Narcissists Demand…. :The Trap of People Pleasing – Self-Deception Series 13 – Purity 1102

 

Narcissists Demand…. :The Trap of People Pleasing –
Self-Deception Series 13 – Purity 1102

Purity 1102 07/24/2023 Purity 1102 Podcast

Purity 1102 on YouTube: 

Good morning,

Today’s photo of my canine pal, Harley, looking over
the plains in the direction of the rising sun off of Waite Rd comes to us from
yours truly as I captured this scene yesterday morning while out on our stroll
to rejoice over the coming of a new day.  
Although, technically I take Harley for a walk, we have developed a
relationship of limited trust in which we begin our journey tethered to one
another with a leash, but as we go, I allow Harley the opportunity to run and
walk free up and down the road the understanding that he won’t stray too far
from me and that he remains responsive to my commands to “come” or “stay” when
directed, and that he will surrender to getting back on the leash before
returning home because he has a history of running “buck wild” around our
neighbor’s property.   I enjoy seeing
Harley run free but just because I trust him in some regards, doesn’t mean I
trust him completely because I know he acts on instinct and sometimes is taken
away in the heat of the moment or becomes so focused with his attention on one
thing that he doesn’t realize that there are other things to be aware of, like
speeding automobiles that would send him to doggy heaven.  So although I let him loose, I know that his
safety and well being is still my responsibility and continually recall his
attention to where I am and where we are going as we make our way from out there
to back home.   

Well, it’s Monday and it’s back to another week of
work before my scheduled two week vacation so I will be focusing on getting
through the next 5 days safely so I can spend my vacation getting rest and relaxation
rather than recovery.   

Speaking of recovery, I was reminded over the
weekend that although we can accomplish a measure of peace (and even sobriety) on
our own through our own efforts and will, if we don’t put our trust in the Lord
and ask for Him to help change us from the inside out, it won’t be long before
we lose our attention and go running buck wild into the things we were endeavoring
to be free of.   

It reminds me of a man that attended our recovery
ministry, Celebrate Freedom, in the past who had attended a few meetings and
reported how he was so glad to be free of his addiction and how he was enjoying
the simple pleasures of family life now that he was “free”.  However, even though he had some history in
recovery circles, he seemed to be lacking the one thing I know is absolutely
necessary for a sustained life of victory and freedom: an intimate relationship
with the Lord and a commitment to follow Him always.     

So even though this man was happy to be “in church”
and to be around “good people”, he basically decided that he didn’t need to
bother with going to the recovery meetings and could just focus on his
family.  

But the problem is the identity of a “good dad and
husband” come with continual stress and frustrations of meeting others needs,
and if you are used to pleasing your needs with substances, unless you are
getting your needs for peace met by God, it won’t be long before you decide
that you “need a break” and go back to the things that destroyed your happy
home in the first place.  So that
happened. He walked away from a community in which he could have had support
and he didn’t invest into receiving strength and wisdom in God and now his
strength and seemingly his sanity has given way and he is suffering loss as his
addictive appetites have been satisfied but they have consumed everything else
in their path.

He believed the lie that he could do it himself,
that he didn’t need help, didn’t need God, and that he could sin in secret with
no negative consequences. In a few months, he went to “free” and restored to
frantic and broken.   And I wish I could
say that I only know of one person who did something like this, but I am afraid
I have seen this tale play out more than once sometimes with tragic, life
ending results.   

So I know how important it is to be a positive voice
for the Truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the life transformation that is
possible when one surrenders to His wisdom and ways for living. In order to
live free, we have to live with and for Him. We have to renounce the lies of
the world and live in His truth.

And that brings us to our current series on Self-
Deception, where we have decided to investigate some of the ways we deceive
ourselves by walking through Step 2, Deception Vs. Truth, of the Steps to
Freedom in Christ to see what ways we may have been deceived by “the world” and
ourselves and in what ways we have wrongly defended ourselves. 

