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3 Ways to Live Like a Creator instead of a Victim

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The concepts in this post come from an amazing little book, The Power of TED: The Empowerment Dynamic by David Emerald. You can pick up your copy here. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last 12 months. I highly recommend it. (BTW, this is not an affiliate link. I receive no commission or any other benefit if you buy the book. But you’ll receive a huge benefit if you read it and incorporate these Kingdom of God principles into your daily life.)

I also want to give a shout out to my friend, Jane Abbate, who turned me on to this awesome little book. You can check out Jane’s excellent website at www.MessyMiracles.com (again, not an affiliate link).

No one wants to be a Victim. Yet so many of us live a victim lifestyle. We live at the mercy of our Persecutor, be it a person or a situation, and helplessly await our victorious Rescuer. Only the Rescuer never measures up to our expectations. The rescue comes with strings attached. Our Rescuer becomes our new Persecutor, and around the track we go again. Does this sound familiar? Have you been, or are you now, caught in this cycle?

The fascinating thing to me is that all three roles, Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim, are all driven by the same motivational engine. Fear.

  • Persecutors act the way they do out of fear of becoming Victims. They try to control the situation. If they make someone else the Victim, then they aren’t. The persecutor thinks of the Victim, “Oh, you poor, sad bugger!”
  • Rescuers also operate out of fear of becoming a Victim. They get their sense of well-being and purpose, not from the calling of God on their own lives, but from fixing Victims. You know you’re dealing with a Rescuer when they don’t want to help you fix the problem—they want to fix you. Rescuers think, “Oh, you poor thing! Bless your heart!”
  • Victims are afraid of everything and live in anxiety, reacting to one problem after another. Victims think, “Oh, poor me!”

The good news is there’s another way to live. God did not create us to be Victims. God is The Creator, and since we were made in his image (Genesis 1:26-27), we were made to be Creators. Creator is the opposite of Victim.

Stick with me here. This is not New Age “we are all gods” nonsense. But God gives us authority over our sphere of influence, especially our lives. That’s why we become what we behold, and what we focus on manifests in our lives.

That’s why Jesus said, after Peter’s confession of Christ, “… on this rock I will build my church.” (Matthew 16:18) The Greek word translated “church” is ecclesia. Since there weren’t any churches around yet, I always thought it was the Greek word for synagogue. But it’s not. Ecclesia actually is the ruling council of a Greek city-state. Jesus was really saying, “On this rock (Peter’s spoken confession), I will build my government.”

Our words, our confession of what we believe, have governmental authority over our lives. God created us this way in his own image as Creators with this authority. He built this principle into the fabric of the universe so we could bless each other (and our own lives). When we speak or focus our attention on something, good or bad, it dispatches spiritual forces to make it so.

What does living like a Creator instead of a Victim look like? The key is that, instead of fear, the Creator’s driven by a different motivational engine—Empowerment. Here are three very practical ways to live like a Creator instead of a Victim.

1) Creators focus on vision while Victims focus on problems. Victims don’t have vision. Reacting to problems is their whole life. Creators focus on the reality they want, and realistically assess the differences between that and their current reality.

2) Creators deal with Challengers, not Persecutors. Persecutors create problems the Victim waits to be rescued from. The responsibility lies with the Rescuer, not the powerless Victim. Creators, on the other hand, see problems, not as Persecutors, but as Challengers to their desired vision. Creators take responsibility for actively taking baby steps through the Challenge and toward their vision.

3) Creators work with Coaches, not Rescuers. Rescuers assume responsibility for fixing the Victim, and their help comes with strings attached. They often become the Victim’s new Persecutor. But although Coaches may offer advice to help fix a problem, both the Coach and the Creator understand the responsibility for fixing the problem rests with the Creator. Coaches allow Creators to freely accept or reject their advice, and Creators seek out this kind of healthy help.

But what about when bad things happen that are not our fault? What about things totally out of our control? What about crime? Mass shooting victims and their surviving families? What if your parents divorce? How about abuse?

We can be the victim of a crime, or of abuse, or anything else life dishes out, without getting sucked into the Victim lifestyle. That’s a choice we make. It’s all about what we choose to focus on. Do we focus on the problem, and live a Victim lifestyle careening from one reaction to the next? Or do we live a Creator lifestyle, focusing on the vision of the life we want, designing and actively taking baby steps to get there?

The choice is up to us.

How about you? Does this resonate? Which of these roles do you fill most of the time? What change are you going to make after reading this article? And please share on social media if you think this would bless someone else.

Changing the Unchangeable

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If we’re really made in God’s image (see Genesis 1:26-27), can we change the unchangeable? Is there any greater use of authority than changing the weather? Talk about something “bigger than us.” Could there be any greater miracle?

In a former life, I was doing sneaky government stuff, or more properly supporting sneaky government stuff as a contractor. In order for our mission to succeed, we needed (mostly) clear weather over a 30-day period, on the other side of the world, in a particular place where statistically there was never clear weather at this time of year. It wasn’t looking good for the mission.

So my friend Don P, who had a deep, intimate relationship with Jesus and was one of the Ops Directors, announced at the daily high-level senior staff meeting that we were going to pray for clear weather, and that he believed God was going to deliver. Talk about going out on a limb! He was politely mocked, especially by a peer, another Ops Director named Dave T, who was a devote atheist. Don P and Dave T had some very interesting late night conversations.

Don P and I and others had a prayer group that met at lunch. So we prayed for the weather during that 30-day period.

