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Self Pity - The Why Me Syndrome By Wayne Mack

This study is entitled, Why Me?
The text from the Bible is Psalm 73.
To get the most out of this study, follow along in your Bible as the study is unfolded.
Get a piece of paper and a pencil or pen and take down the outline of the study,
evaluating your own life in the light of what the Word of God has to say.
Be sure and do the homework suggestions which are given at the end of the lecture.
This morning I want to direct your attention to Psalm 73.
Psalm 73.
Now, this Psalm deals with a problem that most of us have experienced at one time or another,
because it deals with what I have called the Why Me syndrome.
On many occasions, most of us either have asked or have been tempted to ask, Why me?
Why is this happening to me?
Why didn't this happen to somebody else?
What did I do to deserve this?
Why is God picking on me, or why is someone else picking on me?
Oh, we may not have asked these questions audibly, but we've asked them in our hearts.
I know that the Why Me syndrome is a very common problem for at least two reasons.
I know it first of all because I've heard many people ask questions such as the ones that I have suggested.
Here's a young man who is considerably overweight, and he desperately wants to date young ladies,
or at least one young lady, but it just doesn't seem to happen.
And he looks around at all of the other young fellows who are dating,
and he sees that many of them are much slimmer than he is,
and he realizes that some of them eat as much as he eats, or perhaps they eat more than he eats,
and so he thinks, well, my metabolism is different than theirs, and that's why I'm overweight,
and it's because I'm overweight that the girls don't want to date me, and so he says, Why me?
Why is God picking on me?
What did I do to deserve this?
Or here's a young fellow who really wants to play football, or he wants to play basketball,
but he just doesn't have the athletic ability.
He's not big enough to make it in football, or he's not tall enough,
or well coordinated enough to make it in basketball,
and he looks around and sees the other fellows who are football stars and basketball stars,
and he says, Why me?
What did I do to deserve this?
Why didn't God make me bigger or taller or whatever so that I could play basketball or football?
Or here's a young lady, 28 years of age.
She desperately wants to be married.
She looks around and she sees other young ladies her age, 28 years of age,
and she sees that they're married and that they have children,
and then she begins to feel sorry for herself, and she says, Why me?
What did I do to deserve this?
Why is it that God has not brought a young man along for me to marry?
Or here's a young person for whom school is a struggle.
I mean, to get passing grades in school is a real battle for him.
He has to put out a lot of mental perspiration,
but he sees other fellows or other girls in his school who seem to cool it very easily.
They don't have to study very hard, and yet they get very good grades, and he says, Why me?
Why didn't God make me more intelligent than I am?
Or here's a woman who comes asking for help in coping with her children.
She's filled with self-pity. She's filled with bitterness and resentment.
The children won't listen to her. The children mock her.
They swear at her. They curse at her.
She's sitting along the street.
The children pick up stones and throw the stones at the houses of people.
She says that the neighbors are complaining and calling the police
because her children are such a nuisance to the neighborhood,
and she looks at me and she says, Why me?
What did I do to deserve all this?
Why did I have to have kids that turned out like this?
Or here's a man who comes because his wife has left him.
Now, she left him two years ago, but he's sitting there and he's saying, Why did she leave me?
What did I do to deserve this?
Or here's a man who works for a company for 30 years,
and after 30 years of faithful employment, when he's 55 years of age, most of his life is gone.
He's just before the time when he has worked enough to have a pension.
At that time, he's laid off,
and he sits there with bitterness and resentment in his heart, full of self-pity,
and he says, Why me?
What did I do to deserve all of this?
Or here's a woman whose husband dies at 45 or 50,
and she's left to rear her children all by herself
and to try to scrape together enough money to provide for them,
and she says, Why me?
What did I do to deserve this?
Well, on and on we could go,
giving illustrations of people who are asking Why me questions.
Well, I know that the Why me syndrome is a common problem
because many are asking the question, Why me?
But I also know it because the Bible indicates that many men of God ask this question.
Moses asked this question.
If you read the book of Exodus carefully, you'll find him asking this question again and again.
Just the other day, I was reading in Exodus chapter 5,
and God sends Moses to Pharaoh.
