TEEN TREE OF LIFE
THE DOCTRINE OF
MENTAL ATTITUDE SINS
Part 2
July 16, 2017
BEFORE we begin, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, take a moment to name your sins to God the Father. This will allow you to be filled with the power of The Holy Spirit as you read this booklet (EPH 5:18 & 1JO 1:9). IF YOU HAVE never believed in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you have that opportunity right now. Simply tell God the Father that you are believing on His Son Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. If you make that decision, you are now a believer and will always be a child of God! When you die, you will spend eternity with Him forever in heaven! (JOH 3:16 & ACT 16:31).
We are in our second week of studying Mental Attitude Sins. As we learned, they are arrogance; pride; jealousy; implacability; bitterness; vindictiveness; excessive ambition/competition; fear; guilt; worry; anger; judging; hatred and murder.
We are now up to the fourth one on the list: implacability. If you’re implacable, it means you’re inflexible and without pity. It also means you are ruthless, cruel and hardhearted. People who are implacable are impossible to please or satisfy. Implacability takes root in the mental attitude of the soul where the person has no appreciation for life. PRO 27:20 puts it perfectly: Death and hell are never satisfied, Nor are the eyes of an implacable person ever satisfied.
As you grow as a believer, your life should be overflowing with appreciation, especially for all that God has done for you. Many Christians yearn for more “things” yet do not appreciate what they already have. They are so caught up in their destination that they forget to enjoy the journey. Many believers do not have gratitude for the graciousness and the love of people that they meet along the way. It’s useless to crave more things in life if you can’t enjoy and appreciate what you have in the present. It would be better to appreciate things that you can’t have than to have things that you’re unable to appreciate. The apostle Paul teaches us that one of the signs of the last days is the fact that people would be ungrateful: For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy… (2TI 3:2) Implacable people refuse to appreciate things. If you get to a point at which you appreciate life and suddenly become aware of the miracle of being alive, your life will become EXTRAORDINARY!!
The next Mental Attitude Sin is bitterness. If you don’t have a personal relationship with God, you will become bitter. Bitter believers eventually become a walking time- bomb ready to explode at any moment. These are believers who have allowed bitterness to build up in their souls. The explosion, whether it’s inward or outward, will cause devastation. This is called self-induced misery. Self-induced misery means you caused it to yourself.
Holding on to bitterness produces a very serious spiritual problem. This problem can only be corrected with personal love for God and impersonal, unconditional love for all mankind. Bitter people are sarcastic and mean. They have mental problems. Those who are bitter, display bad tempers, biting sarcasm, and a deep distress of mind that also corrupts others. HEB 12:15 warns us: See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled [corrupted]…
Being rejected is a strong reason for bitterness in the lives of most believers especially in marriage according to COL 3:19: Husbands, love your wives, and do not be embittered against them. This verse applies to any relationship – friends, parents and children, brothers and sisters.
According to PRO 14:10, bitterness lives and resides in the mind: The heart [mind, right lobe] knows its own bitterness, and a stranger does not share its joy. This verse is saying that bitterness in believers is so awful that even strangers avoid them. Why? It’s because bitterness produces a complaining attitude. Complaining is simply an outward effect of a Mental Attitude Sin.
The Bible also teaches us that bitterness produces misery: When my heart was filled with bitterness, and I was pierced within, then I was senseless and ignorant; I was like an animal before You. (PSA 73:21-22)
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn”? David taught this to his son Solomon in PRO 5:3-4: For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and smoother than oil is her speech; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Apparently, Solomon paid attention to his father because later on he wrote: And I discovered more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are chains. One who is pleasing to God will escape from her, but the sinner will be captured by her. (ECC 7:26)
Vindictiveness is another Mental Attitude Sin. If you are vindictive, you want revenge when someone does you wrong. Vindictiveness enters into the believer’s life as retaliation for wrongs whether real or imagined. In this carnal state, the believer becomes obsessed with seeking revenge, resulting in the desire to hurt, to be spiteful, and to try to inflict suffering or punishment as retribution for this real or imagined evil or injury. A vindictive person is ugly to be around. Vindictiveness is also accompanied by jealousy as we learn in PRO 6:34: For jealousy enrages a man, and he will not spare in the day of vengeance. What this verse is saying is that when you become jealous, you become angry and vindictive or vengeful.
But the question in the believer’s life is – what do you do when someone does you wrong or hurts you. Let’s look at God’s Word which teaches us that we can leave the problem in the high court of heaven: For we know Him who said, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge His people.” (HEB 10:30) Now the point here is we have to believe that vengeance is God’s job and not ours. It’s a hard pill to swallow! This is because we want to pay back the person who hurt us. But God wants to teach the person, not hurt him or her. This is because the person’s sin (of hurting) was paid for on The Cross!!! So if you seek vengeance, you’re negating Our Lord’s Work on The Cross.
The next Mental Attitude Sin is inordinate (excessive) ambition and competition. Ambition and competition in life is legitimate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to do better. And when you try to do better, competition is often the result. But, when you become obsessed with competing and comparing yourself with others, it becomes sin.
Look at 2CO 10:12: For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some of those who commend themselves; but when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding.
The same verse in the Living Bible says: Their trouble is that they are only comparing themselves with each other and measuring themselves against their own little ideas. What stupidity!
When it comes to what we accomplish, the Bible teaches us that The Lord weighs our motives: All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight, But the Lord weighs the motives. (PRO 16:2) What this verse is saying is that God looks at the Mental Attitude behind our actions, not the actions themselves. So, for example, if you work day and night on your Science Fair project because you want to win, are you working this hard to be the best (excessive ambition) or are you doing it as unto the Lord? As Christians we are encouraged to work hard – as if we are working for God Himself and not for man. This glorifies God!
The apostle Paul even tells us that if we do something great but with the wrong motives, it’s absolutely useless: If from human motives I fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, what does it profit me? (1CO 15:32)
{to be continued}