BY JOYCE MEYER , CHRISTIAN POST GUEST COLUMNIST.
September
25, 2014|7:48
am One
of the greatest lessons I've learned is that you can't be both selfish and
happy. I know this is true through my own personal experience, but more
importantly, the Bible has some things to say about the attitude we should have
about "self."
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(Courtesy of Joyce Meyer Ministries)
For example, love is not selfish. In the Amplified Bible, 1 Corinthians
13:5 says, "…Love (God's love in us) does not insist on its own rights or its
own way, for it is not self-seeking...." In 1 Corinthians 15:31, the apostle
Paul said, "…I die daily [I face death every day and die to self]" (AMP), which
basically means he was not self-seeking but instead focused on doing what God
called him to do with his life.
There are also scriptures that teach us the importance of having
self-control. Galatians 5:23 lists self-control as a fruit of the Spirit, and 2
Timothy 1:7 says that in Christ, we have a spirit "of power and of love and of
calm and well-balancedmind and discipline and self-control." If you've lived
very long, you realize that not being selfish requires self-control, because
we're all born with a human nature that is selfish. Think about how babies act:
they are only concerned with what they need and usually cry when they don't get
their way. Thankfully, when we experience new life in Christ, we die to sin. Romans
6:11 (AMP) says, "Even so consider yourselves also dead to sin and your relation
to it broken, but alive to God [living in unbroken fellowship with Him] in
Christ Jesus." But even though we die to sin, sin does not die. That's why we
have to continually make the decision over and over again to choose to do the
right thing on purpose. And we have what it takes, in Christ, to do what's right
– whether we feel like it or not.
