Selfishness

Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 118

Transcript

 Why do most people get married? Many times, it is so that we will have someone to share this life with, someone who will make us happy. But there is one thing that will keep you from experiencing harmony in your marriage and in your relationships. In this podcast we are going to look at how selfishness is an enemy of good relationships.

I’m Lee Whitman with Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you into this Hope Healing and Freedom Podcast. In last week’s podcast we looked at the difference between a contract relationship and a covenant relationship. If you have not heard last week’s podcast I encourage you to listen to it. This week is a continuation of last week’s podcast.

Let’s move on to the second part of why marriages struggle to stay together. The number one problem affecting marriages is selfishness. All of the other problems that commonly affect marriage: finances, sexual problems, poor communication, the in-laws, etc.–have their roots in selfishness.

Get hold of this next statement. Your marriage is more about your relationship with God than it is about your personal happiness. Gods goal for your marriage is your personal holiness, not necessarily your happiness. He is going to use your marriage to form you more and more into the image of Christ. We mistakenly think God gave us marriage to make us happy. Wrong. God is going to use your marriage to kill you! Yes, you heard me correctly. He is using your marriage to kill you. Let me explain.

The root of selfishness was sown into mankind in the garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they went from being totally dependent on God for every need they had in life, to becoming independent of God. As humans, we like being independent. We say that independence is a good thing. We even sing songs to the glory of our independence like “I did it my way!”

The problem with independence is that we are created by God to be dependent beings. Since we were created to be dependent beings, and if we are no longer dependent on God as He intended, then the only one left for us to be dependent on is ourselves. We become self-dependent and try our best to be self-sufficient. Self, you, are then responsible for getting all of your needs met and for solving all of life’s problems. 

The Bible uses the word “flesh” to describe when “self” is responsible for meeting your needs. Flesh in this meaning, is anything we do to get our needs met outside of our relationship with Christ. The flesh are those patterns and methods (strategies if you will) each person has developed in order to perform two tasks. First, flesh develops strategies for trying to meet our three basic needs: the need for love, acceptance, and value. I describe this as the Offense in a game. The second task that flesh performs is to develop patterns and methods to protect us from getting hurt. This is like the Defense.

Most of us understand that we were acting out of our flesh when we got angry at the guy for cutting us off in traffic and may have even practiced some sign language skills. What we don’t realize is we are also acting out of our flesh when we manipulate our spouse to get our way; or when we use anger to overpower someone to win an argument; or even when we do a bang-up job on teaching our Sunday School lesson because we want to impress our class and receive their admiration and praise. Doing each one of these is built around the needs of self. 

It’s these patterns of flesh (which is really just selfishness) that make marriage so unfulfilling and cause people to leave one marriage for another in hopes that the new one will be more self-fulfilling.

Let me give you a personal example of how the flesh works. My love language, according to Gary Chapman’s book, “The 5 Love Languages”, is words of affirmation. I love being told how wonderful I am. I really feed off of people saying encouraging and affirming things about me. When we got married, my wife was not very good at giving verbal affirmations. Her love language is acts of service; so according to her love scale, talk is cheap; show me you love me by doing something. Early in our marriage I would often get my feelings hurt when she did not speak affirming words to me. The pattern my flesh had developed growing up was to pull away when I would get hurt (Task #2 Defense – protect) and find someone who would affirm me (Task #1 Offense – get my need met). What made this more painful for me at home was that I got a lot of affirmation from people at church, especially from some of the women who appreciated what I did for them. You can easily see how dangerous this situation could have become, and it was all due to how my flesh (selfishness) reacted. I could have decided that my wife didn’t seem to appreciate me the way I desired and find someone who would show me the appreciation I desperately wanted and felt that I deserved.   

Galatians 5:17 says, Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desire of the flesh.” The things that bring life for a Christian will no longer be found by living out of the flesh. Real life is found in the Spirit of Christ living His life in us and through us. What we need to do with the flesh is crucify its power in our lives. Paul says in Galatians 5:24, Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” 

How do we practically crucify the flesh? Let me use an example that could happen to any one of us. Let’s say your wife has been asking (okay, for the sake of illustration, let’s call it nagging) you to fix something around the house, but you don’t have the parts you need. So, you jump in the car and head down to the Man’s Mall, Home Depot. You buy the gizmo you need, but when you get it home and open it up, you find that it is the wrong gizmo. To which your wife gives you that, “Can’t you do anything right?” look. So, you run back down to Home Depot to get the correct gizmo, only to have the pimple-faced clerk at the service desk accuse you of trying to return a used part since the package had been opened. You instantly feel a rush of anger. You vehemently desire to defend your honor and clear your good name with Home Depot. You feel like exploding and tearing the pimple-faced kid a new one for questioning you. Have you ever been there?