So we present the twelfth “Way You Can Be Deceived
By the World”:

12. Believing that I must gain the approval of
certain people in order to be happy .

The scripture reference for this point is:

Galatians
1:10 (NLT2)
¹⁰  Obviously, I’m not trying
to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I
would not be Christ’s servant.

In his play, No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre said that “hell
is other people”. And when we come into a relationship with someone who demands
to be “made happy” through your efforts we can experience a real hell on
earth.  

When I started to google the words “Narcissists demand….”
Google filled in the blanks with:  

·       Apologies

·       Loyalty

·       Respect

·       Attention

So if you find yourself trying gain the approval of “certain
people” that demand these things or are one of these “certain people” – you may
know a narcissist!  

In Psychologist Dan Neuharth’s article the Frustrating
Double Standards of Narcissists (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/narcissism-demystified/201909/the-frustrating-double-standards-narcissists)
, he highlights 8 ways that narcissists attempt to take advantage of others and
how they seem to have a double standard when it comes to how they treat you and
how they expect to be treated. His article speaks of how narcissists are almost
impossible to please and how they are walking contradictions as they can be:  

 

·       Grandiose,
but brittle

·       Antagonistic,
yet Indignant at questions or opposition

·       Desperate to be Heard, yet uninterested in listening.

·       Emotionally Entitled, yet indifferent to other’s feelings.

·       Swift to Blame,
yet loath to own their part.

·       Image Conscious,
yet woefully self-unaware

·       Charismatic in Public, yet ill-tempered behind closed doors

·       Demanding of Absolute Loyalty, yet quick to betray others.

You may have noticed that I purposely highlighted the narcissist’s
attributes above, because it is all about them after all….

But this is not about them, this about us “people
pleasers”  as we “bend over backwards” to
try to make others happy in hopes that it will make us happy.  But unfortunately, this is often a losing
proposition as we really can’t control people’s emotions or make them feel
contented.  

This people pleasing strategy also goes against the word
of God as we take Christ’s command to “love others” to an unhealthy extreme and
make other people’s happiness or good opinion of us into an idol.   Instead of honoring God, our people pleasing
makes other people gods!

So we have to realize when we have wrongly put our
sense of self worth into someone else, and we have to repent and develop our relationship
with God to gain the wisdom of how to love one another without become a victim
of abuse. Toxic people need to be quarantined by boundaries and our tendency to
serve others needs to be tempered with wisdom. 

The only one who’s approval we need is God, and He
gives it to us freely when we put our faith in Jesus.

So don’t believe the lie that you won’t be happy unless
you please other people. That type of thinking is idolatrous and wrong and only
creates a vicious cycle of pain,  codependency, and abuse.

——————————————————————————————–

Today’s
Bible verse comes to us from “The Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling” By
John G. Kruis.

(
While Bible verses on various topics of Counseling can be found with a quick
google search, we encourage you to purchase this resource to support the late
author’s work. (https://www.amazon.com/Quick-Scripture-Reference-Counseling-Kruis-ebook/dp/B00CIUJZT2?ref_=ast_author_dp )

This
morning’s meditation verses come from the section on Affliction, Discipline,
Chastisement, & Trials.

John 9:1-3 (NIV2011)
¹  As he went along, he saw a
man blind from birth.
²  His disciples asked him,
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
³  “Neither this man nor his
parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might
be displayed in him.

Today’s
verse is the second verse that falls under the 1^st point of our
counseling reference guide resource’s section on Affliction, Discipline,
Chastisement, & Trials

 1. “Not all affliction is for specific
sins. God often sends affliction to purify and strengthen our faith, for His
glory.”

Today’s verses challenge
the belief that the negative circumstances we face in life are always the
result of someone’s sin.   Jesus
disciple’s seeing the man blind from birth wrongly assumed that his condition
was the result of this man’s parent’s sin or somehow from him (really guys? He
was blind since birth – did this man sin in the womb in some way or did God
preemptively punish him with blindness for something he hadn’t done yet?) – but
Jesus puts them straight with a truth that may be harder to swallow than a God
that doled out punishments for sin to the next generation. 

