So year after year I work, work, work, work, work, work, work and I never had the emotional connection with my father that I was longing for, and I hoped would come with the work, because here's what had happened. When I thought I'd done really well, he would look at what was wrong, and see it could be better. What it does is it increases the pain, and then leads you to view life in a certain way. Now here's a question to ask - so of course the thing is, as I've journeyed I've had to try and deal with this stuff, and here's the thing that's interesting. When I became a Christian, it didn't change. I wish it had. It didn't change. It just changed form, got very busy serving God. Same driving mentality: I'm unlovable, if I just do enough, God will love me. Did I know God loved me? I had it in my head, but the problem is, it's not in your head that it counts, it's in your heart. If your heart is programmed with I'm unlovable, you will remain a victim, and you'll always look and see all the reasons why things don't work out. You'll have every kind of excuse, every kind of reason. You'll blame everyone and this and that, even blame the devil. The devil will be the persecutor, Jesus is going to be the rescuer. You have a whole victim cycle operating in your life, and you don't learn to grow and become a son, who learns how to partner with God in life.
This is what God's wanting the church to grow up to our son-ship, so we learn how to partner with God in life, so the temptation is then - and particularly if you're in a prophetic flow - is to wait for God to tell you everything, and you just do what God tells you to do, when God wants you to grow in wisdom and intimacy with Him as the source of wisdom, so you'll learn not to run everything off prophetic flow, but to balance prophetic flow with wisdom and how to make life work. Ooh, you probably know someone like that, and I was like that. For me, to tell the truth, it's been a journey to get rid of all of that stuff. I've had some decisive moments in my Christian life, where I encountered the love of God as a Father, and major changes took place in my heart.
I can remember one time just weeping for two hours as I experienced His love in my office, and felt the touch of God as a Father for the first time. It's tangible, it's real, you can experience it, and when you do, it changes you. Now I'm ready for another dose. I believe God's got much more, so I'm positioning my heart for more - so victim mentality sabotages everything, and here's how it sabotages it. Because the thinking is: I'm the victim, it's not my fault you know. It's not my fault, it's someone else's fault, I'm right! That's the way a victim will think, I'm right, and I'd rather be right than have a relationship, so I'll be right and I'll have a breach, rather than actually be vulnerable and declare maybe I'm not right, and even if I am I really want relationship. So victims view life through someone else is the cause of their problems, and so they're the victim. The second thing is, a victim has to blame someone, so a victim says: you're my persecutor, it's you. You did this to me. You're doing this to me. It was that boss of mine did it - and so victims always have got someone to blame.
You can listen and it won't take long, and they'll find someone to blame. Israel began to blame Moses, but they were really blaming God. The elder brother began to blame the father - notice his language is a little careful, but at the end there it is: this son of yours, and you gave him all this money. He's wasted the money, spent it on prostitutes would you believe, and now you have a party. Hey, what's up with you? So he sees the father as being the source of his trouble, so a person who has a victim mentality will have two other groups of people in the world; one are people to blame, persecutors, people who're against him - they're agin me. Now of course church gets that, and they get to start to think like the world's agin me. No, the world isn't agin me; the world's lost, the world needs us. The world's not against us. Come on, start to think right. We have the answer for the world. We're the light of the world. The world needs us.