Thats your flesh reacting. That is not the real you. The real you is a new creation in Christ, with the very life of Christ living in you. Your life is now hidden with Christ in God. What is reacting to being falsely accused is your flesh, the self-focused self-life in you. Crucifying your flesh would call for you to choose in that moment to not react out of the flesh and the anger you’re feeling, but to let Christ live His life through you in the middle of Home Depot. Even though you feel angry, you can choose to not let the anger come out. Crucifying your flesh would mean not giving in to your old feelings and patterns, but instead, asking Christ how He wants to live His life through you. I don’t know what that would look like except that the pimple-faced kid will not have been ripped a new one when you are done, and you will feel the peace and joy that comes from letting Christ live through you. 

Our flesh was originally developed outside of a relationship with Christ. Its purpose was to try to get our needs met and protect us from getting hurt, and to a limited degree, it served its purpose for a time. Those methods of the flesh carried out the illusion of getting our needs met, but they never fully satisfied the need. In the process of living out of the flesh, we became flesh addicts, needing to get another fix to maintain the illusion of being okay.

When I was in junior high and high school, I was the class clown. I thought that by getting people to laugh with me, or at me, I was getting their acceptance. These patterns of the flesh carried over into my adult life. I had to be the life of the party for me to feel like I was okay. The problem came when I really wanted to stop being the life of the party and just be me. The addiction I had to their laughter and their perceived acceptance made it difficult for me to quit. It was only when I learned who I am in Christ, and that He accepts and loves me just as I am, that I was able to quit being the clown and learned to enjoy being just me. 

Through Christ, we can stop living from the flesh and the need to be self-dependent and self-sufficient, by letting Him meet our needs which sets us free from the self-focused desire to live out of the flesh. 

My wife has become very good over the years at giving me the words of affirmation I like to receive. But you know what? The need that I once had for people’s affirmation is now being met in Christ. He is affirming me in who I am as His son so completely that I really don’t have the need to get it from my wife, or from anyone else anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy getting affirmation from my wife, but now it is more like “icing on the cake,” rather than a meal to a starving man.

I’ve Lost Those Loving Feelings

What should you do when you don’t have those “in love,” butterflies-in-the-stomach, make-your-knees-weak, warm ooey gooey feelings for your wife anymore? Don’t panic, it is a very normal cycle that marriages go through. Losing that “in love” feeling can and often does happen at some point in every marriage. What should you do when your marriage is in that part of this cycle?

First, live by the commitment you made. Love is a commitment rather than a feeling. Continue to act in loving ways toward your spouse, regardless of how you feel. Guard your heart and mind from the lies of the enemy that will try to deceive you at this vulnerable time. Christ in you loves your spouse. Ask Him to love your spouse through you.

Secondly, ask God to re-ignite your feelings of love for your spouse. During one of those times when my feelings were not there for Cindi, I began asking God to give me back my passion for my wife. I asked Him to give me a physical desire for only her, and to take any lustful thoughts I might have had for other women and turn them back toward her. You know what? He did it! I can honestly tell you that in my eyes my wife is the most beautiful woman I know, and I love her more now than I ever have. And as far as my desire for her, well, to me she is the sexiest woman alive!

While you are asking God to re-ignite your feelings, start taking some practical steps to put some romance back into your marriage. Don’t sit back and wait for those feelings to magically jump-start themselves. Remember those things you did when you first fell in love? Long hours of talking, taking lazy walks around the lake holding hands, romantic dinners with lots of fun conversation, cards and flowers for no reason at all. Start doing some of those things again and see what happens. Live out of your commitment, not out of your feelings, and act in romantic ways. You will be amazed at the fire a little spark can ignite.

Begin celebrating each other again. When your wife comes home from work, or when you come home from work, take two minutes and celebrate each other. Stop what you are doing. Go to her and give her a big hug and a big wet sloppy kiss and tell her you are glad to see her. If you have kids and they are clamoring for your attention, make them wait while they watch you smooch with your wife. It will drive them crazy to have to wait, but it will instill in them great security to see mom and dad loving on each other. If you are watching TV or working on the computer when she gets home, get up from whatever you are doing and go to your wife and celebrate her. It will do wonders for her, and it will help you appreciate her more than ever. If she is cooking dinner when you come home from work, pull her away from her duties for just a minute, thank her for cooking for you and give her a big kiss. Dance her around the kitchen for a moment if she will let you. Don’t grab for anything sexual or you will make this moment about your wants instead of about celebrating her.  

Being “in love” is great. Do everything you can to keep those feelings alive but remember that the feeling alone will never be enough to keep your marriage together. Marriage takes a covenant commitment to God and to each other. 

Prayer

Father God, you have designed us to be in relationship with you first so that you can meet the deepest longings of our hearts. You know that we often become addicted to the patterns of our flesh. Would you reveal to us when we are living out of the flesh so that we can die to the flesh and allow the spirit to live through us.