We are in a world that puts self before others. If you don’t believe me, what about when you’re going about your errands and the light turns green while you’re waiting in a line of cars, but a car has been waiting to pull into traffic, how many times are you letting them in knowing you may get honked at or you may miss the green light? So that’s not you, then how many times has it been you waiting to jump into traffic, and no one will let you in? Do either of these sides of the situation pose a place of selfishness of someone? There are so many situations throughout the day that reveal the selfishness of us or of others. Unfortunately, we are in a day and age where loving ourselves or pleasing ourselves is the top priority because we have succumbed to our own form of reasoning and developed our own set of rules for daily living. We have come to a place even in our walk that we won’t attend a church if it doesn’t fit a checklist of how we think it should look, operate, and so forth with a fictitious set of standards that have been founded by how one feels and thinks. This is a very unfortunate place of being especially when we were instructed to…“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second [is] like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” Matthew 22:37-39. We have managed to leave out God and our neighbors.
We are definitely in a time to heed to the Father’s still small voice (reference I Kings 19:10-12). It is a time for shifting, but God will not do it for us, we must do this, we must push regardless how difficult we find it. We must get up after we stumble, we must seek Him, we must become consistent regardless what comes, we must deny our flesh, decrease so He can increase (reference John 3:30). It is time for us to make sacrifices, and we thought we did before…whew. The problem of before and now after we have been selfish it will seem a bit more difficult because of the mindset we had and the actions of pleasing our flesh. It is a time of sacrificing our flesh and self so we can become selfless to think of others, but most of all to start thinking of the Father God, His ways, His desires and wanting the same things.
“For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded [is] death; but to be spiritually minded [is] life and peace. Because the carnal mind [is] enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” Romans 8:5-8.