He says, Now I want you to go to Pharaoh,
and I want you to ask Pharaoh to allow the children of Israel to go out into the desert,
a three-day journey to sacrifice unto me.
So Moses goes before Pharaoh, and he asks for this privilege,
and when Pharaoh hears this request,
Pharaoh says, Well, you know why this request is being made?
It's being made because the people don't have enough to do.
Let's make them work harder.
And of course, when the Israelites were given more work than they already had,
they became something upset with Moses and began to complain against him,
and Moses went to God and he said, Why me?
What did I do to deserve this, Lord?
Why did you choose me to do this?
Elijah asks that same question in 1 Kings 19.
He's been sent by God out to stay for a while beside the brook Cherith in 1 Kings 17.
Loneliness, deprivation have been his experience.
Finally, the brook dries up, and he's sent to live off of the substance,
the meager substance, of a woman who lives in the region of Sidon or Seraphath.
He goes there, stays there for a while,
and then he is given the challenge of bringing a rebuke to Jezebel and Ahab and the priests of Baal.
And you remember that Mount Carmel experience in 1 Kings 18 where he calls the fire of God down,
he's busy, he carries water, he brings wood, and the fire of God comes down
and the sacrifice is consumed, and Elijah thinks, Well, this is it.
Now Ahab and Jezebel will be converted.
They'll change, but they didn't change at all.
Instead, they became more angry with Elijah, and they threatened again to take his life.
And so in 1 Kings 19, Elijah runs out into the wilderness, sits down under a juniper tree,
and he says in effect to God, Why me?
What did I do to deserve all this?
And of course, this Why me syndrome was the experience of the psalmist as well.
Frequently in the psalms, you'll hear the psalmist asking a question like this, Why me?
What did I do to deserve this? What did we do to deserve this?
Now one of the psalms in which the psalmist asks this Why me question is Psalm 73.
In verse 14 of Psalm 73, the psalmist says, I have been stricken all day long
and chastened every morning. Men, I've got problems, he said.
And in verse 13, he says, I don't know why I'm having these problems
because I have kept my heart pure, and I have washed my hands in innocence.
Why me, Lord? I'm trying to live a holy life. I'm trying to be a child of God.
I'm trying to do what you want me to do, and yet all of these terrible things are happening to me. Why me?
In verse 2, he says, As for me, my feet came close to stumbling.
My steps had almost slipped. I don't know if he's speaking literally or merely figuratively.
Perhaps he means that his feet were almost at the point of stumbling literally,
and his steps had almost slipped literally because there are people who get down in the dumps
filled with self-pity, feeling sorry for themselves, who are affected literally in a physical way.
They begin to walk slower than they walked before. They begin to teeter totter.
They don't have the energy. They don't have the strength that they once had.
So it may be the psalmist is saying that he was affected physically.
At least we know this much, that he was affected in a figurative sense
because he was discouraged and he wondered whether it was worth going on.
Why me? What I do deserve this, and he was just about to give up.
So here's a man who was suffering from the why me syndrome.
But in this psalm, we not only have a description of a man who's suffering from the why me syndrome,
we also have a description of how this man dealt with the why me syndrome successfully.
Now this psalm is included in the word of God so that we may know how to deal with the why me syndrome.
2 Timothy 3 and verse 16 says that the scripture was given for our prophet
to teach us, to reprove us, to correct us, and to train us in how to live rightly.
1 Corinthians 10 and verse 11 says whatever was written before time
was written for our instruction upon whom the end of times have come.
So this psalm was included to tell us something, to teach us something, to instruct us.
If you're here this morning and you're experiencing the why me syndrome,
this psalm was included in the word of God to teach you how to handle it.
If you know of someone, and who of us doesn't, who is experiencing the why me syndrome,
this psalm was included so that you might know how to help these people
who are experiencing this terrible problem.
Now it's important to note that in dealing with this why me syndrome,
we cannot deal with the problem directly.
In other words, when God teaches us how to deal with the why me syndrome in Psalm 73,
He doesn't say, now I want to give you ten reasons why you're experiencing the problems you're experiencing.
