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The Blessed Attitude

Many things in life are outside of our control. Life throws us many curves. Hardships befall us. People in our lives may be difficult. There are so many opportunities for failure, but only few opportunities for success. The real question is, do our circumstances determine our success or failure.

The answer is a resounding, No!

How is it that two children can be raised in the same difficult living conditions and environment, yet one will rise above it, and the other will become a victim who carries their negative experiences into the next generation? The opposite is also true. How is it that two kids can be raised in a nurturing environment, but one will become bitter and the other will thrive in life?

The truth is that no one has a perfect nurturing environment. People who have a good life can always find negative things to focus on, and people raised in a cruel world can find good and climb out of the cycle of failure. What is the key that opens the door to a good course for our lives?

Attitude.

Things will enter each of our lives we cannot control, but one thing we can control is our own attitude. And our attitude is the blueprint for how we build our lives in the world in which we live. This is by God’s design.

The Lord has promised two things we can anchor our hopes upon.

One is that God promises He will not allow us to endure more than we can bear. This promise is regarding temptation from without. God does not promise He will not allow us to self-destruct. If we are determined to find the bad in life and are determined to milk negativism for all it’s worth, God will not stop us. God doesn’t protect us from our own rebellion, but He does protect us from the evils around us. When I say protect, it is our hearts that are protected.

What’s more, the Bible says to be strong in the Lord and the power of His might. This means we have unlimited strength if we put our focus on seeking God and allowing Him to guide us to the good in every circumstance.

God will not allow hardships to overcome our faith, but He will allow hardships to break us from trusting in the flesh. If you are relying on the power of your might, God’s promise doesn’t apply. The Lord doesn’t promise to protect our fleshly way of living. Sometimes we have more than we can bear because we are trusting in our strength instead of God’s unlimited power given through the Spirit.

Evil cannot destroy our heart, but evil within our heart can destroy us. And negativism is evil nurtured within our heart. We are the cultivators of what thrives in our heart.

Brooding produces nothing good. The heart is like a garden. We can plant poison ivy, thorns, and harmful plants in our garden, but why would we want to? Yet this is what many of us do in our own hearts. Something harmful will spring up, and instead of weeding it out, we rush to water it, cultivate it, grow it into something powerful, and then wonder why it is affecting our lives.

If we are grumbling under our breath, complaining about everything, murmuring, and cultivating a negative attitude, we’ll reap these things in our lives. The Bible warns that what we sow, we will also reap. If I’m constantly walking around and grumbling under my breath, what can I expect to reap through my emotions? I’ll reap what I am sowing and nurturing – a negative grumbling spirit.

I have never seen a happy grumbler. I have never seen a broody person with a joyful attitude. The more I brood, the darker my attitude becomes. Have you ever listened to the testimonies of people who ‘just snapped’? Those who commit atrocities have a history of brooding. They allow what harms them to dominate their thoughts and it grows into an obsession. The more they brood, the more stressed they feel. They become time-bombs that are only one incident away from exploding.

A few years ago, a man named Bryce Williams was fired from his job as a news reporter. Even though his behavior is what caused his firing, he became angry and blamed others for his loss. Two years later, he murdered another reporter and a cameraman on the air as a retaliation for the wrongs he felt. He left a note behind explaining how he had been stewing since his firing, and said, “My anger has been building steadily. I have been a human powder keg for a while and knew I would go BOOM at any moment.”

This is the extreme side of the danger of brooding and is the fruit of rejecting God’s call to set our minds on the good God has promised and builds into our lives – if we walk by faith. It robs us of joy, blinds us to hope, and cultivates anger, and eventually hatred.

Is this the way to handle frustrations? To cultivate bitterness only poisons our own heart and creates self-destruction. Why choose this when joy and hope are guarantees through God’s way?

On a smaller scale, every person can become a bomb maker. If our attitude puts us on edge, it doesn’t take much to set us off. Brooding builds up the pressure and then we start expecting negative things from people, and we react as though everything is an offense. Sometimes innocent comments are misinterpreted as an attack. This causes our negative attitude to react based on our internal turmoil, rather than upon the intention of the person we are reacting against.

The negative spirit imposes their feelings onto others. This causes them to interpret innocent mistakes or comments as an attack. It also causes the negative person to view petty disagreements as momentous. Instead of shrugging off little annoyances, the negative spirit goes to war.

