Week 18 Sunday
Week 18 Sunday
Another Road with a Dead End—Self-centeredness
Luke 9:46-48
We come now to another road with a dead end—self-centeredness. It is a way that is not-the-way. Paul, describing a self-centered life and its results, ends by asking this question, “Well, what did you gain then by it all? Nothing but what you are now ashamed of!” (Rom. 6:21 Moffatt). The end was zero. That is the inevitable end of a self-centered life—nothing. No matter what the outer shell of life may contain in the way of prosperity or fame, the soul is dead; it died of being off center.
Our civilization teaches self-interest as the primary driving motive, “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” But when you do that, the devil not only takes the hindmost but takes us all, and especially the one who takes that attitude. And takes that one first of all. For the self-centered are the self-disrupted. They are making themselves God, and they are not God, so the universe won’t back their way of life.
Jesus penetratingly said, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it” (Luke 9:24 Moffatt). He doesn’t actually save it; he wants to save it. But it goes to pieces; he loses it. Why? The sum total of reality decrees it. Life will not back it.
First, it is unnatural. The idea that life is made up of one driving urge, the self-regarding urge, is a false view of human nature. There is not one urge in human nature, but three great urges: self, sex, and the herd (or gregarious) urge. The self urge is obviously self-regarding; the herd urge is other-regarding; the sex urge is partly self-regarding and partly other-regarding. There are just two dominant urges in human nature: the self-regarding and the other-regarding, the egoistic and the altruistic. Suppose you organize life around the self-regarding urge; then that leaves the other-regarding urge unfulfilled and frustrated. Therefore the self-centered person is at war within, waging a personal civil war. The self-centered are the unhappy, the frustrated. I have never seen a happy self-centered person. They do as they like, and then they don’t like what they do. They express themselves, and the self they express sours. That is not-the-way.
O Christ, you have come to deliver us from the dominance of ourselves. You have come to free us to be natural. Save me from myself and from the futilities of a self-centered life. I know this—experience tells me so—but give me power. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: ‘‘To please and serve you is my joy, thy law lies deep within my heart” (Ps. 40:8 Moffatt).
Week 18 Monday
A Self You Cannot Live With
Luke 9:23-25
Self-centeredness produces a self you cannot live with. If you won’t live according to God’s way, you can’t live with yourself.
I once saw a cartoon of a very sick-looking world with a doctor holding its pulse. He shakes his head and says, “You are in a bad way; you are allergic to yourself.” If you make self-centeredness your driving urge, it will drive you into conflict with yourself, will drive you into complexes; you will be allergic to yourself.
An intelligent young woman said to me in alarm, “I’ve tried to charm people, using any means to win them. Now they’ve found me out. I’ve lost all my friends. Even my little boy has found me out. I’m losing him. What shall I do?” She wanted some magic medicine by which she could be saved from the results of her self-centered life. There was only one thing she could do to save herself from the fruit of her life, and that was to cut the root—herself.
Another woman said, “I’ve been self-centered all my life, and I’ve been able to get away with it. Now it has caught up with me, and I’m empty, incapable before a real task.” Yes, you can get away with it for a while, but sooner or later that which is whispered in the ear is proclaimed from the housetops. A self-centered life turns out empty; everybody sees it.
A prominent man with an oversized ego, whose great powers were canceled out by his egoism, asked me to speak in public on his behalf so that the community would recognize and use him. I couldn’t. For the thing that was canceling out his usefulness was himself.
There was a young lady of Guelph,
Who was wholly wrapped up in herself;
It would have been kinder,
To try to unwind her,
But they left her in knots on the shelf.*
Life will leave you “on the shelf,” will refuse to use you, if you are wrapped up in yourself. If you think of others, then others will think of you. But if you think of yourself, then others won’t, except to despise you or leave you alone.
O Christ, when life is centered in you, it is fruitful; when it is centered in me, it is frustrated. So I shift the center, by surrender, from myself to you. And I do it now. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39).
*As quoted in a Harold Blake Walker column in the Chicago Tribune (June 21, 1964).
Week 18 Tuesday
Self-renunciation in Order to Find Self-realization
Matthew 5:3; 18:1-5
Self-centeredness produces disease. Much of this disease is functional in the beginning, but it often passes into structural.
All life is made on the principle that it must think in terms beyond itself if it is to be healthy. This is true of the basis of life, the cell. We are told that all cells, when they begin their existence, are capable of being the whole. But they renounce being the whole and surrender themselves to be a differentiated portion of the whole, in order to serve the whole. In that renunciation, they are realized. They lose their lives to find them again. But if they should refuse that renunciation to serve the whole and try to be the whole, try to make the rest serve them, what is the result? A cancer. A cancer is a group of unsurrendered cells trying to be the whole, making the rest serve them. It is a group of cells turned self-centered and selfish. The cancer eats its way to its own death and to the death of the organism upon which it feeds. It has broken the law of being, and death results.