You don't find that in Psalm 73.
He doesn't give us in this psalm ten reasons why God has brought this upon you.
You won't find that in Psalm 73.
He doesn't give us in Psalm 73 ten things that you've done to deserve what's happened to you.
He doesn't say that in Psalm 73. He doesn't deal with the problem directly.
He deals with it indirectly.
Now many people think that if a person understands why he's having a problem,
he will automatically be rid of that problem.
For example, some think if a person only knows why he's getting angry, he won't get angry anymore.
Or if a person knows why he's depressed, he won't be depressed anymore.
Or if a person knows why he is a liar, and some people are what have been called continuous or pathological liars,
and some think if a person only knows why he constantly lies to get out of tough situations,
he'll automatically stop lying.
There are some people who think that if a person knows why he's nervous or why he's anxious,
if they can delve around in his past enough and discover what happened when he was a child
or when he was born or shortly after he was born, then automatically his problems will dissolve.
But that's not usually true.
I had a woman come to me for counseling some time ago who had spent thousands of dollars
going to secular psychiatrists and psychologists.
She'd gone to them for years, and she was nothing better but rather grew worse.
And as she sat in my office on that particular occasion, she said to me,
I am now a more intelligent, miserable person.
Now I don't know about the intelligence business.
I do know about the miserable business because she was a miserable woman.
These men had told her about why she was having the problems,
but knowing why she was having the problems didn't solve the problems.
I had a woman sit in my counseling room recently who told me that she knew she was critical of her husband,
and she knew that it was wrong, and she knew why she was critical.
But she says, I don't know what to do about it.
Knowing why she was critical and knowing that she was critical didn't change the fact that she was critical.
She needed to know what to do about it, not simply why it was happening.
Not too long ago, I had a man come to me, and he sat down in my room.
He looked at me after I'd asked him the question, what's your problem?
And he said to me, I have come because I want you to tell me why a certain thing has happened to me.
And he went on to explain what had happened.
And I said to him, well, suppose I could tell you why it had happened.
What good would that do? Would that change the fact that it has happened?
Would that really help you to deal with it now?
Or is what you need not an answer to the why question,
but an answer to the question, what should I do about it now that it has happened?
How should I handle the situation? How should I react? How should I respond?
And I went to Deuteronomy 29 and verse 29, which says the secret things belong unto the Lord,
but those which are revealed belong unto us.
And I said, what you ought to be concerned about is what God says in his word about the way that you should handle this situation,
about the way that you should react to this situation.
I can tell you how you should react, I can tell you how you should handle it,
but only God knows exactly why it has happened.
And we can get involved in speculation, we can get involved in imagination,
but what we need to really get involved in is the facts of the word of God.
Proverbs 20 and verse 24 says, man's goings are of the Lord, who then can understand his way.
And so I brought this man to the word of God, and I'm helping him to learn how to handle the very tough situation that he had.
Now this is precisely what God does with the why me syndrome of the psalmist in Psalm 73.
Now as we look at the psalmist with his why me syndrome in Psalm 73, I see two things.
First of all, I see a description of the causes of the why me syndrome,
and secondly, I see a discussion of the cure for the why me syndrome.
The causes of the why me syndrome are found in verses 2 through 14.
Now one of the causes of the why me syndrome is envy.
In verse 3, the psalmist said, I was envious of the arrogant as I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
Envy was behind his why me syndrome.
In James 3 and verse 16, the Bible says where envying is, there is confusion and every evil work.
Envy never did any good.
The Bible says wherever you find envy, there you will find confusion, and there you will find every evil work.
Proverbs 14 and verse 30 says, a tranquil heart is life to the flesh, but envy is rottenness to the bones.
Envy will destroy you according to the word of God.
Now what is envy?
Well envy is strongly desiring what somebody else has, or has.
In Genesis the 30th chapter, the Bible says that Rachel was envious of her sister Leah.
Scripture says that she came to Jacob when she bore no children.
She was envious of her sister and she said to Jacob, give me children or I die.
She was envious of the children that her sister Leah had.
She strongly desired to have children even as her sister had children.
