Selfishness Vs Selflessness
Selfishness devastates relationships. It causes conflict, arguments, divorce, and war.
Selflessness strengthens our connection with others and God.
James 4:1-3 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
In our relationships it’s very easy for selfishness to enter in over time. When a relationship starts, we tend to make real efforts at being giving and humble, but over time, selfishness sems to take root. How can we practice steps to selflessness?
In what areas do you usually put yourself before others?
Philippians 2:3-4 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
If putting yourself first demolishes relationships, then the opposite is true. Selflessness builds trust in our relationships.
Galatians 6:7-8 Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God!—harvests a crop of weeds. All he’ll have to show for his life is weeds! But the one who plants in response to God, letting God’s Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life.
What we sow, we’re going to reap. How does harvesting a crop of weeds benefit anyone? When we sow selflessness, we reap God’s blessing which includes eternal life. All we have comes from God’s selflessness towards us so let’s give away those same blessings that God so lavishly gives us.
What is the Holy Spirit saying to you through these scriptures?
