3 Steps to Breaking the Cycle of Self-Pity

The late Martyn Lloyd-Jones has been counseling me the past few days through the re-publication of his sermons on Psalm 73 by Christian Focus entitled Faith On Trial. If you are a regular reader of this blog then you know how many times I have referenced this psalm in the past year and how the Lord has been using it in my own heart. The Holy Spirit has magnetically pulled me back into it time and time again. One of the powerful lessons of this psalm is the diagnosis and cure of self-pity, which is never productive. What Lloyd-Jones says is so helpful that I will quote large portions.

“The trouble with this man was that his thoughts had been turned in on himself and so had got into a vicious circle. We start thinking about things in this way, we become miserable and unhappy, and we do not want to see anybody. We do not want to mix with God’s people. We become preoccupied with our troubles—the hard times we are having, the feeling that God is not fair to us and that we are being treated very harshly. We are miserable and feeling very sorry for ourselves, and there we are, going round and round in circles of self-pity. Self is always the centre of this problem. The first thing to do, therefore, is to stop this preoccupation with self and stop turning round and round in circles on the natural level! But how does one break out of the vicious circle? I suggest that there are three main things here.”

1. Put first what the psalmist put first – literally going to the house of God. “What a wonderful place God’s house is. Often you will find deliverance by merely coming into it. Many a time have I thanked God for His house….The house of God has delivered me from ‘the mumps and measles of the soul’ a thousand times and more—merely to enter its doors…we go to the house of God, and to our amazement we find other people there before us…the healing process is going on, the cure is being continued….We look around the congregation and suddenly find ourselves looking at someone whom we know has had an infinitely worse time than we have been having…it puts our problem into a new perspective immediately [see 1 Cor 10:13].   Continue at Paul Tautges