A. There’s a story told about a little boy and his sister who were riding a rocking horse together.
1. As you can imagine, it was a little crowded on that rocking horse with the two of them on it.
2. After a few minutes rocking like that, the little boy said, “If one of us would get off this rocking horse, there would be more room for me!”
3. That, my friends, is the way of selfishness – it is the way of the world – and it is the current focus of our “ME” generation.
4. But God calls us to choose a different way – a better way – actually a more excellent way – the way of love.
B. Today we are continuing in our “All You Need is Love” series, and we want to continue to learn how to make love a way of life.
1. Today we want to explore what it means that love is not selfish.
C. We turn again to 1 Corinthians 13 and Paul’s definition of love that we find there.
1. Verses 4 and 5 read: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
2. We have already explored a number of those characteristics of love, but today we want to focus on the one that says, “Love…is not self-seeking.” (NIV 1984)
3. Let’s look at how other translations render the verse:
a. “Love…does not demand its own way” (NLT).
b. “Love…does not insist on its own way” (ESV).
c. “Love…does not seek its own” (NASB).
d. “Love…is not selfish” (HCSB).
e. “Love…is not self-serving” (NET).
f. “Love isn’t always, ‘me first’ ” (The Message).
4. Let’s go back to our opening illustration with the rocking horse.
a. If a person has a love that is not selfish, self-seeking or self-serving, then rather than say, “If one of us would get off this rocking horse, there would be more room for me,” they would say, “let me get off this rocking horse so there will be more room for you.”
b. Can we all admit that putting others first does not come naturally?
D. If we are going to make progress in developing a love that is not selfish, we have to start with an honest assessment of ourselves.
1. It’s like the old saying you’ve probably heard many times before, “The first step to dealing with a problem is to admit you have the problem.”
2. So the first step in dealing with selfishness, so that we can have a love that is not selfish, is to admit that we are selfish.
3. The truth of the matter is that all of us are infected with the selfishness bug.
a. It is a malady that makes the Black Plague appear as mild as the common cold.
b. If you tally the death tolls of all infections, fevers, and epidemics since the beginning of time, you will still fall short of the number of fatalities, physical and spiritual, claimed by the single infirmity of selfishness.
c. So, in case you don’t know it, let me be the one to break the news to you, you are infected with selfishness, and so am I.
d. We all suffer from the disease and show the symptoms and signs of the disease.
e. Don’t believe me?
4. Consider this illustration – Suppose you are in a group photo.
a. The first time you see the picture, where do you look? You look at yourself, right?
b. And if you look good, do you like the picture? You better believe it!
c. If you are the only one who looks good, do you still like the picture?
d. If some are cross-eyed and others have spinach in their teeth, do you still like the picture?
e. If that makes you like the picture even more, then you’ve got a real bad case of selfishness.
E. Selfish, self-centered people see everything through self – they have a mini-me in their eye that stands before everything.
1. Like this humorous cartoon of the rhino painter. What does he paint into every painting? The horn on the end of his nose. He can’t see life without that horn being a part of it.
2. Similarly, we struggle to see life through anyone’s perspective but our own.
3. The motto of the self-centered person is: “It’s all about me!”
4. The flight schedule. The traffic. The dress styles or worship styles. The weather, the work, whether or not one works, everything is filtered through the mini-me in the eye.
F. Before we explore how to overcome selfishness, let’s spend a minute trying to understand where it comes from.
1. As is often the case with sin, Satan takes something that God has put in us for our good, and Satan twists it and uses it against us for our destruction.
2. So in the case of selfishness, there are at least two things that God has created us with that Satan has twisted.
G. The first is the desire to survive.
1. Self-preservation is one of the most fundamental and innate drives we have.
2. We all have an inborn instinct to preserve ourselves from danger, injury, or death and that, by necessity, makes us think of ourselves first and foremost.
3. This drive is so primal and powerful that there are few other desires in life that can supersede it.
4. Only a few others, like a mother’s desire to protect her children can overcome this will to survive.
5. Self-preservation is a good thing – without it we’d have a difficult time making it for very long.
6. The bad thing, though, is when this drive runs amuck and is twisted by Satan, and when that happens, our will to survive causes us to shove other aside in our battle to stay alive.
H. Many of us saw the blockbuster movie, “Titanic” that came out in 1997, but there is a 1958 black and white movie about the sinking of the Titanic called “A Night to Remember.”
1. The movie is a compelling psychological drama as you watch the characters evolve as it dawns on them more and more that the ship is actually going to sink.
2. At first, everyone seems relatively nice and civilized.
3. But as the ship sinks lower and lower in the water and hope begins to wane, some resort to stealing other’s life vests and to disguising themselves as women in order to get into a life boat (women and children first, right?).
4. Other people, on the other hand, do just he opposite.
5. As things get more desperate they turn nobler by giving up life vests, and by giving up their spot on the life boat, and they willfully stay behind with loved ones instead of saving themselves – how’s that for being unselfish!
I. So I’m trying to help us understand why we all struggle so much with selfishness.
1. And I’m saying that thinking about yourself and your own needs is not all bad because God has given us this instinct for survival.
2. What the Bible says is that it is not wrong to think of yourself and your needs and desires, but what is wrong is when that instinct runs away with us and all we think about is ourselves.
J. The second inborn desire that Satan steals and twists is our desire for significance.
1. We all have the desire to be valued and appreciated. We all want to be somebody, to make our mark by achieving and accomplishing significant things.
2. Without this desire there would not be many of our greatest accomplishments – no great art, or no architectural marvels, or no advances in medicine or technology – we might still be living in caves!
