Selfishness is Sin

He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40).

Agape Love

The kind of love spoken of here is not a feeling, it’s an act of the will. It is the willing of the highest good of God first and foremost, and the willing of the highest good of others equally with our own highest good.

Selfishness

Selfishness is putting our interests above God’s and others. It is putting ourselves first and foremost. It is dethroning God as King of our lives and placing ourselves on the throne of our heart.

If “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:10), and “sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4), then selfishness is the essence of sin. Sin is not missing the mark, sin is a wrong aim. It is aiming to please self rather than God. It is the root of evil.

Flesh, Sin, and Sins

The flesh is the tendencies toward selfishness, sin is the aim to serve self, and sins are the selfish actions that result from this wrong aim. They are selfish thoughts, words, and deeds.

Testimony of the Church

“Sin is due to the abuse, not use, of free will. The abuse of free will occurs when we put our egocentric interests above the common interests.” – Thomas C. Oden

“The root of all sin is selfishness, separating first from God and then from man.” – Andrew Murray

“We hold the essential principle of sin to be selfishness.” – A. H. Strong

“We have also seen, that all sin is selfishness.” – Charles Finney

Prayer Before Eating

“For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4-5).

We should pray before we eat a meal. God is our Provider, therefore everything we receive is a gift. We should therefore receive the gifts of God “with thanksgiving.”

Even Pigs Grunt

I heard a preacher once say that even pigs grunt before they eat. It is true, they do. How much more should we thank our Creator for His providence?

I will share my little prayer that I use before meals. But there are many other examples you can find online. Use whatever one stirs you to thanksgiving.

My Meal Prayer

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this food, blessed it and nourish it to my body, through Christ my Lord. Amen.

False Expectations About the Bible

John Chrysostom (around 387 CE) appears to be the first writer to use the word Bible to refer to the Old and New Testaments together. It later became a favorite destination for the collection of writings.

Since then a lot of false expectations have arisen about the Bible. Many have become stumbling blocks to people.

One of those false expectations is in treating the Bible as a history book, or a science book. The Bible is not a history book, it’s not a science book, it’s a book about the relationship between God and humankind.

Science and History

Now it is true, that the Bible does contain history and science. But that’s beside the point. The Bible is not a history book, and it is not a science book,. Therefore, the accuracy of its science and history is not that important.

A lot of ink has been spilled trying to defend the non-essential parts of the Bible. The Bible is filled with myth, metaphor and parables. This is how you use language to hint at what can’t be defined in literal language.

Essentials and Non-essentials

It takes a little bit of wisdom to understand the difference between what’s essential and what is non-essential when it deals with God. And unfortunately, in the modern age, people have mistakenly thought the non-essential was the important part.

In essentials, the Bible is true. In non-essentials, the Bible is fallible. The Bible is both human and divine. It is divine and true regarding God and our relationship to him. It is human and fallible regarding the world and our understanding of it.

A Relationship Book

The Bible is not written to tell us about the world, the Bible was written to tell us about people’s relationship with God. It documents how God dealt with humankind throughout the ages.

A lot of doubt has been created in the world, because of false expectations of the Bible. The Bible is a book that God inspired men to write down, not about science and history, but about their relationship with Him. That’s what the Bible is. It’s a relationship book.

Praying the Psalms

Lately I have been studying the prayer habits of the Christian community through the ages. One practice that has really blessed me is praying the Psalms.

I have taken the structure of Psalter in the Common Book of Prayer and modified it to meet my needs. I work a swing shift, so I am not able to do both in morning and evening Psalms reading. So I turned the one-month cycle into a two-month cycle, by assigning each division to a new day. So day 1 evening reading becomes day 2 morning reading.

The next thing I needed was to simplify the Liturgy of the Hours for morning prayer into seven sections: Opening Prayers, Prayer for Forgiveness, Apostles’ Creed, Psalms, Intercessions, Closing Prayers, and Lectio Divina.

This has been an evolution in my prayer life, helping me stay consistent, scriptural, and inspired. You can catch the devotion and love of the Psalmist as you turn their words into your prayers.

There are adjustments that one has to make. Some Psalms are very vengeful and ask God to destroy the enemies. Here we can recontextualize these towards evil spirits and the devil. We can also think of Israel as the chosen people, which we now are. So there are adjustments that can be made as we make these prayers our own.

What Do You Mean by God?

“Though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said” (Acts 17:27-28).

A. W. Tozer once wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” I believe that this is true. I think that most Christian’s God is too small.

God is not the Supreme Being

What do we mean when we use the word “God”? Many people envision God as a being like other beings, he just happens to be the Supreme Being. This makes God just one more thing among others, he just happens to be the biggest, strongest, and smartest.

But I don’t think God is the same order of reality as us. God is Wholly Other, completely different from anything we know.

In fact, God is so completely different that we speak most accurately about Him when we say what He is not. God is not a being, but the Ground of Being. For the Bible says, “In him we live and move and have our being.”

The Best Definition

David Bentley Hart gives the best definition of God.

God “is the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all could exist.”

Your God is Too Small

For most of my Christian life, my God was too small. David Bentley Hart was the one who opened my eyes to the reality of God, an Absolute Reality upon which our contingent reality rests.

God is Being Itself, the cosmos is becoming. There are two realities, the reality of Being and the reality of becoming. One is nothing but change, the other is changeless. One is Absolute, the other contingent.

Confused and Ignorant

Until we view God rightly, all else will be confused and dark. Language conceals as much as it reveals. Language merely points to a reality beyond words.

It is only when God becomes Wholly Other does Jesus become ever present. God reached out from the reality of Being and reached into the reality of becoming in order to reveal Him (John 1:18).