Feb. 28, 2007

Have you noticed that we live in a “blame-it-on-someone/something-else” world today? If anything goes wrong in your life, just blame it on anyone but yourself. After all, you’re perfect, right? 

Have an accident? It’s someone else’s fault, for sure. Having a bad day? It’s the folks you work around, not you. Can’t read or write? Must be the educational system you went to school in. On and on, we read story after story in the news where someone is suing someone else for something that is wrong in their life. Whatever happened to personal accountability?

I noticed something when reading in Revelation, chapters 2 and 3. The Spirit wrote to the seven churches in Asia in these 2 chapters, and they all had different problems. The Spirit spoke directly to each of them about those problems, but the common theme is the promise that it made to all of them at the end. “To him that overcometh…”, it reads 7 different times, and a promise follows that edict. 

What I get from reading that is that every person who is in Heaven today is an overcomer. Think about it - there are no wimps in Heaven! 

The real message is that EVERYONE – you included – has things to overcome in their life. Society tells us to blame someone or something else for the things that we don’t like in our lives, but the Bible tells us something different, doesn’t it? 

Do you have a relative or co-worker who drives you nuts? Get over it!

Do you have illness or financial problems that make you want to feel sorry for yourself? Get over it! 

Do you have grudges against others that you’ve held and thought about and talked about and pondered for weeks or months or years? Get over it! 

Do you have areas of weakness and temptation in your life that continually pull you back to sin, time and time again? Yep, you guessed it…. get over it! 

Some things in life are a result of mistakes we have made. Other things happen that we didn’t ask for or deserve and these are usually the things that hold us back from complete joy in our lives. But Paul the apostle wrote “Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14) 

So how do you “get over it?” Release your past. Forgive those who have wronged you. Focus on “those things which are before”, or the things that are in our future. Ask God to help you overcome the addictions and hurts and feelings that you can’t overcome on your own.