Every organ looks to something beyond itself, to the service of the whole, and thus finds itself. If you think about your voice while speaking, your voice will work badly, will probably go back on you. Those who know say that you must project your voice about two feet beyond your eyes. May I, who have had no voice trouble through years of speaking, suggest that it must go farther than two feet? You must think of getting a message to an audience and forget all about the voice. Then the voice is realized.
Just now, as I write on a train, a man sighed and said, “I’ll be glad when I get back home.” His wife replied, “You make yourself tired by worrying about yourself.” His self was the center of his world, and it was a tired self, tired of itself.
“You know, I’m very sensitive,” said a patient to a psychiatrist. “Yes,” he replied, “you are very selfish.” “But I didn’t say ‘selfish,’ ” said the woman. “I did,” replied the doctor. She went away angry, but came back in ten days, chastened, and confessed it was true. That was the basis of her illness.
O Christ, you have fashioned me in my inner depths for the health of your self-giving. I am sick when I break that law. Help me now to become well by thinking of you and others. Then life shall blossom and bloom where now it withers and dies. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Self-realization comes through self-renunciation.
Week 18 Wednesday
Creating Illnesses
Psalm 106:15; Proverbs 3:7-8; Isaiah 33:24
We must continue our study of how self-centered living creates illness in mind and body.
A brilliant woman, released from alcoholism, said, “Before, I was always striving to be happy and was, therefore, unhappy most of the time. Now I am not dwelling on anything. Then, if I was not happy, I would dwell on that, resenting it and saying, ‘Poor me!’ Now I am not unhappy about being unhappy.” She was well.
A mother dominates her daughter. The daughter had a good year away from home, teaching. The mother, to get her back home, developed an illness. The daughter came back home with nothing to do but to serve a mother who was ill because of self-centeredness, and she herself became frustrated and ill—a vicious circle. The center and spring of that household mess was the mother’s self-centered illness.
Another case: A mother develops asthma to get her children back home to attend to her. They stand around her bed and fuss over her, and that is what she wants. She is willing to make herself sick to have her way and gain attention.
Whenever there is a family gathering, an aunt always comes, but always comes ill. The family fusses around her and gives her sympathy, and that is what she wants. When mealtime comes, she always eats, and heartily—in bed where they can attend to her.
All of these people are trying to take a strategy of life that is not-the-way. The Man who was the most healthy person that ever lived on our planet, a Man who radiated health—only to touch him was to be well—lived beyond himself for others, always. He was never ill, for he lived the Way. Our not-the-way ways produce disruption and disease.
Luther says, “ ‘No tree bears fruit for its own use. . . . In God’s will everything gives itself.’ Only Satan and men under his influence seek their own.”* Note, “Everything in God’s will gives itself,” and thus fulfills not only the will of God but the law of its own being. The outgoing, the unselfish, are rhythmical and harmonious; the incoming, the selfish, are discordant and inharmonious. They are ill.
O Christ, I see I am made for your way of outgoing love. I have asked to be loved and in that asking have received nothing but ashes. Help me to be loving, outgoing, thinking of you and others, and then life shall catch its freshness and its flavor. I know this. Help me to do it. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am off center when I am self-centered. I am on center when I am Christ-centered.
*Quoted from T. A. Hegre, The Cross and Sanctification (Bloomington, Minn: Bethany House Publishing, 1960) at http://earthenvessels-donbiro.blogspot.com/2007/12/cross-its-implications-for-others.html.
Week 18 Thursday
The Three Stages of Life
Hebrews 5:11-14
The stages of life through which we pass to maturity are dependence, childhood; independence, adolescence; interdependence, maturity.
The first stage, dependence, the childhood stage, is a necessary stage, in which the child is the recipient of the experience of the past and takes what is passed on. That is the stage of receptivity; and Jesus said that if you do not become as a little child, become receptive, you cannot enter the kingdom of God. The first lesson of the child is receptively to obey.
Then comes that difficult second stage, difficult for the parent and the child, the stage of independence: adolescence. The child, now growing up, wants sufficient room to develop, to be a person in his or her own right, to express personality, to make his or her own mistakes, and to suffer the consequences or reap the rewards. Sometimes the parents want to retain a repressive-band of authority, and the child gets rebellious. Sometimes the child runs menially amuck and wants to obey no one but self. Someone has defined adolescence as “a period of temporary insanity.” I quoted that at a meeting, and a mother came up and said, “That was the most hopeful thing you said. I thought it was permanent!” She had been dealing with an adolescent boy, and knew!
