The Daily Word

Daily, we see selfishness demonstrated in many ways, acts, and even words. To me this characteristic has become the keyword of current life and maybe this current generation. Many people donate to charities and perhaps consider that this constitutes all they need to do to demonstrate unselfishness. As Christians, we must look much wider than this.

Our example is Jesus and our Christian life characteristics should mirror His. As we read through the Gospels and the story of His life on earth, His absolute concern was care for others which culminated in Him giving His life upon the cross so that every human could benefit by obtaining salvation from sin by His sacrifice.

We have recently been considering how that love for others should absolutely characterise us, and we have recently also remembered the sacrifice of so many of our soldiers and civilians who have been killed in wars, and as the words repeated every year say, “they gave their tomorrow for our today”.

In Romans 12, the next exhortation about our relationship with others, in many ways goes beyond love because it says, “Honour one another above yourself”. This basically eliminates any form of selfishness. The exhortation means that we should consider every other person’s welfare above our own, particularly our fellow church members. It means not seeking to impose our will and what we want on others. These are very contrary to our natural tendencies and certainly at odds with the way that society behaves today. So like all the exhortations found in Romans 12, we can only fulfil this by the help of God’s Holy Spirit. And, the challenge to ‘prefer one another’, as the King James Version puts it, will crop up many times during a day, so we need to make this a habit and that can only come with a very close relationship with our Saviour.

So the next time we are faced with a decision as to what we want against what someone else wants, providing there is no sin involved in either case, we need to consider very carefully our motive for our decision: does what we want bring benefit to them and others or is it just because we want it our own way?

Article written by Brian Preston, Elder @SFGH Church