Beloved: grace, mercy and peace be yours from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. Welcome to another week of the month of September 2023. I pray that God will rid your heart of every wrong thing that is making your relationships sour and also hindering your experience of His goodness. Amen.
Now one of the things that often make it difficult for us to have sweet fellowship with the people in our lives is selfishness. What is selfishness? Selfishness is going for what we want without showing any concern for how it will affect others. In other words, you just want what you want and are not interested in who gets hurt or destroyed in the process.
Selfishness, then, is the foundation of all the evils being done in the world. It is the reason people steal, fornicate, rape, murder, do money rituals and so forth. They are just concerned about what they want for themselves. They don’t care about what they do to have it and how what they do to have it is going to affect others. They are selfish.
Selfishness, as I already pointed out, is also the reason people cannot get along in their marriages, neighbourhoods, workplaces and even Christian assemblies. All they think of is what they want and how to get it. They will not think of how what they want and the way they go about getting it will affect those with them or around them. So, they are going to meet with resistance, which sometimes may be violent or costly.
A number of years ago, I came home from work only to be greeted in my street with a very terrible and unbearable odour. “What happened here?” I asked my co-tenants. “Why is everywhere filled with this kind of evil odour?” And they told me that it was those in the house beside us that emptied their septic tank straight into our street.
But why did they do that? Did they think of the health implications of doing so to themselves and the neighbourhood as a whole? No! Did they consider the fact the odour that would come from doing so would drive everybody in the neighbourhood away from their houses? No! They just saw that their septic tank was full and needed to be emptied. So, they emptied it into the street. And that, of course, made some neighbours call on some government health workers to visit them and give them appropriate punishment.
What is my point? It is that selfishness will make life difficult for you and those around you. This is why the word of God says to us, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.” (Phil 2:3-4NIV) Did you see that? If we want peace in our homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces and churches, each of us must not just be concerned about want we want for ourselves but also about what others want for themselves.
See, when we are not just concerned about ourselves but also about others, we will demonstrate caution and understanding in our dealings with them. So, we will not take steps that will destroy them in our attempt to satisfy ourselves or become bitter against them, if they have to say ‘No’ to certain requests we are making of them. But if we are taking steps that are ruining other people’s lives or joy because we want to please ourselves or if we are making enemies of others because they will not say ‘Yes’ to certain requests (and not rights) of ours, we are walking in selfishness. And regardless of how high we rise in life, sorrow and pains will never be far from our lives.
So, watch your life for every form of selfishness and make sure you deal with it with the word of God and by the power of the Spirit of God. And may God strengthen you to do so. Amen.
Have a great week.
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