Don't Be A Victim | Yesterday Was Easy - Episode 07

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I personally believe that one of the greatest plagues on the church in this culture is the victimhood mentality.

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Welcome to Yesterday Was Easy. In this feminized culture that we live in, men are abandoning their

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God -given roles of shepherds of their homes at staggering rates. It is much easier to be a lazy coward and forego responsibility than it is to be courageous and hard -working and accept responsibility.

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It is much easier to play the victim than it is to play the victor. It did not take very long for the first man to pull his victim card.

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In fact, it only took three chapters into history for this to occur. In Genesis chapter 3, when confronted by God for eating the forbidden fruit, not only did

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Adam attempt to pin his sin on Eve, but he also had the audacity to try and blame God himself.

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Now, keep in mind that when Eve sinned by eating the fruit, Adam was right there beside her, failing to properly lead her.

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My guess, probably because of one of three reasons, or maybe all of them. He was either being a coward, lazy, or he didn't want to take responsibility for his wife.

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So naturally, following her husband's lead, Eve did the same thing by pulling her victim card and blaming the serpent.

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Bad leadership leads to bad fruit. Unfortunately, Adam and Eve's sin did not stop with them, but carried over to their children.

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One chapter later, in Genesis chapter 4, Cain committed the first murder in history when he intentionally killed his brother

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Abel in a jealous rage. There are three points I want to make here. One, if we do not put our sins to death, our children will carry these same faults with them into the next generation.

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Men, if we do not want our children to repeat our failures, we must correct them now.

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We must train up our offspring to fear God and obey his statutes. Two, God was not pleased with Cain's offering because it wasn't his best.

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God was pleased with Abel's offering, however, because it was of his first fruits. He had faith that God would bless him and his work.

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If you desire God's blessing on your life, then give him your best. And three, God warned

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Cain that sin was crouching at the door and to rule over it, which he clearly did not do.

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Cain then, being jealous of his brother, murdered Abel in cold blood. And to make it worse, when asked about it, instead of owning what he did, he immediately played the victim.

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He had the gall to pass the book back to God. My friend Toby Sumter, who has a lot of good to say on this topic, wrote that he has tried to warn about the current sacred victim culture we live in.

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This is a false gospel if there ever was one. It offers justification and holiness to any and all who will claim the status of victim.

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This is a form of self -justification, since a victim must claim relative innocence and this is also a form of crowdsourcing your justification by popular vote.

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But perhaps most importantly, this is a refusal to accept responsibility. We must also be aware of certain flanking attempts where Christians are offered various victim club cards.

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But we must see every offer of victimhood as an offer to join the anarchy, to become assistants to the insanity.

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Victimhood ultimately leads to anarchy, which is simply life absent from government, including self -government.

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Toby then went on to write, We must refuse and reject every offer of victimhood, not because real injustice cannot be perpetrated against us, but because we are never totally innocent and we have a better offer.

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And this is because we have a better victim. Jesus is the better victim because he was completely innocent and willing and therefore his sacrifice was an act of taking responsibility in order to present us to God with all glory.

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And because Jesus took responsibility for us, we are completely justified by faith. Our sins are washed clean and the obedience of Jesus is imputed to us.

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This is why Paul says in Romans 8 that even when we are victimized, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

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Jesus truly was a victim of slander, betrayal, abuse, and murder, but was also truly innocent.

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The point is that even if we are sinned against in a conflict, we are always truly sinful in general and never truly innocent.

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There are legitimate instances of being a victim of someone else, see Jesus, but what we want to avoid is a victimhood mentality, where everything is everyone else's fault.

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This mindset allows you to blame all your struggles, including your own sin, on everyone around you.

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Going back to the garden, when the serpent tempted Eve with, Hath God said, Satan has continually attempted to create moral ambiguity.

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To be continued with, moral ambiguity is frequently closely aligned with evading responsibility.

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People have a bad habit of trying to justify sin with ambiguity and confusion. This can be done by straightforward evasion and relativism, but this can also be done by claiming that everything is everyone's responsibility, which ultimately means no one is responsible for anyone because you are not infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, in short, you are not

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God. Be assured that the attempt to do this will always result in various attempts at playing

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God, but this will ultimately result in apathy and paralysis.

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In the end, evading responsibility only alienates yourself from all your friends, loved ones, and pastors, because you begin to reject all forms of accountability.

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This is a tremendous disease infecting the church. Cowardice men who refuse to own their failures.

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I could give you numerous examples of men who have refused accountability for their sin, blaming everyone else, including their wife, their kids, their pastors, and even

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God himself. Lastly, Toby wrote, In God's ordering of things, personal responsibility is the basic building block of culture.

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Men are tempted to try to trick power out of evasion of responsibility, by blaming others, by claiming to be victims, but that is a black hole of chaos and anarchy.

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So the opposite of victimhood is personal responsibility, which starts with good self -government. It's taking ownership of your marriage, your children, your work, and your relationships by admitting when you're wrong, and not just admitting fault, but fixing it and making it right by truly owning it.

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When we have sins crouching at the door, as Cain did, we need to put them to death by ruling over them just as God instructed.

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Because of Christ, we are more than conquerors. This means he gives us victory over sin. As 1

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Peter 2 says, Christ willingly became the victim of our sins so that we no longer have to be.

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Personal responsibility is being a good steward of the things God has given you by stamping your name on them.

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Victimhood is being a poor steward of the things God has given you by continually passing responsibility on to others.

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The culture desperately wants us to be a victim of something, unless you're a white cisgender male of course, because everyone else is a victim of us somehow.

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But scripture calls us to trust in the better victim, who has already carried the responsibility of those who trust in him to the cross and paid for them with his life.

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Very few things frustrate me more than men who play the victim, who cry up a storm every time somebody is mean to them on Facebook, or when they have a bad day at work, or when their wives treat them poorly, or when their kids are difficult to manage.

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In a culture where drawing your victim card faster than Doc Holliday at the OK Corral is deemed the morally righteous thing to do,

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I say that Christian men should not even own a victim card, and if you do, go burn it.

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Never a victim, forever a victor. Yesterday was easy, don't be a victim, stay hard.