While few people make the news, many people are time-bombs. They are one incident away from having a temper explosion, emotional meltdown, deep depression, or any other outlet for their emotional reactions. Notice I said ‘reaction’, not ‘response’. There is a difference. Most people react to their environment. Circumstances create an automatic reaction which drives their lives. Yet the sound mind knows how to respond to circumstances.

Negative attitudes can only react. Only positive attitudes have the power to respond.

We have the power to stop, consider an appropriate response, and resolve the problem. But this is only possible when we are in control of ourselves instead of being controlled by our circumstances. Or being controlled by our negative attitudes.

It’s important to reiterate this again. We project our attitude on others without even realizing it. A good attitude assumes the other person is thinking positively, but the bad attitude interprets negativism from a person even when it is not present. A dishonest person doesn’t trust others, in the same way, a negative person believes those around them are also negative.

While doing some interim preaching in a church, I noticed a storm brewing among some members. There was a lot of backbiting going on and I decided to address the situation by explaining the Bible’s command to love the brethren. I looked at what it means to love, and what love does not allow us to do to our brethren. After the message I received two reactions. Those who knew nothing about the turmoil going on said they felt inspired and encouraged to express Christian love.

Those who were manufacturing division became angry. I received angry phone calls and was accused of spewing venom from the pulpit. One person quoted me as saying something I never even thought. He was so insistent that I spewed hate from the pulpit that I got a copy of the recorded message to see if I actually said the things he claimed I said. The offensive things some people heard were never spoken.

How can two groups of people hear such different messages? One expected to be blessed from the scriptures, but the other expected offense. Their attitudes affected how they interpreted what they heard. In fact, those with negative attitudes heard things which were never said.

How many offenses in life are similar in nature? It isn’t what is said, it is what is assumed that offends people. “He just thinks… I know she’s mad at me because she didn’t speak…He’s doing that to get under my skin…I can tell she doesn’t like me by the look in her eye.”

All of these are assumptions. Most are wrong. Yet we can manufacture conflict so the assumption becomes reality. We project our attitudes on others and this can build up or tear down relationships.

The second promise of God is that all things work for our good. God did not promise all things in our life would be good (that is from the human perspective) but that it would produce good. This is something I’ll refer to again as we move through this book. God is looking for your good – not merely here on earth, but good from the eternal perspective. We get so shortsighted that we think a setback or loss of something temporal is a tragedy.

Many years ago, a local newspaper covered a story on a man’s reaction to an accident. Someone rear-ended his boat in traffic. He snapped and attacked the man and severely beat him. His action sent him to prison. Because of a scuff on his fishing boat, he was willing to attempt to kill the person who accidentally caused the damage.

The real irony is that by now his boat is probably in a junkyard somewhere – along with thousands of other boats which have aged to the point of uselessness. Is a possession bound for the junkyard worthy of our life?

Life is filled with disappointments. I may lose my job, lose a ball game, miss that promotion, or any other thing I think is important in this 70-80 year life. Are these truly worth an emotional investment? If I’m cheated, will it matter in the course of my life? How will it look in light of eternity? Is it worth the hatred, bitterness, or desire for revenge? Is it worthy of my sorrow and despair? Is self-destructive behavior the answer to a problem? Any problem?

No. Nothing in this life is worthy of the value we place on it. As the Apostle Paul once said, “The sufferings of this life are not even worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us.” By ‘us’ he is referring to those who have given up temporal things in order to live for eternity.

No suffering is even worthy of our comparison. Therefore, we should not be investing our lives into our sufferings, irritations, annoyances, frustrations, disappointments, or any other thing that displeases us in this life. Our focus should not be on what we have lost, but what we are gaining. The focus has to be on where we are going – and that requires having a direction to go.

See the goal and begin walking that way. What is your goal in cultivating a healthy emotional and spiritual life? We must cultivate an eternal perspective. This will affect our attitudes and values in every area of life.

Cultivating a Positive Outlook

It’s important to have an accurate understanding of the power of attitudes. The attitude itself doesn’t create a mystical power which makes things happen, for the power is not in you. Good attitudes change our heart to look for good and receive good, while negative attitudes have the opposite effect.