But envy is not only a strong desire to have what someone else has,
it is also thinking that you deserve to have what someone else has just as much as they deserve it, or perhaps even more.
And that was the situation of the psalmist.
Look at what he says in verse 3.
I was envious of the arrogant.
He said, I looked around and here were these arrogant people.
He says they were wicked people in verse 3.
In verse 6 he says they were proud people.
In verse 6 he says they were violent people.
In verse 7 he says that they had wicked imagination.
In verse 8 he says they were mockers.
In verse 11 he says they were irreligious.
They were blasphemers of God, and yet they were prospering.
He says, I couldn't understand that.
I deserve to have what they have more than they do.
And so envy is thinking that you deserve to have what somebody else has as much or more than they do,
or envy is behind the why-me syndrome.
But in this psalm I also see that exaggeration was behind the psalmist's why-me syndrome.
Some time ago I heard the story of a fellow who went into a monastery,
and in that monastery they took a vow of silence.
They could say two words every ten years.
After his first ten years in the monastery, he met with his superior,
and the superior said, okay, you can say your two words.
He said, food cold, and he went back into silence for another ten years.
After ten years he met with his superior and he said, bed hard.
He went back into silence for ten more years.
After ten more years he met with his superior and he said, want out.
And his superior said, all right, get out.
You've done nothing but complain since you came anyway.
Now that superior was exaggerating,
and the psalmist was guilty of exaggerating in at least two ways.
First of all, he was guilty of exaggerating the prosperity of the wicked.
He says in verse 4, there are no pains in their death.
That's not true.
There's pain in the death of many a wicked person.
I've been beside their bed when they've been dying.
I've heard of how the wicked have cried out to God in their death.
The psalmist was exaggerating.
He was also exaggerating when he said their body is fat.
Now what he meant was that they had plenty of food,
and that's not true of all wicked people.
There are a lot of wicked people who are dying of starvation.
Some of them have fat bodies, but others have bodies that are emaciated as well.
He was exaggerating.
He says in verse 5, they are not in trouble as other men.
They don't have the problems that other men have.
Yes, they do.
Many of them have terrible problems.
I know that for a fact.
The psalmist was exaggerating.
So he was exaggerating the prosperity of the wicked.
But he was also exaggerating his own problems.
Look at what he says in verse 13.
He says, surely in vain I have kept my heart pure.
In vain I have washed my hands in innocence.
He says, for nothing.
That's what the words in vain mean.
Living for God has profited me nothing.
I've gotten nothing out of it.
Now that was a lie.
He was exaggerating his own problems.
He had gotten a lot of blessings out of being a child of God,
and later on he comes to a realization of that.
But at this point, he's so down in the dumps, he's so filled with self-pity,
he's guilty of feeling sorry for himself so much,
that he says it's been of no value at all.
And in verse 14 he says, I've been stricken all day long
and chastened every morning.
He said, ever since the time of my birth I've been stricken all day long.
Every morning I'm chastened.
I think he was exaggerating.
And behind most wimey syndromes, there is exaggeration.
A person is exaggerating the prosperity or the blessings of someone else,
and probably exaggerating their own difficulties and trials and problems as well.
A third cause of the wimey syndrome in Psalm 73
is confusion about the true nature and source of blessedness.
In verse 3 he says, I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
Now the psalmist was misinterpreting the nature of true prosperity.
Do you know that God promises that the child of God will be prosperous?
Do you know that God promises that the child of God will be rich?
Psalm 1 in verse 3 says that the man who delights in the law of the Lord
and meditates in his law day and night
shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water.
His leaf will not wither.
He'll bring forth his fruit in his season and whatever he does will prosper.
God says, if you'll meditate in my word, delight in my law, you'll prosper.
2 Corinthians 8 in verse 9 says, you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor,
that ye through his poverty might be rich.
And we who have become Christians, the Bible says, have become rich.
God promises us that he'll cause us to prosper.
Now that's a promise.
But the problem is that many people misinterpret the nature of true prosperity.
They think of prosperity in terms of gold and silver and jewels,
in terms of material and physical things.