Jesus attests to the truth
that not all bad conditions are caused by sin, but He instead indicates that
God allows suffering to come into our lives to allow “the works of God” to be
displayed in us! Jesus teaches the hard lesson that our suffering may be a part
of God’s divine plan for us – that our suffering has a purpose!

While our faith can be
simple in some respects, it never tries to soft soap reality as Jesus taught
that we would be persecuted and suffer and although we will die, in Christ we
will live.

——————————————————————–

As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.

Today we continue sharing from  The Holy Spirit By A.W. Pink.

As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage you all to purchase A.W. Pink’s books for your own
private study and to support his work.  This resource is available online
for $0.99 (https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Spirit-Arthur-Pink-Collection-ebook/dp/B008CM5292/ref=sr_1_3?crid=AHKAQOM39CTN&keywords=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit&qid=1684376225&sprefix=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit+%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-3) 

A.W. Pink’s The Holy Spirit

15 – The Spirit Drawing

It Is
the Spirit Who Draws

John the Baptist came preaching “the baptism
of repentance for the remission of sins” (Mark 1:4), but by what, or rather Whose power was it, that repentance was
wrought in the hearts of his hearers? It was that of the Holy Spirit! Of old it
was said, “He shall go before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke
1:17). Now the “spirit and power of Elijah” was that of the Holy Spirit, as is clear from Luke 1:15, “he (the Baptist)
shall be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Similarly, it should be duly observed that
when Christ commissioned His Apostles to preach in His name among all nations
(Luke 24:47), that He added, “Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you:
but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until
ye be endued with power from on high” (v. 49). Why was the latter annexed
to the former, and prefaced with a “Behold” but to teach them (and us) that
there could be no saving repentance produced by their preaching, except by the
mighty operations of the Third Person of the Godhead?

None will ever be drawn to Christ, savingly, by mere
preaching; no, not by the most faithful and Scriptural preaching: there must
first be the supernatural operations of the Spirit to open the sinner’s heart to receive the message? And how can we
expect the Spirit to work among us while He
is so slighted, while our confidence is not in Him, but in our preaching? How
can we expect Him to work miracles in our midst, while there is no humble,
earnest, and trustful praying for His
gracious activities? Most of us are in such a feverish rush to “win souls,” to
do “personal work,” to preach, that we have no time for definite, reverent,
importunate crying unto the Lord for His Spirit to go before us and prepare the
soil for the Seed. Hence it is that the converts we make are but “man made,” and their subsequent lives
make it only too apparent unto those who have eyes to see that the Holy Spirit does not indwell them nor
produce His fruits through them. O
brethren, join the writer in contritely owning to God your sinful failure to
give the Spirit His proper place.

The renewed heart is
moved and melted when it contemplates the holy Savior having our iniquities
imputed to Him and bearing “our sins in His own body on the tree.” But how
rarely is it considered that it is little less wonderful for the Holy Spirit to exercise Himself with our sins and hold them up to the eyes of
our understanding. Yet this is precisely what He does: He rakes in our foul
hearts and makes us conscious of what a stench they are in the nostrils of an
infinitely pure God. He brings to light and to sight the hidden and hideous
things of darkness and convicts us of our vile and lost condition. He opens to
our view the “horrible pit” in which by nature we lie, and makes us to realize
that we deserve nothing but the everlasting burnings. O how truly marvelous
that the Third Person of the Godhead should condescend to stoop to such a work as that!

“No man can come to
Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw
him” (John 6:44). No sinner ever knocks (Matthew 7:7) at His door for mercy, by
earnest and importunate prayer, until Christ has first knocked (Rev. 3:20) at
his door by the operations of the Holy Spirit!^[1]

—————————more
tomorrow————————

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, “Freedom in Christ” series of Discipleship Classes via the
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
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My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Ask Seek Knock blog (https://tammylynask.blogspot.com/ ),  her
Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)

For those who require the assistance of a Deeper
Walk International Prayer Minister to experience healing or your freedom in
Christ, I highly recommend Christy Edge’s Life on the Edge Freedom Prayer
Ministry. You can schedule a session by going to : https://cedge216.wixsite.com/life-on-the-edge     

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