Overcoming The Victim Mentality

Scripture

1Afterward Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days. 2Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches. 3Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or paralyzed—lay on the porches. 5One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. 6When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?” 7“I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.” 8Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!” 9Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking! But this miracle happened on the Sabbath, John 5:1-9

Observation

Out of a whole crowd of obvious need Jesus zeroed in on one man at the pool of Bethesda. Jesus goes on to explain to the whining Pharisees later that He only does what He sees His Father doing. This man in particular was ready to overcome a lifetime of victimhood. Jesus starts out by asking him a simple and obvious question, “Would you like to get well?” He could have answered with a cynical, “Well, duh! Why do you think I’m here every day at the healing waters in the first place?” Confession is so key in the Kingdom. Speaking out loud, to Jesus, what we need Him to do that we can’t do. Then, in a very honest confession this man explains why he can’t get to the waters. Every day he is forced to watch other people step over him or even on him and get healed because he never has anyone to help him… until now. Yet, Jesus does something unexpected. Instead of picking the man up and pushing everyone else aside to get him in the water, Jesus, the living water tells him to do it himself, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!" How cruel. This paralyzed man has just told Him what he can’t do and yet Jesus is telling him to do the impossible. Instead of doing it for him or even giving him a helping hand he steps right over a lifetime of a very justified victim mentality and believes in the man before the man even believed in Him. Verse 9 is amazing because there’s no delay, argument, excuses, or pushback. “Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking!” As with all healing, this man had to overcome the lies in his head before he could walk it out, literally, in his life. The battle against the victim mentality started with his confession to Christ, continued with his inner decision to take Jesus at His word over every other word spoken over him, and then was victorious in his body as he obeyed what Jesus told him to do.

Application.

Confession, decision, and action in the presence of Christ is our way out of this victimhood culture we are all living in. It seems that so many are living their lives not really living. They are laying around waiting for someone to give them a hand and then bemoaning how unfair life is because someone else gets the help they need. It’s a very miserable way to live and sucks the joy out of the life God has given us. “If you have a victim mentality you will see your entire life through a perspective that things constantly happen ‘to’ you. Victimization is thus a combination of seeing most things in life as negative, beyond your control, and as something you should be given sympathy for experiencing as you ‘deserve’ better. At its heart, a victim mentality is actually a way to avoid taking any responsibility for yourself or your life. By believing you have no power then you don’t have to take action.” (Harley Therapy). Some would consider the response of Jesus to the man of Bethesda as a lack of compassion, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The most compassionate thing Jesus could do was to separate the fact that this man was an innocent victim of circumstances while not feeding the lie that his circumstances now defined his identity. In a culture where the victim mentality has gone mainstream through the propagation of identity politics, Jesus wants us to live differently. The first thing we have to do is recognize and repent for our own victim mentality. As secular thinker and author Stephen Covey points out: Reactive people [i.e. people with a victim mentality] are affected by their…environment…When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behaviour of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.” When we can confess this, decide to take our identity in Christ instead of our circumstances, then we can take action to walk in the victory we have in Jesus. Sometimes, it will be instant recovery as in this story, but most of the time we are celebrating the recovery from hurts, habits, and hang ups over a long period of time in the context of a healthy community that calls us to stand up, pick up our mat, and walk. This is how Paul describes the overcomer mentality of the Christ follower in Romans 8: "35Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? 36(As the Scriptures say, “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.”Ps 44:22.) 37No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us."

Prayer

I’m so thankful that for examples like my Pop who has had some pretty awful things happen to him in life and yet never loses his confidence in You. Even with this most recent situation of heart and kidney trouble he continues to walk out his healing process in joy and confidence that You’ve got this covered. So, today I will confess the areas in my life where I have felt things were unfair and where I have compared my journey to someone else. I’m deciding to live in the reality of Ephesians 1:3 right here on earth, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”. Show me how to walk people in to freedom without trying to do the walking for them.