Seeing Self-Pity as a Dead-End Road

Several years ago the road I traveled home at the end of the day was washed out in one of those torrential rains that come around every hundred years. For nearly ten years this had been my route home, but now there was a barrier placed at the half way point. My habitual commute ended with a dead-end. It took them two years to repair that road. For two years my commute included an extra five miles nearly every day, because I kept forgetting the road was out until I saw the barricade. I’d turn around and drive out the same way I’d come in, telling myself that I wouldn’t make the same mistake tomorrow.

My route home during that time parallels my struggle with self-pity. Even though I know it is a road leading nowhere, I instinctively choose it as if I have no other option. Self-pity is best defined as the preoccupation with yourself because your hopes, desires, or expectations have not been realized. It is unproductive and destructive to all relationships. From time to time, I still find myself on that all-too-familiar road, unable to remember how I got there until I see that barricade and realize I’m approaching self-pity’s dead-end.

In the Scriptures we discover God’s thoughts on self-pity through his conversations with biblical characters. Three in particular are worth noting: Cain, Moses, and Jonah. Each encounter reveals God’s warnings for those on the dead-end road of self-pity. They also provide God’s gracious solutions for how to return to a life of productivity. A careful study of the biblical characters reveals several common features in their battles with self-pity:

• It followed a mountain-top experience
• It revealed a prideful desire for another’s approval
• It intensified when they ran from responsibility
• It grew in the discontented heart
• It increased when they compared themselves to others
• It fueled various forms of anger
• It led to despair

While some of the features were similar, there were marked differences in the final outcomes. Moses was successful at defeating self-pity and went on to live a productive life. Cain and Jonah were not; they simply would not stop thinking about themselves.

Self-pity is sometimes mistaken for humility, but it is actually a prideful response, even though it may not feel that way to us or appear that way to others. C.S. Lewis shows us the nature of genuine humility when he writes, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.” Like the facade on a rotting structure, self-pity is a false humility. True humility is so sharply focused on others that it will sacrifice itself completely for another.

This is clearly the pattern Jesus demonstrated for us. When the disciples were arguing about who should be the greatest, Jesus saw it as an opportunity to talk about the cross. He says, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” Jesus encourages us to do the same.

While the Father teaches us how to think, and the Son exemplifies for us what to do, it is the Holy Spirit’s power that actually makes change possible. He empowers us to make God-honoring choices.  As we cooperate with him, those daily choices will become daily habits, and lasting change will follow. This is what it means to walk in the Spirit.

Perhaps you know self-pity firsthand. Your circumstances seem overwhelming. Negative thoughts consume your thinking. Feeling sorry for yourself has become a way of life. While you used to battle temptation, lately you can’t find the energy to try. You compare yourself to others and come up short. No matter where you start, all roads seem to lead to self-pity’s dead-end. Perhaps its time to get you off a road that leads nowhere and to get you back on the road God wants for you.

Because self-pity tends to be a struggle for many men, we include a session on it in our 4M Training for Men.

Taken from Dead-End Desire: biblical strategies for overcoming self-pity