November 02, 2020: "Self" Is the Greatest Curse, In Relationship to God, Our Family and Our Friends.

There is so much wrong in our world today. Almost everywhere we turn to, we see so much anger, fighting in the streets, and sometimes killings. Our current generation compared to our generation from the 1980's, has become a generation so full of "self".

Our "self-will" has over-taken today's society even in our Christian circles. My daughter who works at serving people at a restaurant came home yesterday and told me of a woman she knows that goes to our church that was very rude and self-demanding with her order. She didn't recognize my daughter, but that should not have mattered.

We as Christians, should always be aware that we are being watched by others, but especially by our God. How we act and behave, especially as Christians, gives our God a bad name and reputation. We as Christians must portray the "Light of Jesus" in our lives. As stated by Andrew Murray in his book, "Absolute Surrender", "Christ came to redeem us from self".

He further states in his book: "We sometimes talk about deliverance from the "self-life"- and thank God for every word that can be said about it to help us - but I am afraid some people think deliverance from the self-life means that now they are going to have no longer any trouble in serving God; and they forget that deliverance from self-life means to be a vessel overflowing with love to everybody all the day.

And there you have the reason why many people pray for the power of the Holy Spirit, and they get something, but oh, so little! because they prayed for the power for work, and power for blessing, but they have not prayed for power for full deliverance from "self". That means not only the righteous self in intercourse with God, but the unloving self in intercourse with men. And there is deliverance."

Romans 5: 5

5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

PERSONNAL COMMENT:

I am sad to say, we all fail in this area of our lives, including myself. We find ourselves getting upset with situations that we can't control and we, "our self-life" quickly steps in to demand our rights in the way we want to be treated. We have failed to learn to believe and accept the truth that the Holy Spirit can pour God's love into our hearts. And the only way this can be done, is by emptying our "self-life", and come to absolute surrender of self, so that God's love can fill us, not our selfishness of what we think we deserve.