Bigger Than MeChikamu

Have you ever realized you were sick of somebody? I felt that way about myself. But where can I go to get away? Because wherever I go—there I am. Jesus knew I’d have this issue, and if I didn’t have it, I’d really have a problem. But Jesus said it better. He made plenty of statements about the need to lose oneself and to put oneself last. All those teachings sound wonderful if you ignore the fact that they’re nearly impossible to live by. Even those not too enamored with the Bible claim the Golden Rule as wisdom, but they haven’t found it very practical either.

If you’ve been paying attention up to now, you know that self is a big issue for me, and I came to the place where I needed to get it out of the way. Like many others, I’d determined that the first part of life is a quest for “success,” of a sort. The second part of life, I agreed, was about “significance.” But here again, how do we decide what that means? We can all agree that money and power aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. So, what does it mean to be significant? I decided it meant making a positive difference in the lives of others. But here, I found, was the problem. Significance gets all tangled up with that issue of self. What I mean by that is that it becomes very easy to make too big a deal out of my importance in the world. Significance can become just another form of pride. 

As I studied more of the words of Jesus, I didn’t see much of this “strong sense of self.” Yes, we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and that implies a basic self-love. But as I came to understand His teachings, the problem is that that sense of self we present to the world is based upon the values of the world: people, performance, possessions, and power. Jesus, we are told, “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant” (Philippians 2:7 NASB). He came in the form of a helpless baby, born to obscure parents in a nowhere town. He left on a cross. If anyone had every right to be “full of himself,” so to speak, it was the Son of God. But He modeled selflessness. I needed to learn what it meant to empty myself, or at the very least to get over myself.