Many New Age circles and various religions operate on the belief that we create reality by our thoughts. They falsely believe positive thoughts create good things and negative thoughts create bad things. While it is true positive attitudes find more opportunities and have better success than negative attitudes, I’d like to examine this from a more accurate perspective – a perspective which directly affects each of our lives.

Simply by observing people, it is clear those with positive attitudes find good more often than those with bad attitudes. Is this the power of the mind to alter the universe? Or is there a deeper meaning?

I’ve often wondered about this belief. Can you imagine, six-billion people altering reality to suit their own desires? If this were possible, the world would be a mass of chaos and confusion.

The truth is, we have been born into our specific circumstance, and we have to build ourselves upon our faith as we respond to our unique situation. Though I believe the Bible’s claim that God foreordained my life before the foundation of the world, I also believe the scriptures which say, “Choose this day a blessing or a curse.” It is God’s desire to bless, and indeed He has built His blessings into every life. This is also true for the people who seem to have been dealt a bad hand in life.

It’s not the bad hand we’ve been dealt that ruins our lives. Life appears sour when we lack the willingness to look for the blessings all around us. Let’s look through the lens of both the negative attitude and the positive one and see how our attitude affects the outcome of life.

The Negative Lens.

A negative person is focused on what? They gaze upon the things in life that annoy them. A negative heart focuses on what is wrong in the world around them, how they have been wronged, offended, lack the types of opportunities they wanted, aren’t pretty enough, skinny enough, rich enough, educated enough, and the list goes on and on.

When something goes wrong they cross their arms, plop down, and say ‘woe is me’. A negative attitude focuses on what bothers them, and this becomes all they see. A grumbling heart is stuck on what offends and it blinds the grumbler to the good around them. Their attitude strangles relationships and blinds them to anything but the offense. This negative mind-set becomes a cycle – for it creates more offenses while also clinging to the past ones.

All the grumbler sees are the things which are wrong. Indeed there are things wrong. Every one of us has many situations in our lives we do not like and wish we could change. But when the things which offend become our focus, life revolves around a cycle of negativism.

So is it the negative thoughts which create negative circumstances? No. Everyone has negative circumstances, and some people endure horrible things, yet overcome. The truth is, negative circumstances are part of living in a fallen world, and it will always be around you. The problem with the negative attitude is that it invites the passing trouble to take up residence.

The Positive Lens.

The positive attitude has the opposite effect on the individual. You’ve probably met someone who has gone through a tragedy and yet they seem happy and joyful. I’ve heard others ask these types of people, “How can you handle what you’ve been through so well?”

The truth is, they have probably shed many tears. They sorrowed over the loss they endured, but they dealt with it in a healthy way. Instead of making the tragedy their prison, they used it as steps to climb higher. They overcame – not because it didn’t hurt – but because they looked for the good on the other side.

The Bible says we should look to the attitude of Christ, “who for the joy set before Him endured the cross while despising its shame.” We are commanded to consider His life so we are not ensnared by the cares of life, we don’t become discouraged in our souls, and so we can also endure through joy.[1]

Consider what the Bible says about Jesus’ view of the cross. Jesus despised the cross. He hated it. He knew it was the source of His pain and suffering, yet He endured – not by focusing on the cross, but by looking beyond it to the joy that lies ahead. He endured what He despised by focusing on the good that would come through His suffering. And we are told to look to His example so we don’t become discouraged in our souls.

Did Jesus’ positive attitude change His circumstances? No. The cross still stood between Him and the goal. There was no other way but to endure what He was about to suffer. But His attitude changed. This is one reason we are told Jesus can identify with us as our High Priest, for He suffered and was tempted in all ways like us.

If we look at Jesus’ prayer before going to the cross, we see a wonderful example for our encouragement. He was alone. His closest friends did not take His foretelling of the coming suffering seriously, and when He invited them to pray with Him, they fell asleep. He woke them, but they fell asleep again. After His prayer time, He sat beside His disciples and said, “Take your rest now.” He then waited alone until His persecutors came to arrest Him before waking them again.

But I want to focus on His prayer as written in Matthew 26. Jesus prayed three times for deliverance. He began by pleading with our Heavenly Father to take the cup of suffering away. He ended by acknowledging the will of the Father as something to be obeyed over His own. In the next prayer, we see His words surrendering to that perfect will. The final prayer was an acknowledgment that He must endure this suffering, and His willingness to follow the plan that led to our redemption. Though He knew this ahead of time, He still had to struggle through His human emotions.

