But, the Bible teaches that God works in this state of rebellion His own purpose. His Word shows us that He works in it through His people.  His people who are on this rebellious planet join to their God who is working His plan through them.  And those people He is working through are not immune to pain.  He works within the evil to conquer the evil.  This is what we call SingleVision.

Seamless truth: seeing God in all things, seeing Him working good in all things.  But His people are involved in pain.  People of the Bible, when they’re caught in their hurts, their faith soars beyond the hurt to God at work.  Whatever Satan is doing, whatever the opposition has in mind, God’s people in His Word don’t look at life, they don’t look at the problem, they look through it, and they see God; that is Single Vision.

Biblical Example of Single Vision
So, God is God to the person that sees God in all things. He is the God of those things.  Take Jeremiah for example, it appears he had a little study group.  One of them was Daniel, and there were three other Hebrew guys, and Ezekiel was part of it.  They were the cream of the crop; there were not many believers in Jerusalem at that time. This little group, obviously students of Jeremiah, were the first ones carted off into captivity.

What’s in this? Surely the bad people ought to be taken off first. Why were they taken first? The cream of the crop, a Bible study group? But, God had a way to overcome this evil. It was going to be through His people. It’s amazing what God did through them. He arranged for them to be carted off into captivity to accomplish His purpose.

Were they kept from feeling the chains on their wrists since they were doing His work? No!  They had to eat strange food and observe strange practices and live under an oppressive system among those who spoke a different language, among those who exposed them to witchcraft and all manner of evil.  But they remained who they were in the midst of all that.

While they could have been calling themselves victims, they declared who they were in their circumstances. They wouldn’t bend, they wouldn’t bow, they wouldn’t budge. These young men quietly lived their faith and the results of that would take a lot more time to relate than we have here.

Let it suffice to say that Nebuchadnezzar, the worst of the middle eastern kings, knelt down and confessed there was one high God.  God sent his best men into the very mouth of hell and they knew the pain of it, and the deprivation of it, because God’s plan was to swallow up evil in the midst of evil.

The Point of It
Do you see what I’m getting at? They could have sat down and said, "but we’re victims!"  But, they embraced it so that what Daniel wrote in his diary became the first chapter of the book we call Daniel. He says, "The LORD delivered Jerusalem into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar."

What on earth is he talking about? God’s in this? This horrible experience? This horrible time? You mean God is in this? Yes, Single Vision, that basic concept of truth for all eternity, knows that God is in everything working for our good and for His glory.

You see I’m saying, with all of this in mind, we are not victims. If you are a believer, you look through life and you see God is in this. With Single Vision you see God is in this. Whatever case or situation or circumstance or past event that you could name, I tell you that God is in it.

Another Biblical Example
Look at Joseph, you talk about a person that was abused and betrayed. At the age of sixteen or seventeen, he was just a kid.  His whole family was messed up. You talk about a co-dependent family!  His brothers threw him in a pit, soaked his coat in blood, then sold him to traders, who carried to Egypt as a slave, where he was betrayed by Potiphar’s wife, then he's sent to prison, he’s forgotten by the butler, but in all of this he says God was with him.

And when he had opportunity to revenge himself with his brothers, he had a fabulous statement to make, "you meant this for evil, but God meant this for good." Joseph had Single Vision, he saw that God meant it for good. Was he a victim? He knew he was victimized, but he knew he stood there by the grace of God and that God had worked through him and through his brothers and through all of those who had abused him for his good and for His glory. Joseph did not see himself as a victim.

What About Today?
You might ask, shouldn’t a woman expect certain things from her husband, or a husband expect certain things from his wife, or a child from its parents?  No, I’m going to say, no, you shouldn’t.  Our only expectancy should be from God.  It’s very nice if everyone else cooperates, but we can expect God to always be there and to love us unconditionally and in all circumstances but we can’t expect anybody else to do that. We can desire it, but we can’t expect it.  When we expect it, we are always going to be let down and we will feel like victims.

No, we can’t expect all these things of human beings.  We are to expect Him to never let me down.  Give us this day our daily bread.  Why do you pray that?  Isn’t it your employer that provides your daily bread?  No, he’s just the one who passes it on. If you are looking to your employer for your daily bread there’s going to come a day when he lets you down and you’ll become very upset.

Your daily bread comes from God. Normally it comes by way of your employer, but if the employer isn’t there for some reason, it’s still God who will supply our daily bread and God can multiply it in our hand or send a raven to drop it out of the sky.

Normally in ideal situations we do know God’s love through our spouse, and normally in ideal situations we do know God’s love through our parents, and children are nurtured in the love of God, but we don’t live under ideal situations and circumstances at all times, and they’re not always there and maybe they’re the reverse of what they should be, but God hasn’t changed. He’s still there; He still nurtures.  I don’t care what the situation is or how bad it is; know this in your heart; God is in it, working for your good and for His glory.

And know this, I’m not trying to be cruel, but listen to me, when you were being abused as a child, God hadn’t forsaken you, you were surrounded by angels and you were led every step through life since then or you wouldn’t be listening to this cassette right now.

Believe me, you were not forsaken. You might ask, "Why couldn’t He stop it?  That maniac of a father doing that to me?"  He didn’t.  But, He did work within that and if you’ll just believe His love for you, you’ll know He was with you in it, and He’s with you now and is working in that and through that to His glory and to your good.

He never left you once, and angels guided you out of that hideous hell to this place where you are now.  Yes, Joseph was abused all right, but he embraced life where he was.  He never fantasized, I know he never fantasized, because if he had, we’d have never heard of Joseph, because fantasy is not what your imagination is for.

Your imagination is to see through the situation that looks so dark and so grim and to see God who is loving you unconditionally in the circumstance and the situation. He’ll never forsake you; He’ll never leave you. No, you are not a victim. Praise God.

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SICK LOVE

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Are You a Victim?

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