3. The Bible says that we are the highest point of God’s creation on earth.
a. God has crowned us with glory and honor (Ps. 8:3) and has put eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11).
b. This means that we are never going to be satisfied, but are always going to be striving for significance, because we are created in God’s image.
4. We are created to strive for eternal values and eternity, and nothing but the eternal God can satisfy us and this is a good thing – it calls us to our highest and our best.
5. But this desire can also run amuck, and suddenly we are consumed by our striving and everything becomes about us, and everyone and everything in the world are merely tools to help us achieve our significance.
K. So how can we learn to have a love that is not selfish?
1. How can we keep selfishness from ruining our lives and our relationships?
2. How can we keep these two instincts, the drive for survival and the drive for significance in proper perspective?
3. How can we hold them in check so they don’t cause us to push our friends and loved ones out of the lifeboat to save ourselves?
4. How can we hold them in check so we don’t sacrifice others on the altars of success and significance?
L. The answer I want to offer us to all those questions is this: We need to learn to imitate Jesus.
1. So if the first step in dealing with selfishness is admitting that we are selfish, then the second step is learning to imitate Jesus.
2. Let’s turn our attention to something that happened in Matthew 20 that brings to light our need to be like Jesus in humility and selflessness.
3. The Bible says: Now as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside and said to them, 18 “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death 19 and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!”
a. If you were one of the disciples with Jesus that day, what would you have been thinking?
b. Would you have been thinking, “Wow, what a selfless Teacher and Savior I have, I want to be just like Him?”
c. Or would you be thinking what a couple of the disciples were thinking?
4. The Bible says: Then the mother of Zebedee's sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. 21 “What is it you want?” he asked. She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.” 22 “You don't know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?” “We can,” they answered. 23 Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”
a. Can you imagine that?
b. For three years Jesus had lived with them and taught them and showed them about love.
c. Now Jesus had just reminded them that He was going to Jerusalem to offer Himself as a sacrifice for others, and here come two disciples with their mother to see about getting special positions for themselves! You talk about being self-centered!
d. How discouraging that must have been for Jesus!
5. The story continues: 24 When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers.
a. So, when the other ten heard about it, they were upset by what James and John had done.
b. They may partly have been upset because they hadn’t thought of it first!
6. So what did Jesus do? The Bible says: 25 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave-- 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
a. Real love and real greatness comes from loving others and putting them first.
b. That’s what Jesus did, right? He didn’t come to be served…it wasn’t all about Him…He was more interested in us, and what needed to be done for us.
c. A love that is not selfish is a love that focuses on serving those around us and putting their interests above our own.
d. That’s what Jesus did, and that’s why we need to learn to imitate Him.
M. This is exactly what Paul challenged the Philippians to do in the letter he wrote to them.
1. Let’s turn to Philippians chapter 2.
2. Now we know from studying this letter that there were some problems with selfishness and division in this church.
3. In chapter 2, Paul addressed the problem with these words: 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4 Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
a. At first glance, the standard in this passage seems impossible to meet.
b. Do Nothing? Was Paul saying that we shouldn’t do anything for ourselves?
c. But when we look more carefully, we realize that Paul is talking about a selfishness that is a self-preoccupation that hurts others.
d. It is an obsession with self that excludes others.
e. So we notice in verse 4, how he says do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.
f. Selfish ambition and vain conceit cause us to care only about ourselves.
g. But real love causes us to not only think of ourselves, but to think also of others, and to even put the needs and desires of others ahead of our own.
4. Next Paul points to Jesus as our example in this: 5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross!
a. Jesus knew who He was and He was secure in His value and position.
b. Therefore, He was able to humble Himself and take the place of a servant, and to take our punishment and suffering upon Himself.
c. Notice the language – Jesus willingly chose to “make himself nothing” and to “humble himself” – these are choices, these are acts of the will.
d. We can learn to make those same choices.
e. The verses that follow describe the reward Jesus received for His unselfish love.
f. God will also reward each one of us for our unselfish love.
N. So if we are going to have a love that is not selfish, then we are going to have to strive to imitate Jesus in His humble service and loving sacrifice for others.
1. We need to take our focus off our little selves and focus on our great Savior and make it our goal to be like Him!
O. Let me end with this story.
1. One Saturday morning, a mother was preparing pancakes for her two sons.
2. As the delicious smell of the pancakes cooking began to fill the kitchen the two hungry boys aged 5 and 7 began arguing over who was going to get the first pancake to come off the griddle.
3. Their mother, sensing an opportunity to teach a lesson said, “Boys, listen; if Jesus was here, Jesus would say, ‘Let my brother have the first pancake, I can wait.’ ”
4. Immediately, the older brother turned to the younger and said, “Okay, this time, I’ll let you be Jesus.”
P. When we have a love that is unselfish, we strive to be Jesus all the time.
1. Will you and I strive to allow God to cultivate in us a love like Jesus’ love – a love that is not selfish, or self-centered, or self-seeking, or demand its own way, or isn’t always, “me first”
2. How would your relationships be different…
a. If you were more other-centered?
b. If you served others and made sure their needs were met, rather than looking to be served and demanding that your needs be met?
3. May God help us as we work on being more like Jesus this week!
Resources:
A Love Worth Giving, by Max Lucado, Chapter 7 – “Getting the ‘I’ Out of Your Eye” Word 2002.
Love is Not Selfish, Sermon by Steve Jackson
Love is Not Selfish, http://onlyimagine.blogspot.com/2009/03/sermon-40-days-of-love-love-is-not.html