But after independence is gained, one finds that independence isn’t what it is cracked up to be. You long to be interdependent, to relate yourself helpfully to other people, to establish right relationships. This is maturity. In maturity you lose your life to find it again.
Some people never become mature. They are always adolescent, always insisting on their rights, their places, their selves at the center of the picture. They may be sixteen or sixty, but they have never grown up. They are immature. A judge who dealt with family relations in his court said that the greatest cause of divorce is “emotional adolescence”—people who never grew up emotionally. They never knew the joy of surrendering to something beyond themselves, of saving life by losing it.
O Christ, you have shown me how to live. Help me to live your way, so that I may truly live. I would abound and not drag leaden feet to dead tasks. I would know what it is to be purged of all self-centeredness and to be free to give myself to others—a heart leisured. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I grow up only as I go up—to Calvary. I die to live.
Week 18 Friday
Steps Out of Self-centeredness
2 Chronicles 7:14; 26:16
We now give a ladder leading from a self-centered life to a life released from oneself:
(1) Don’t act as though you have no love for yourself. You do. You are bound to. The Way teaches that you are to love yourself, “You must love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Matt. 22:39). A healthy self-love is legitimate and right. If you try to act as though you have no love of yourself, then self-love will dress itself up in other guises and come back again. Love yourself, healthily.
(2) To love yourself healthily, you must lose yourself. To be truly selfish, you must be unselfish. For the self is realized only as it is unselfish. The happiest people are the people who deliberately take on themselves trouble for other people. Their hearts sing.
On the Titanic, an author had a manuscript upon which he had been working for many years. When he plunged into the sea, he held to one precious thing, his manuscript. He saw a child in the water—the manuscript or the child? He dropped the manuscript and swam to the child. It was dead. He found another child, alive, held it up, and tried to get into a lifeboat, but the boat was too full. He grasped a nail on the side of the lifeboat. It pierced his hand, and there he hung by that nail. But he had saved the child. The manuscript was lost, but his soul was saved. And the story of what he did is more deathless than his manuscript could ever have been. He lost himself and found himself forever. Had he not done it, he couldn’t have lived with himself.
(3) The only way to be able to live with yourself is to love others. As you love others, you will have a self you can live with. Frank Laubach, lonely and a failure, went out to Sunset Hill and talked with himself, “You have been too much concerned with yourself. You have been thinking too much of yourself. You have been working for people, not with them.”* He lost himself by surrender and was transformed. If you love your neighbor as you love yourself, you can get along with your neighbor and you can get along with yourself. Interesting people are people who are interested. Bores are people who are bored.
O Christ, I thank you for your interest in everybody and everything. Break these bonds of self-centered interest that choke my soul and my mind and my body. Give me freedom to love widely and deeply. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I can have a self that is lovable only as I love something more than myself—God.
*Frank Laubach (1884–1970) was a Congregational missionary and mystic. Published source for the quotation is unknown.
Week 18 Saturday
The Significance of the Cause
Matthew 5:10; 10:19-20
We continue our ladder out of a self-centered life:
(4) Deliberately surrender yourself to the highest—the kingdom of God. “Seek first his kingdom, . . . and all these things shall be yours as well.” “All these things,” including yourself. When you deliberately surrender yourself to the kingdom, then the self falls into the right place, subordinate. Then it can be loved.
(5) You now take on the importance of the cause with which you are identified. You are identified with the Cause of causes—the kingdom—so you are really important in its importance. The best introduction I have ever received was given by an African American minister who introduced me to a mixed-race audience in these words, “I will introduce the speaker by quoting from one of his books: ‘The significance of Mahatma Gandhi is not in the person, but in the cause with which he is identified—the cause of India’s freedom.’ The significance of the speaker is not in himself, but in the cause with which he is identified—the kingdom of God.” The perfect introduction. One could speak after that, for supreme values were supreme. When you are identified with the kingdom, then when you speak the kingdom speaks, when you act the kingdom acts.
But if you are self-centered, you are unimportant, for you are identified with nothing important, no matter how importantly you may act. “He looked importantly about him, and the world passed by without him.” It always passes by the self-centered.
(6) Deliberately take on yourself obligations and interests that will make you forget yourself. A businessman retired at sixty because his family thought that he would kill himself if he kept up the pace. Three weeks after he retired, he had a nervous breakdown. A rest cure gave no relief. A doctor found that in his early days the man had been interested in juvenile delinquency. He himself had narrowly escaped going to a reformatory as a delinquent. He decided to give himself to delinquents, snapped out of his nervous condition, and has never had a relapse. He forgot himself and became important in the importance of his task.
O living Christ, so tremendous in yourself and so tremendous in your impact on others, because so identified with the kingdom, help me this day to be great only in the greatness of the kingdom and to be significant only in the kingdom’s significance. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The kingdom of God is significance; all else is insignificance.