I've had many people who have come into my counseling room down in the dumps
saying God doesn't keep his promises
because here I am, I've become a child of God and I'm not rich,
I have trials, I have problems, I have difficulties,
my car breaks down just as other people's cars break down.
They have a wrong understanding of true prosperity and so did the psalmist.
It's clear from what he says that he's thinking of prosperity
purely in physical and material terms.
And the Bible makes it clear that there are many things
which are much more valuable than gold.
In Luke 12 in verse 15 Jesus said,
a man's life does not consist in the abundance of things which he possesses.
And the Bible says, what shall it profit a man?
Matthew 16 26, if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul,
your eternal destiny, your relationship with God through Jesus Christ
is much more valuable than all of the money in the world.
What will it profit you if you gain the whole world
and then stand before God and are cast into hell?
Oh, your relationship with God, coming to Jesus Christ,
trusting in him and living for him
is much more valuable than all the gold in the world.
In Psalm 19, the psalmist says that the truths of God's word
are more to be desired than gold.
Yea, they much find gold.
They're sweeter also than the honeycomb.
In the book of Proverbs, scripture says wisdom is more valuable than gold.
How blessed is the man.
Chapter 3 verses 13 through 18,
who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding.
For the profit of wisdom is better than the profit of silver
and it's gained and find gold.
And nothing you desire compares with her.
And then in verses 17 and 18, he describes some of the blessings
or some of the profit of getting the right kind of wisdom from God.
Her ways are pleasant ways.
All her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her
and happy are all who hold her fast.
And the Bible says if you have God's kind of wisdom,
you have happiness.
If you have God's kind of wisdom, you have peace.
Her ways are the ways of pleasantness.
That's much more valuable than gold and silver.
God promises that we'll prosper,
but it's not necessarily a physical prosperity
because many things are more valuable than material things.
And so the psalmist was down in the dumps
because he misunderstood the nature of true blessedness.
But he was also down in the dumps because he was fretting.
In Psalm 37, we have what I call the fretter's psalm.
Four times in the first eight verses, God says,
fret not, fret not, fret not.
And God says fret not, first of all,
because it's important that we don't fret.
And secondly, he says it four times
because most of us are so guilty of fretting.
It's so easy to fret, so God says,
fret not, fret not, fret not, fret not.
Why? He wants us to get the message.
Now, what is fretting?
Fretting is becoming preoccupied with a problem
so that the thought of that problem
consumes most of our thinking.
I know of a man who made a mistake 25 years ago
and for the last 25 years he's been preoccupied
with that problem and worth very little.
I know of another person who sat in my office
weeping over something she had done 30 years ago
and it was a very trivial thing.
Her son had become an Eagle Scout
and she didn't take into account his desires
on that particular day when he became an Eagle Scout.
And she sat there weeping because she planned
a party for him without asking him what he wanted to do.
And for a long time she's been fretting
over that event plus other ones like it
because she realized she hadn't done
what she should have done with her children.
Or here's another person who flunked out of college
17 years ago and for 17 years he's never held down
a job because he's still fretting
about flunking out of college.
Or here's a man whose wife left him a while ago
and so ever since his wife left him
he's been fretting and worrying about that
and filled with bitterness and resentment
and really accomplishing very little.
That's fretting and that's what the psalmist did.
And I think as you read through Psalm 73
you get a picture of a man who got something in his mind,
the prosperity of the wicked, his own problems
and for a time he was just consumed
with thinking about these problems.
And whenever a person becomes consumed
with the negative aspects of life
it isn't long before he's asking,
Why me? What did I do to deserve this?
But I not only want you to notice
the causes of the Why Me syndrome,
I want you to notice the cure for the Why Me syndrome.
Now the first part of the cure is found in verse 15.
The psalmist said,
If I had said I will speak thus,
behold I should have betrayed
the generation of thy children.
The first part of the cure is the exercise
of self-control.
The psalmist took charge of himself.
Up to this time he was allowing his mind
to go wherever it wanted to go.
At this point he began to do some thinking
and he said to himself,
What I'm doing is not right.
I've got to take control of myself.
