Self-pity and self-righteousness by Joyce Meyer

Joyce Meyer: The reason why I asked you if you were aware that you had unforgiveness toward yourself or if you were unaware of it is because I believe this is the root of a lot of people’s problems and they don’t even really know that’s the problem. I think that probably literally hundreds of thousands of people are watching right now thinking, “wow, I wonder if that’s my problem.”

R.T. Kendall: Both Christians and non-Christians. Christians have the problem. They don’t want to talk about it because they know they’re not supposed to feel guilty. But I know of an atheistic psychiatrist who actually said, “I could cure any psycho- pathology in 30 minutes if I could get my client not to feel guilty.” We’re talking about people in the world — same problem exactly.

Joyce: Early in my ministry I was just trying to do anything that there was to do to help people, so I was asked to go to a mental institution here in St. Louis and minister to some of the people. It was in the real bad ward where people were locked up. I’ll never forget there were people shuffling around, and so many of them were mumbling, “it’s all my fault. It’s all my fault. It was all my fault.” Joyce Meyer Online that has really stuck with me that those people, many of them probably were in there because they had felt so guilty for so long that it actually destroyed their mental health. Why is it so hard for us to forgive ourselves

R.T. Kendall: Well, I have a chapter in the book on the twin sins: Self-pity and self-righteousness. There’s something about all of us; we don’t want to receive something that’s absolutely free — we want to do something to help it. So we tell ourselves, “this is too good to be true. I can’t just walk away with a free pardon, let myself off the hook.” So it’s self-righteousness. And then the self-pity that we’ve held over the years, we want to make that count for something and we can’t bear the thought that we can just get away with it and forgive ourselves, but that’s the very thing we are required to do.

Joyce: Yeah, there’s something about that, and we’re going to talk about this a little bit more when we come back, there’s a part of us that always wants to pay. We feel like there’s a debt…

Joyce Meyer Ministries – I asked him, “why do you think everybody in the church are saints? A church could be a museum of saints or is it a hospital for sinners? So if you consider it a hospital for sinners, then you have no reason not to go.