How to Overcome Selfishness and Conquer the Flesh // Eliminating Sin, Part 4

<p>Our self-life – self-indulgence, self-preservation, self-gratification – our self-life, as it turns out is a tyrant that robs us of real life. The life that Jesus has for us. And I believe that this selfishness, this craving of the flesh is something that Jesus came to set us free from.</p> <p> </p> <h3><span style="color: #ff9900;"><strong>OVERCOMING SELFISHNESS</strong></span></h3> <p>Selfishness is a word that we are all too familiar with but I wonder how often we stop to think about what it actually means!<br /> Self–ish-ness ... it’s about our tendency to put ourselves, our needs, our plans, our reputations before other people.</p> <p>Problem is, we notice when other people are being selfish to us – we notice when they put themselves and their own interests before ours but we rarely notice when the shoe is on the other foot. We rarely notice when it’s us who are being selfish. In fact, for most of my life, I never once thought of myself as being selfish when the reality was that ‘self’ was all I was interested in.</p> <p>How about you? How often do you think of yourself being selfish as opposed to other people being selfish towards you? That’s why selfishness is such an insidious sin. It rears its ugly head all too often without us ever really noticing that we are the ones being selfish. And this putting of self above and before other people – it takes so many different forms. Whenever my interests are more important to me than your interests, the easiest thing in the world is to put mine before yours and that ... that’s what we call selfishness.</p> <p>Over the last three weeks on the programme we have been chatting about overcoming stubborn sin and I know that there are a few people who might squirm at that little word <em>"sin"</em>. I used to too. I thought of it as an outdated, irrelevant, judgemental, religious term that, frankly, belonged in the lexicon of those doddering old folk I saw wandering in and out of those places they call <em>"church"</em>, and that ... that is a deception that the devil