స్వార్ధము || Selfishness || Zac Poonen Telugu Christian Messages
Channel: Raja Devathala
Date: 26/06/2017

Once again we want to look at sin and how serious it is. It is more serious than sickness; worse than cancer, leprosy, aids, and all put together. Once you understand that, you will have a great longing to be free from all sin.

In this study let us look at a passage from Luke 10. Jesus told a story here about a man who was beaten up by thieves, as he was travelling on a road, and he was left lying there half dead. Two religious people - one a priest, and the other one, a sort of an assistant (Levite) to the priest passed by that road. They just walked past that man, on the other side of the road, and left him there. They went on to the temple to carry on with their religious services! After that, another man came that way, a Samaritan. He was neither a priest nor a religious type of person. He was just an ordinary person, an ordinary sinner. But he had compassion on this poor person lying half dead there. He lifted him up, bandaged his wounds and took care of him. He even paid for the expenses for putting up that injured person in a little hotel. He told the hotel keeper, 'Take care of him and I will give you more, if you have to spend more on him.' Jesus then asked, 'Which of these three proved to be a neighbour (Lk. 10:36). The answer is obvious.

Religious people, sometimes, are very, very selfish. Jesus spoke here about a sin, which is again not listed in the Ten Commandments. It is the sin of selfishness. We have been looking, in our last two studies, about the sins that Jesus hated the most. What are the sins that Jesus hated the most? We saw, first of all, hypocrisy, and then we saw, pride, and here, we see another one, selfishness - thinking only about ourselves. You know, we can be very, very religious; religious enough to be a priest or a bishop or even an archbishop and still be thoroughly selfish. That priest, who was supposed to be representing God, all he was interested was in his religious ceremony and not helping the poor person in his need. When our life is like that, it does not bring us the approval of God. We can be very upright in a whole lot of external things. We can think that God is very happy with us, because we do all those external things so correctly and that we have a good testimony before men, and we keep very accurately the external rituals of our religion. Maybe you are even an elder in your local church or a pastor or whatever it is, but if there is selfishness in your life, I want to tell you, Jesus hates selfishness. He hates a life that is only interested in self.

Now we are all born selfish by nature. We are not born thinking about others. Think of little children in our homes as they grow up. They don't automatically know how to share their toys with others. No, you have to teach them that. Naturally speaking, they are selfish; they will fight for the best toy, the biggest toy, the biggest piece of cake in the plate and things like that. That is their nature. Only when we grow up, we don't fight in such a crude way (for the biggest piece of cake), but we still like it. Inwardly we haven't changed; our selfishness is now more subtle. People don't see it so obviously. And we seek it in cleverer ways.

So, when we see selfishness as a sin just like the sins of hypocrisy and pride, we would realize that Jesus came to save us from our sin. If Jesus hasn't saved you from selfishness, what type of saviour is He? If he has saved you only from gambling and drunkenness, that is not much of a salvation, is it? Because, a lot of people out in the world have that, without Jesus Christ; they also do not gamble or drink. What does it prove? Many Christians are glorying in the fact that they don't commit certain external sins. Then I can show you ten other people in the world who don't commit those sins also, who don't have Christ in their lives. So what type of salvation has this Christian experienced?
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