By
Leeann Wilhelmi
Recently I read a story about a young policeman in New York City’s Time Square who encountered an older homeless man without shoes on a cold night. He spoke with the man and found out his shoe size and went immediately to buy the man a warm pair of boots. He spent his own money and knelt to help the man put his boots on and lace them up, caring not one bit that he was being inconvenienced and out some significant pocket money to help someone he didn’t even know. What a selfless act.
The selfish nature is blinding. It overlooks the needs and desires of others to fulfill its own. It can take any conversation and derail it to bring it back to self. It cares nothing about understanding others or serving others, much less how their actions affect others.
In the world right now, the enemy is on a rampage to convince Christians of their righteousness, of their importance and it has unfortunately resulted in many being seduced into selfish behavior. This selfishness has strained the seams of friendship, of marriage, of relationships in general and has detrimentally affected physical and mental health.
Through many years of observation, we’ve noticed one trait about selfless people and that is their sense of gratitude, as well as their genuine concern for others. It has been eye opening to see these very aware souls choose to promote rather than tear down those that others would perceive to be troublemakers. Because of this act alone, we’ve seen a dramatic change of behavior manifest in the lives of those “troublemakers”. We’ve seen people come to know the Lord through this act of lifting up rather than tearing down. These servant-minded disciples are the best leadership has to offer.
Recently one of our favorite restaurants went through a big change. The excellent management staff was not chosen to take the location forward, (motivated by cutting costs through hiring new workers for much less money), and those who weren’t demoted quit in favor of going to work at businesses where they were appreciated. Consequently, everything from the service to the quality of food has suffered. Greed, a byproduct of selfishness, crippled a business.
So, what is the answer to this pervasive attitude? What’s to be done with these feelings that cause us to cave to what serves us? Philippians 2:3-4 tells us that we are to “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of others.” In short, selfishness is sin. And sin separates us from God.
The thing is, selfishness can start out quite innocently. James 1:14-15 says that it can start out as simply as having a desire, but that desire can conceive and give birth to sin. What does that even mean? I recently saw a vision of wealth parading in front of a young man. She was enticing, misrepresenting her true identity and full of tricks to lure him away from his first love. You don’t have to look far to see that wealth makes promises it cannot keep. Happiness and ease are two such promises. This could be what 1 John 2:16 means by lust. We see what someone else has. Then we want it. In the case of money, we ”see” that someone we know has an easier life and make an assumption that there is no struggle involved because they have “enough” money. We assume that they are happy because they purchase what they want without checking their account balance first.
So how do we die to self? It might be helpful to examine some of the self words that have crept into our vocabulary. Self-confident. Self-satisfied. Self-centered. Self-absorbed. Self-righteous. Self-important. Self-sufficient. Self-promotion. It is a mindset that we don’t need others, and the principle “other” is God. It’s alarming to see how self-promotion has taken such a prominent position in the Church and is widely accepted. The reasoning used is that the flood of advertisements on social media, the vlogs and blogs and so on is that it helps reach more people for the cause of Christ. It’s amazing that the Church multiplied at all in the first century without social media! I digress. We die to self by not trying to impress others, by adopting humility, by being obedient to God, by serving others and considering others more important than ourselves.
A big buzzword in today’s world is “branding”. This branding speaks of a person’s public image, of their reputation or identity that markets them to the world. Who’s branding you?