Famous Last Words

In Deuteronomy 30:11-20, we read of God's faithfulness and the wonderful condition of that faithfulness: READ

These last words of Moses are upbeat and positive. He's saying to them that just over the next ridge, just beyond life's next corner is a whole new existence ...

a new land, a new life, a new opportunity. It would be what they chose it to be.

He sets before them those wonderful opportunities and great things. "What you need to know is not something you have to fly with angel's wings to heaven and stand in the presence of God to receive. It is not something you need to traverse some wide, theological sea that's stormy and hard to navigate in order to learn it. What you need to know to make your life rich, full, and good is as near to you as your heart. It is as near as the words of your mouth. It is as close to you as music is to a hymnbook. It's something near at hand.

The thing you have in your possession that can make your life wonderful, good, real, and full is choice. You have in your possession the ability to make choices, and you can choose a good life. You can choose wonderful, abundant life for yourself.

And you who feel like some marionette, some puppet with strings attached, you don't have to live like that. You can pull your own strings. You have in you this wonderful power to make life good."

Do You Have a Victim Mentality?

This is not a universally-accepted truth. There are many people around us who would say, "We don't get to pull our own strings. We are victims of who we are, where we are, how we were born, where we were born, and what our life is about."

There is a kind of thinking that has clouded the American mind called determinism. It's a mishmash ... a mixture of Freudian psychology and genetics.

It is saying with Freudian psychology how you were raised has much to do with what you are, and that's a half-truth. It's also mixed up with the study of genetics. We've just come into this kind of study lately where people are saying, "We can't help who we are. I don't have happy genes, so I can't be happy. I don't have a driving gene, so I can't be a driven person. I can't make my life what it needs to be because I am who I was born to be. It's somebody else's fault. The choice is not mine. It's in someone else's hands."

You've heard about or possibly seen the voluptuous cartoon character in Who Killed Roger Rabbit who said, "I'm really not a bad girl. They just drew me this way. A lot of people feel that way. Somehow, they've been drawn to be somebody other than they really would like to be.

I read something this week that's supposed to be played with a guitar.

It's entitled "Determinism Revisited."

It says:

I went to see my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed

To find out why I killed the cat and blacked my wifey's eyes.

He laid my on downy couch to see what he could find,

And this is what he dredged up from my subconscious mind.

(Interlude: Hey, libido -- bats in the belfry, jolly old Sigmund Freud.)

When I was one, my mommy locked my dolly in the trunk,

And so it follows naturally that I am always drunk.

When I was two, I saw my father kiss the maid one day,

And that's the reason I suffer from kleptomania.

(Interlude: Hey, libido -- bats in the belfry, jolly old Sigmund Freud.)

When I was three, I suffered from ambivalence toward my brothers,

And that is the reason why I poisoned all my lovers.

I'm so glad that I have learned the lesson I've been taught.

That everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault.

In America, the motto seems to be: It's not whether you win or lose but where you place the blame. God is saying, "You don't have to listen to that."

Have you ever heard anybody talk about why they succeeded? Have you ever heard someone say, "I succeeded because I couldn't help it. It's who I am. I was born this way."

You never hear that when someone succeeds. It's always the reasons for failure.

Imagine Freddie Fourth-Grader brings home a report card, notably absent of the first two letters of the alphabet. His father is looking at the report card full of C's and D's and F's and wondering what in the world to do about this. The little boy says, "Well, Dad, what do you think? Is it heredity or environment?"

If the report card had a lot of A's on it, do you think they'd be talking about heredity and environment? Boy, they'd be talking about good study habits and how hard work pays off.