When Jesus said, “Not my will but yours,” an angel strengthened Him.[2] Though the temptation kept pounding at His will, Jesus looked to the will of the Father as the source of good and placed His hope in the Father’s plan.

This is how we also approach life. There is nothing wrong with asking God for a way of escape unless it is to request God follow our will instead of us following Him. Sometimes we must pass through the suffering for a greater good. And unlike Christ, we don’t have the foreknowledge to see the reason behind our trials. But this doesn’t change how we approach the pains of life.

Sometimes God delivers us, but other times God gives us strength from heaven to endure it. It is not until we look back that we can see the good God intended. Add to this, the Lord does not correct this fallen world before us simply because we become Christians and are no longer part of its ways. We still must endure what the world around us endures, but we show the hope beyond the suffering. We endure with joy, because unlike the unbeliever, we have a glimpse into eternity and know God’s goodness awaits. And we also know the promise if we suffer for His will, we shall also reign with Him.[3]

A negative person can’t see the strength of God offered from heaven because they are not looking at the Author and Finisher of our faith. They are looking at the world and cannot see the comforting hand of God. Nor can they see the joy set before them, which gives them the strength to endure. This is why the Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”[4]

Even though the one with the right attitude may have to endure suffering, they have eyes to see what the negative attitude cannot. In the midst of this fallen world is the goodness of God. The blessing can be obscured by the curse of a fallen world, but the one with the right attitude is looking for the blessing – and will always find it.

The blessing may be a way of escape. It might be strength to endure. It might be the hidden door of opportunity. It may also be the rewards of eternity. The right attitude is always rewarded. The right attitude also is always looking for good and finds it. Our positive attitude does not recreate reality, nor does it create what we desire. A positive attitude gives us eyes to look for the good – even among bad. It creates in our hearts the desire to find God’s blessing among the chaos and difficulties around us.

A good attitude doesn’t change our circumstances. It changes our focus. When we are looking for the good we know is out there, we will eventually find it. But a person who only looks at what is bad will be overwhelmed with the smorgasbord of bad all around them. The world is corrupted by sin and until God redeems all things, creation remains fallen and filled with troubles. But God will not allow us to be overcome by evil, so He has woven His good throughout a fallen world. But it is only found by those with eyes to see it.

Even an unbeliever can have a good attitude and look for good and the window of opportunity, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is God’s design. Or as Jesus stated, “Your Heavenly Father makes the sun rise on the just and unjust. He makes the rain to fall on the just and unjust.” In other words, good and bad are in this fallen world. Until we awake in eternity, we have to endure this world. Yet the goodness of the Lord can be found to any who will seek it.

What the pagan religions think they are creating with positive attitudes is actually the goodness of the Lord given to all. While they don’t have the promise of God’s inheritance, the goodness of God is seen by all – both the just and the unjust. Some blessings are only within God’s plan and provided to the Christian, but benevolent grace is given to all.

This especially applies to you. If you are cultivating a negative attitude, you will see the fallen world and the things that bother you. Suffering will be your housemate. But if you cultivate a good attitude, good will be found, even in the midst of hardship. Some think blessed people are a magnet for good, but the truth is blessed people are those who have cultivated the right heart and look for good.

A positive attitude must be cultivated. A cultivator uproots what is undesirable while nurturing what is good. A cultivated heart doesn’t just happen. It must be an intentional effort.

Life Applications

• Memorize Hebrews 12:1-3
• Memorize Romans 8:28
• Think about what is beyond your problems. Think about the promise of standing before the Lord. Think about the promise of bringing good into your life even in painful circumstances.
• When you feel frustrated or overwhelmed, stop and remember to look for good.
• When you get upset, ask yourself, “Am I reacting or responding?”
• In each situation ask, “Am I being controlled by circumstances, or am I exercising my God given right to control my responses to circumstances?”

Remind yourself you are not trying to be strong, but are yielding yourself to God’s purposes, knowing He will send strength from heaven. It is His strength which gives endurance, and it is His joy which becomes our strength.

[1] Hebrews 12:1

[2] Luke 22:43

[3] Romans 8:17, 2 Timothy 2:12

[4] Nehemiah 8:10