The next morning at the senior staff meeting, when the big-wigs got the briefing of the previous night’s results, they discovered the weather in that place on the other side of the world had been clear as a bell. “Ok, you got lucky once,” was Dave T’s dismissive response. We continued to pray.

After 8 days straight of perfectly clear weather (which was darn-near statistically impossible), Dave T’s response was a hilarious mixture, to us at least. It was, on the one hand, extreme joy that this unlikely mission was succeeding, but on the other hand, extreme annoyance that God seemed to have something to do with it. He’d come in, shake his head, smile, and just say, “Keep praying”!

Don P had the last laugh.

There were some cloudy days in that 30-day period. In the end, the mix of clouds and clear weather we experienced was exactly the reverse of the statistical prediction. The mission succeeded, and God got the glory, at least between one hard-core atheist and one intense Jesus-lover.

As God’s image-bearers, we can do stuff like this. It should be Christianity 101. And yet far too often we look to supernatural solutions as last resort. Asking for God’s intervention in the natural world, or using the authority he’s given us to command it ourselves, should be the norm.

Another time, closer to home, my brother was doing electrical work with his friend, another electrician named Harlan. I knew (and worked for) Harlan personally, and he really loved the Lord. Anyway they were working on a room addition on a friend’s house as a side job, so it had to get done on a Saturday. But this Saturday was particularly rainy, and you can’t do construction, much less electrical, in the rain, since the addition was just framed with no roof yet.

They prayed when they started in the morning. It rained all over the neighborhood, all around the house where they were working. It literally rained on the houses to each side, but not on their job site.

When they broke for lunch under the covered, back-yard porch, it started dumping. After lunch, while it was still raining on their jobsite, Harlan stood up and said, “Well, time to get back to work.” After he said that, the others watched in awe as a curtain of rain moved across the swimming pool and out of the yard. The jobsite had no rain once again. Harlan was not surprised.

Why do we doubt? Jesus did it when he calmed the storm (Matthew 8:23-27 and Mark 4:35-41). And he said we’d do greater things than he did (John 14:12). Personally, I’d like to try it! Would you?

Action Step: I will be sensitive to situations where the natural world, including the weather, needs to be dorked with. I will listen to the Holy Spirit with expectation and not doubt, and I will pray what and how he tells me, whether by petition or by command. Either way, I’ll expect to see God move, and be surprised if he doesn’t rather than if he does.

How about you? Have you seen something like this happen, where God changed the weather for you? Share your story in the comments. And please share on social media if you think this would bless someone else.

The Authority of Image-Bearers

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Recently my partner Ted and I learned something about the authority we have in Jesus as God’s image-bearers.

We were co-leading a Bible study for men (post-abortive recovery) at the crisis pregnancy center where we volunteer in Fredericksburg, VA. Ted was on a business trip in Boston. No biggie, we both have iPads, he could just FaceTime in. I’d set my iPad on a box in Ted’s chair, and it’d be just like he was in the room with us.

The night of the Bible study though, we discovered the wifi at Ted’s hotel was really bad. Not just sort of bad, like three-day-old-leftovers bad. But really bad, like rotten-eggs-sulphur-smell bad. We had been trying for like 10 minutes, but the connection was so sketchy it was dropping literally every 30-60 seconds. This was just not going to work, and it was completely out of our control. Or was it?

We prayed, “Lord, by the authority of the blood of Jesus, we take authority over the bandwidth of this connection, and we ask that you line up angels, wingtip to wingtip between Fredericksburg and Boston, and just shuttle the packets back and forth so we experience no more dropouts.” From that moment on, we had a two-hour connection without a single dropout.

When we finished, we thanked the Lord for protecting our connection, and prayed that he could release the angels now with our gratitude. Within 20 seconds we lost the connection.

Skeptics call that a coincidence. But when you see enough “coincidences” you start to believe. I’ve got a graduate-level degree in mathematics, and I know enough about network engineering to know that what we experienced that night was, without the intervention of God, something statisticians call “statistically impossible.” In other words, it takes a lot less faith to believe that God intervened supernaturally in that situation, because we asked him to, than to believe it was just a “coincidence.”

The point of this true story is that we, as God’s image-bearers, have authority over the natural world. We should use it. It’s who we really are.

Genesis 1:26-27 peeks in on God talking to himself as he made people:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

So often we just skip over that without thinking about what it really means. But it’s amazing! God created us in his image, his likeness, with his authority over the natural world. Yeah, we gave that authority over to the usurper, Satan, during the Fall in Genesis 3, but Jesus restored it through the cross. We have authority in his blood. Everything submits to his name.

Jesus clearly had authority over nature, calming the storm in Matthew 8:23-27 and Mark 4:35-41, and walking on the water in Matthew 14:22-33. But that was Jesus not us!

Oh yeah? Peter walked on the water, too. And c’mon, if big-mouth Peter could do it… Seriously.

Jesus himself said that we would do even greater things than he did (John 14:12). And the Bible says of itself that these things were written down as examples for us (1 Corinthians 10:11). Examples of what’s possible. Examples of what we should expect. Examples of what should be Normal Christian Life 101.

Action Step: I’ll be sensitive to when things in the natural world need changing, and realize I’m God’s agent of change in that situation. I’ll take authority by the blood of Jesus and command the change that needs to happen. I won’t let fear of it not working hold me back. That’s God’s problem.

How about you? Tell us your story in the comments. What have you seen happen? What prayers over the natural world have you seen God answer? And please share if this would bless someone else.