Now a victim mentality will steal your Godly inheritance. You have to understand what's at stake here. The promises God holds for your life, the destiny He wrote for your life, the good things He planned to accomplish in and through you, all depend on you adopting an attitude of faith. If you stay in a victim mentality, there is no way you can rise into, and experience, the things God has planned for you. God has planned financial breakthroughs, breakthroughs in your personal life, breakthroughs in relationship. He's planned not just breakthroughs; He's planned breakouts, where you start to influence people, win people, see answers to prayer. However a victim mentality will steal away all the good things that God has planned for you. This is why it is important to shift from a victim mentality to a kingly mentality.
I must shift the way I see life. I must shift in my heart and in my mind, in my words and in my actions. I must make a choice to change. No one makes it for you. No one makes it for you. Wherever you have been, no matter how bad, tragic, no matter what bondage, whatever slavery, whatever problem you have been in, God can use it as a stepping stone to get you up into your destiny, and as He redeems your past, you begin to see how it prepared you for the things you have ahead - but you make the choice.
Now I want you to have a look at this thing; first of all just redefine the victim mentality. A victim mentality is a way of thinking. It's a way you think. It has to do with your thought life. It is a way of looking at life and interpreting it. It is a belief system in the heart, so it's a whole way of thinking and believing, the way you approach your life.
If you are in the secular world, then the motivators would begin to show you how to think differently. As you think differently, they'd say you'd have a different life, which is partly true. Definitely if we think good thoughts, as you'll see shortly, your life will change. So a victim then, a victim mentality is a mentality where the person - now notice this - they will not take responsibility. That's the bottom line. They refuse to assume responsibility. They choose rather to make excuses for why life is like it is and to find someone or something to blame. When you blame someone you put responsibility on them, you remove it from yourself and leave yourself powerless and resentful at how life sucks. This is a way of thinking, it's an internal choice in your heart. Every situation that comes to you, you can approach it as a king or as a victim. No one chooses the response but you. Think about that.
So a victim mentality then is a way - it's blaming others for why I feel like I do: You make me feel so mad. No, I don't make you feel so mad, your feelings are your feelings, they're not my feelings. OWN your feelings. They're YOURS! You can go to the grave with them if you wish, or you could choose to change. You have to understand this is a very, very important thing, because New Zealanders as a whole, there's a widespread victim mentality sits on many people. It's in the culture, but in the culture of the church we want to shift you to have a kingly thinking, where there's nothing in life that isn't too much for you. Amen! Amen! I can see there's resistance going on but that's alright, we're going to keep going there, and I want to share with you something at the end that'll be an insight that'll really help. So let's have a look at Israel, and how they viewed their situations.
I want to do three things; how they viewed their situation, how they responded and then what it cost them. I want to show you how God directly connects their failure to get His promises, to the way they thought and behaved. So you can be in church, saved, redeemed but if we don't make a choice to shift our thinking and believing and living, we actually live substandard, and below what God intended for us. So first of all how they viewed their situation, what their belief system was, how did they see themselves first of all? They see themselves like grasshoppers: I am a grasshopper. It's called an inferiority complex. I am a grasshopper, I'm small, problems are big. That's a belief system. The second thing is how they saw life's challenges, Verse 31 and 33: Oh, the giants in the land are too big for us. Oh, you mean that God allowed something to come into your life that was too big for you to handle, and you weren't ready and prepared to deal with it? Oh really? I thought He was more in control than that. The giants - everything is a giant to a person with a victim mentality. It's a problem they're burdened with.