And I noticed him first of all controlling
his words and his actions.
He said, If I had said I will speak thus,
he put a bridle on his words.
And he watched what he said.
The Bible says the fool gives full vent
to all his mind.
Proverbs 29 and verse 11.
The Bible says in the multitude of words
there wanteth not sin.
Proverbs 10 and verse 19.
The Bible says in Proverbs the 13th chapter
at verse 3,
The one who guards his mouth
preserves his life.
The one who opens wide his lips
comes to ruin.
And so the psalmist said,
I must be very careful what I say.
God says that if I open wide my mouth
I'll come to ruin.
Now there are a lot of people who do nothing
but talk about their problems
and they don't care who they talk about,
their problems too.
They're constantly going over and over
and over and over their problems
again and again and again.
And it's no wonder they're driven
deeper and deeper into the depths of despair.
If you want to overcome,
you've got to put a bridle on your mouth.
You've got to guard your mouth.
I'll tell you, when I speak,
there isn't anybody who is more moved
by what I say than me.
When I preach, I believe what I'm preaching
or I wouldn't preach it.
And the more I say something,
the more firm I am in my belief of what I say.
And if a person keeps saying there's no hope,
I don't deserve it,
why me, over and over again,
he becomes more and more convinced
that he's getting a raw deal.
So you've got to control your mouth.
Secondly, the psalmist not only controlled his words,
he controlled his thoughts.
He controlled his thoughts.
He started doing some thinking.
He said, if I had said,
I will speak thus,
behold, I should have betrayed
the generation of thy children.
What did the psalmist do?
Listen, my friends,
what holds your mind will mold your life
and influence your feelings.
If you're feeling badly,
it's because you're thinking badly.
Your mind will control how you feel
and your mind will control how you act as well.
Now the psalmist took control of his mind
and he began to think about what was right and wrong
instead of just about his problems.
He said, if I do this, it'll be wrong.
He had some convictions.
He knew something of the word of God
and he said, what I want to do,
and oh, how his heart wanted to just talk to somebody else
about his problems and get sympathy.
He really wanted to do that badly.
But he said, if I do that, it would be wrong.
It would be sin.
So he turned his thoughts to the word of God
to what was right and wrong.
Secondly, the psalmist started thinking about other people.
He started to turn his thoughts away
from thinking about himself to a concern for others.
He said, if I do this, I'm going to betray,
I'm going to offend, I'm going to be a stumbling block
to the generation of thy children.
I'm going to be a hindrance to other Christians.
And God has said that I'm their keeper.
Now in Philippians chapter 2, the Bible says,
don't look upon your own interests,
but look upon the interests of others.
And in Romans 14, verses 7 and 8, the Bible says,
no man lives unto himself.
You're responsible for other believers,
even as they're responsible for you.
And when the psalmist began to get the focus
of his attention off of himself and on others
and how he could minister to them,
he began to climb out of the why-me syndrome.
You'll never get out of the why-me syndrome
until you get the focus of attention off of your problems
and off of yourself and on the word of God,
what's right and wrong, and on other people
and how you can help them.
Now the second part of the cure for the why-me syndrome
is found in verses 16 and 17.
He says, when I pondered to understand this,
it was troublesome in my sight
until I came into the sanctuary of God,
then I understood or perceived therein.
In verse 17, he says, I went to the sanctuary of God.
Previously, he had just been staying alone.
He had been doing the wrong kind of thinking.
He had been thinking about the prosperity of the wicked.
He had been thinking about his own problems.
He had been trying to solve the problem on his own.
But the time came when he found no solutions on his own,
and so he went to the sanctuary of God.
Now the sanctuary of God is the place
where you find the word of God.
The sanctuary of God is the place of prayer.
The sanctuary of God is a place where you meditate.
The sanctuary of God is a place where you find the people of God.
He went to the word of God.
He went to prayer.
He went to the people of God,
and then he began to understand.
Well, what did he begin to understand?
He began to understand three things.
First of all, he understood the real condition
of the ungodly regardless of their external circumstances,
and you find that described in verses 18 through 20.
He understood that the ungodly were not in enviable places,
but rather in slippery places, verse 18.
