December 28, 2020 – Click here to listen
Reading Andrew Carnegie’s, How to Win Friends and Influence People, will convince you that humans are obsessed with self. The book is awesome and was required reading for my executive team in most every company that I owned. It is useful in business because making customers happy is all about them and not you. Actually all of life in our society follows the same theme. It is a rare bird that desires to hear about you, they want to hear about themselves. Carnegie says let them talk and you listen.
Like most things in the world Satan has turned upside down what God desires in life. Famed intellectual and one time atheist C.S. Lewis wrote the following and it beautifully sums up the issue of self:
“The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false gods, became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death. But when it flies to and fro among the players too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance ‘makes heaven drowsy with the harmony’. All pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it.”
Did you catch the inference about Satan offering not just an apple, but a golden apple of self which causes discord? Worshipping oneself comes directly from below and many have fallen for it. We don’t exist for us is a strange concept to many. But just remember that God is the center of all creation and not us.
Do you bristle at that? Ask yourself where you were when God spoke the universe into existence? We were in the mind of God. We were created by Him – for Him. If the world would simply think of God first and others second, it would alleviate most of the problems of the world.
Recognize who you are and who God is. John the Baptist understood this concept and he eloquently but succinctly said it all.
John 3:30
He must increase; I must decrease. The One who comes from above is above all. The one who is from the earth belongs to the earth and speaks as one from the earth.