Dealing with Selfishness

Your question has to do with selfishness. How do you get rid of it?

It is important to put selfishness into the proper category. It is sin. It is idolatry. It is usurping God’s place in your life in order to be the center of your life yourself. It’s not a good thing. I know you know this already, but I thought I might need to reiterate it here just so we don’t get off to the wrong start.

The Bible says there are lots of things that accompany selfishness that sometimes hides or masks selfishness. For example Galatians 5:19ff lists several sins that, when you think about what they actually are, are all selfishness in different areas of life: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. These are all sins that say, “I want what I want and I’m not waiting until God gives what is best to me. I want it my way, right now.”

What to do, if you recognize yourself in this list? You need to confess your sin to God and to anyone you’ve sinned against. Confess means to “say the same thing.” So, to confess sin means to say the same thing about the sin that God says about the sin. If you lust after something that has not been given to you, you confess to God that you’ve desired something (name the specific thing) that God has not given to you. You should also confess the sin of lack of trust. In lusting after something that is not yours (coveted), you have not trusted that God will give it to you when it your time to have it, or you have not trusted God to give you what you need when you need it. Not trusting God is sin because it is not of faith.

Confession needs to be specific. If you got angry about something, confess it and all the accompanying sins (bitterness, envy, idolatry, anger, evil thoughts, words, kicks, etc.). If there are a long list of sins since the last time you confessed, just sit down somewhere and list them out until you can’t remember any more. Remember this is about relationship with God, not some sort of mechanical exercise. When you have confessed all your sin, God will let you know. Remember he wants to be in fellowship with you a whole lot more than you do with him (he sent his son to die so that you could have fellowship with him).

Once you have confessed all your sin you are “right with God.” This means that your relationship with God has been restored (cf. Is. 59:1, 2; 1 Jn. 1:9). You are holy and justified, and righteous before God and man. The fruit of the spirit should be present in your life and you should react with great rejoicing. If you don’t feel it, do it anyway.

A lot of humility is required to confess sin to God and to men. This is especially true if the sin is pride. You have to realize that you are not “all that” and admit that you’ve jerked God’s authority out of his hands and taken it upon yourself and you are not all that good at it and want to give it back. You have to acknowledge that God is God and you are not and that you were sinful to pretend that you were god. This acknowledgement is what the Bible means by “poor in spirit” (Mt. 5:3). If you want to serve God, bless God, be loved by God, be comforted, you need to humble yourself and place your trust for these things in his hands.

This emptying of yourself puts you in a position where God can lift you up. And he wants to lift you up. But it will be his doing, not yours.

Now that that is over you need to know that you are righteous and holy (by grace) and are now in a position to do what God wants you to do (in the power of the Spirit). So, now comes the other side of discipline: the first side is the side that tells you that you are not walking with God and are in danger of Hell-fire. This lack of joy is what God uses to bring his wayward children back in line (one of the ways he spanks his children). The side of discipline you’re on now is the side where you are taken from where you are to where you might be. Discipline trains you to walk with God consistently. It is walking with God consistently.

Life in Christ is about Christ. There is no room for thinking you are hot stuff. Jesus is hot stuff. There is no room for boasting in yourself or what you can do or think (Eph 2:9). But there is boasting (Jas. 1:9) it is just in the Lord, not in ourselves (1Cor. 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17ff).

So, the goal here is to get yourself out of the way and let Christ assume the center instead. And this takes discipline. Paul says, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:24-27).

What he is talking about is leading others to the Lord, but the way he does it is by being what he is preaching—Christ crucified, and risen (cf. Phil. 3:13-17). The Gospel lived out is our goal. It is what makes a Christian a successful Christian. Walking with God, in fellowship, is the goal and so Paul worked hard at it.

The way this works out practically is a matter of Holy Spirit led and empowered obedience, self control, and discipline. “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions” (Romans 6:11-12). “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). “But that is not the way you learned Christ! assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:20-24).

This is not simply an act of the will. Sometimes you will need to change things you do. For example Paul tells Timoth to flee the lusts of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace (2 Tim. 2:22). This means that sometimes you will need to run the other way, hiding, not going there (wherever “there” is). If a guy has trouble with alcohol, he should avoid going in to bars. And he might need to change his whole life in order to walk with God. If all his friends hang out in bars, but he can’t avoid drinking when he goes into a bar, he needs to change who he hangs out with.

It not only means running away from sin, but you should also run to God and the things of God and the people of God. Christians who want to walk with God have to make some serious and hard decisions. Life requires that paradigms need to change. Everything needs to change. This is why Jesus said “he who does not take up his cross and follow me, is not worthy of me” (Mt. 10:38) and “if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, pick up his cross and follow me (Mt. 16:24). It is a life and death thing. It is something that requires a total change in thinking, feeling, and living.

And it is not just a one time thing. It is something that the follower of Christ needs to decide to do every day, every hour, every minute.

You need to keep in mind too, that people are sinners by nature. This means that though we are right with God, we have the seeds of sin in us that constantly seek to drag us back into our former lives. That’s why the Bible calls it discipline and all the commands regarding our fight with sin are in the active voice: keep on denying, keep on crucifying, keep on reckoning, etc.

One final thing: James tells us to consider it all joy when we face various trials (testings, temptations). He goes on to tell his readers that the testing of our faith produces steadfastness and that steadfastness, when steadfastness has done its thing we will be perfect and complete, not a lacking anything (Jas 1:2-5). This means that we are to regard our temptations as tests that when we handle them properly will produce godliness in us. The tests are temptations that tempt us to leave the God who saved us. When we handle temptation correctly (cf. Jesus and his temptations in the desert), God works godliness into us—we become like Christ. Because of the results of walking with God we are to see our temptations as opportunities to serve the living God and because of this we are to look forward to them with great (all) joy.

I hope this helps,