They were in a place of instability and insecurity.
He recognized that the ungodly were subject
to great emotional distress,
and he mentioned sudden terrors in verse 19
and the sale of tranquilizers and Meloril and Stelazine and Thorazine
and all of the mood-lifting drugs
and the drugs which are concocted to counteract anxiety.
All of these drugs are but a display of the fact
that the ungodly around us are sudden to emotional distress.
They're not happy.
They aren't finding security.
They aren't finding the answers in the world,
and so they turn to drugs to help them.
But he began to realize that the ungodly live in a world of unreality.
They live in a fantasy world,
and so in verse 2 he says,
Like a dream, when one awakes, when aroused, thou wilt despise their form.
Their world is like a dream world.
They think that it's real, but it's not real.
You know, when you're dreaming,
you think what you're going through is really what's happening,
but then you wake up and you discover it wasn't real at all.
And the ungodly who think they have something valuable,
they think they've found the answers are one day going to wake up,
and some of them are waking up even while they're here alive,
and they're committing suicide, turning to drugs, alcohol, sex, whatever,
trying to find some substance.
They're living in a dream world.
Apart from Christ, there is no reality.
The psalmist became aware of that.
He also understood that the future of the ungodly was bleak and black.
He talks about destruction in verse 18.
He says they're going to be destroyed in verse 19.
He says they're going to be utterly swept away in verse 19,
and he says that they will be despised in verse 20.
The Bible says,
He that believeth on the Son hath life.
He that believeth not the Son shall not see life,
but the wrath of God is abiding upon him.
Hebrews 9, 27 says it's appointed a man once to die,
but after that the judgment.
And that's what's before every person who has never come to Jesus Christ,
and the psalmist began to realize that the future of the ungodly
was indeed bleak and it was black.
But secondly, he not only began to understand the real condition of the ungodly,
he began to understand that he was ultimately responsible for his own problem.
And you see that in verses 21 and 22.
He says,
When my heart was embittered and I was pierced within,
then I was senseless and ignorant.
I was like a beast before thee.
Now Hebrew scholars say that the Greek verbs in verse 21 have a reflexive action,
and that verse 21 could really be translated,
When I embittered my own heart and when I pierced myself within.
The psalmist came to the realization that it wasn't the prosperity of the wicked that was the problem,
it wasn't his own problems that was the problem, it was himself.
He was looking at it wrongly.
He saw that he was the one who was embittering his own heart,
and he was the one who was causing his own pain.
He was piercing himself. Why?
Because he was senseless. He lacked sense. He wasn't looking at things properly.
He was ignorant. He was forgetting some very important things.
He was like a beast. He was looking at life just as an animal looks at life.
Looking at it purely from a physical and material point of view.
And he saw that he was having the problem because he was thinking and viewing life from a wrong perspective.
He accepted full responsibility for his problem.
That's the second part of this aspect of the cure for the Wyme syndrome.
And then thirdly, the psalmist began to understand the wonderful privileges of the child of God,
regardless of his external circumstances.
And that we find in verses 23 through 28.
The Bible says that we've been blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
And in these verses, the psalmist lists some of the tremendous blessings that we as Christians have.
He doesn't list them all, because of course you couldn't list them all in one song.
But he lists a few of the blessings that we have.
He talks, for example, about the privilege of divine acceptance in verses 22 and 23.
I am continually with thee in spite of what I've done.
The grace of God, in spite of our sin, he still is with us. He doesn't forsake us.
He talks about the privilege of divine companionship.
I am continually with thee. No, never alone. No, never alone.
Never to leave me. Never to leave me alone.
He talks about the promise of divine support in verse 23.
He says, Thou hast taken hold of my hand. God holds us up.
He talks about the privilege of divine comfort in verse 23.
God taking hold of our right hand and all what comfort it brings to know that God has a hold of our hand.
He talks about the privilege of divine guidance in verse 24.
With thy counsel thou wilt guide me. I don't have to discover truth for myself.
I don't have to decide on my own. God has promised to be my guide. What a privilege that is.
He talks about the privilege of divine strength in verse 26.
God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
He talks about the privilege of divine protection in verse 28.
I have made the Lord God my refuge.
And he talks about the privilege of divine purpose for living in verse 28.
He says, I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all thy wondrous works.
Oh, the psalmist said, I have a purpose for living, and the purpose for my living is to glorify God, to point others to him.
Oh, there are so many in our world who don't know why they're here.
They have no purpose for living. I've had people come depressed and anxious,
and one of the problems that many of them have is that they don't know why they're here.
Life has no meaning. It has no purpose.
You know, if all there is is going to work in the morning, going to bed at night, eating and drinking and working and then dying,
if that's all there is to it, no wonder people have the terrible emotional distresses that they have.
No wonder they're hopeless and helpless.
But if we live for more than that, if we live to honor and glorify God,
to preach the gospel to every creature, to take the Lord Jesus to those who sit in darkness,
to bring them to know him who can forgive them and redeem them and give them eternal life, that gives purpose to life.
And the psalmist began to see what a tremendous privilege and purpose I have for living.
And then he also began to see the privilege of his divine prospect, where in verse 24 he said,
With thy counsel thou wilt guide me, and afterward receive me to glory, only glory by and by, only glory by and by.
There may be tears to shed while we travel home, but there's only glory by and by.
We're going to be in the presence of Jesus Christ, and there will be nothing but glory,
the divine prospects that are before the child of God.
Well, there you have God's analysis of the cause and the cure of the Wyme syndrome.
Now, in closing, I want to give you some suggestions about how you can make this message very practical and very personal.
To make this message very practical and very personal, I want to suggest that you go home this afternoon
and write down the times when you've been tempted to ask, Why me?
and then to evaluate which of the causes were operative in your life.
Were you asking, Why me? because you were envying somebody? Who was it?
Were you asking, Why me? because you were exaggerating?
Were you asking, Why me? because you were misinterpreting the true nature of blessedness?
Were you asking, Why me? because you were fretting?
Well, you'll never get over the Wyme syndrome until you eliminate those things from your life.
Secondly, to make this message practical and personal, evaluate your self-control.
What about your mouth? Are you like the fool in Proverbs 29 and verse 11 who gives full vent to all his mind?
Are you a person like the psalmist in Psalm 39 who had a bridle on his mouth
and made sure that what he said was really pleasing in the sight of God?
Let no unwholesome speech proceed out of your mouth, Ephesians 4 29.
What about the self-control of your words and of your thoughts?
Thirdly, go home and evaluate your sense of responsibility.
Are you blaming your problems upon your wife, your husband, your children, your environment, your job, your neighbors?
Or are you saying, No, it's not their fault. They provide the environment in which I become depressed or anxious.
But I'm the one who becomes depressed. I'm the one who becomes anxious.
I'm the one who responds and reacts in an unbiblical way.
And Lord, I accept full responsibility for the Wyme syndrome.
I encourage you to go home and get out of concordance and write down everything that the Bible has to say about the condition of the ungodly.
Get that firmly fixed in your mind, not from a worldly point of view,
but get it fixed in your mind from a biblical point of view as far as the condition of the ungodly.
And then lastly, to make this message practical and personal, write down all of the privileges of the child of God.
Get out of concordance, go through the word of God, and look at what God says happens to the person who is a Christian who has come to know Jesus.
Take Psalm 73 and take each of these privileges that I've mentioned and write a paragraph on each of them describing what it means.
What are the implications of divine acceptance?
What are the implications of the fact that God is your divine constant companion?
What are the implications of all of these other privileges?
And especially, what are the implications of the fact that you have a divine purpose for living?
Are you telling of God's work? Are you preaching the gospel?
Write out a list of ways in which you can reach others for Christ, a list of ways in which you can turn others to the Savior.
And as you do these things, you'll be pulled out of the why me syndrome if you're in it.
Or if you're not in it, you'll be kept out of the why me syndrome because you'll discover the tremendous privileges and blessings it is to be a child of God and to serve our Lord Jesus Christ.
Well, may God help us to hear His word and to put it into practice that His name might be honored and glorified.