But we get to the New Testament. The New Testament is very clear that selfishness is one of the great issues, one of the great manifestations, maybe the greatest manifestation of sin and human beings, and has got to be dealt with. In Paul's epistle to the Philippians, he gives a very solemn charge to them and it's respect. And I want to read that to you. And then he goes on to give them sort of the antidotes. Well, what should it do with this? Well, this passage is returning your Bible to Philippians too. Let me just give you a little background. This is not a passage that was written first to people to instruct him on marriage. But the reasoning goes like this. This is a problem in all of relationship. And it was a problem that was causing disunity. That is what God says that we should have in our relationship to one another is a kind of intimate unity that is remarkable. It's very distinctive from what the world knows. And that's what he was asking the Philippians church to pursue. But they had these problems of disunity that were sparked by selfishness. And so what he's saying essentially, and what I think the Lord would say to us today, is that if these are problems simply in average run to the middle relationships, how much more is it going to be a problem in the greatest kind of relationship? So beginning at chapter two verse one, if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than yourself. Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. To being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human lightness, and being found in appearance as a man who humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted into the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that is the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father, God the Word, the beautiful passage. And it's sort of the hinge path of the book of Philippians. Sometimes people will point out that the concept of joy is preeminent, the word used or one of its derivatives about 16 times the book of Philippians. And sometimes people mistakenly think that because the Philippians are such a joyful people, it's just the opposite, because of their selfishness, that this disunity was fostered, but also because of their selfishness, they lack joy. They put it differently, they lack the sense of real happiness in life. And you know how that is, if you're selfish, you're selfish because you think that's when it gets you somewhere. You think it's going to make your life better, it's going to make your life happier. That was the first lie that's a devil through a little servant communicated to Eve, he said in Genesis 3, your eyes will be open, if you eat the fruit, and you will be light God. He's putting it differently, you're missing out, your life isn't as wonderful as it could be. It's not as complete unless you obey me and disobey God. And so at the heart of Sam is this bent to be happy, to have a better life, lacking contentment, which is also an issue for the Philippians. And so he says that you've got to essentially turn 180 degrees in opposite direction, excuse me, that what you think is going to make you happy, but pursuing your own selfish ways actually turns in on itself and produces a misery. Some of you are familiar with the fairy tale that's been told over and over most recently by Disney's Beauty and the Beast. They hand some prints to the self-absorbed and a cursed place on him where he turns into this hideous beast. And that beastly figure I think really symbolizes the way he was even before he was turned into a beast. He was already a miserable beast and now he was given the reality of that until he could earn the real love of someone else. Now the difference between that story and the Christian message, if the Christian message says you can't do that. If you try to earn the love of someone else you're not able to do that, if you try to earn the love of God, that's impossible as well, that's where the gospel comes in. And that's what this chapter tells us in such a beautiful way. And saying essentially the main problem is Christian is our selfishness. It's also the main problem therefore in marriage. The book of Proverbs talks about this. Another way of saying selfishness is pride. There's always the same thing. In Proverbs 8, 13 says, I hate pride and arrogance, I hate this. Proverbs 16, 18, pride does the foredestruction and a haughty spirit before fall. So this selfishness that is part of the fabric of our being, we tend to say that it's going to give us the kind of life that we want, the marriage that we want, but it doesn't. But it does. It produces a misery returning to be instead of the beauties that we want to be in life. Many people would say that there are other main problems in there. Maybe it's financial issue. In fact, studies will show that the number one reason for the four today is financially related. You might also say that sexual problems contribute to the marital discord and divorce. Also the issue of communication. People just say, I can't communicate with my staff. And that leads to difficulty. Other people will say it's gender based. Men and women can't understand each other. So you have many books recently that are along these lines. One feminist author said, if this way she said, the more I know about men, the more I like dogs. There's something about men that is born to women and vice versa. It's very little that is similar. And someone say, from a Christian perspective, that the main problem is that husbands and wives don't live out of their roles. They don't know what they're supposed to do. If wives are just learning what they're supposed to do and men were just learning what they're supposed to do, everything would be okay. Now I want to suggest that that's the closest to the correct. And we're going to actually get there and spend several weeks on that. But I think it is this issue of selfishness which we've got to come first. Because if you don't deal with that monster, then your roles are turned on its head. And men will take advantage of women and turn them into doormats. And women will have a, I think really what the feminist movement in our country has had a very misunderstood view of the role of women. So we have to get first at the real problem, the main problem, the main cancer of marriage which is selfishness. And so that's why the apostle Paul gives this charge to the Philippians. He says, do not let anything happen. Do not do anything first three out of selfish ambition or vain can see. But in humility, consider others better than yourself. The word they're for consider is literally think this way, which is another main word throughout the book. The problem is in our thinking. Remember the gateway to a person is in their brain. And so what what Paul is after here is a reprogramming of the individual to be a different person. So how is it that this passage sets out that we can leave it? How is it that we can get asked this main enemy? Well it begins with understanding who you are. He begins a passage by saying if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ. So what the Bible teaches is that essentially we were made, Adam and Eve were made to be in perfect fellowship with God and then there was a great divorce that happened. It's like they were already married and there was a divorce, a great separation. But then God gave through Christ the opportunity for humans to be remarried as it was to him. And so there is this union, this one fleshness with God that is the very beginning, the starting point of all this. If you simply try to be unselfish on your own, it's not going to work. If it's going to be an utter failure, you have to begin with being united with Christ. And that's really what is the thinking in verse 5 as well. It says your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. I think a better translation is your attitude should be the same as that which is appropriate for those who are in Christ Jesus. So what you are literally in Christ Jesus, which you may know, is one of the most favorite ways of summarizing all that it is to be a Christian, that when you are in Christ, it's that you are united with Him, that when you come to understand that you are lost, that you are desperately lost, that you are running away from God like Adam and Eve. And that God has undertaken through the grace and mercy of Christ and His life, death and resurrection, this union to bring you back when you believe that really at a heart level you are married to God. You are united to Him and you are in Him. And what he's saying here is this is real. If you are really united to Christ, if you know these things, then begin to think in a way about yourself and about others. Then it's appropriate for those who claim to be Christian, who claim to be in Christ and that begins with doing nothing out of a selfish ambition. It begins really first by admitting that you are the main problem in your marriage. It begins by admitting that you are the main problem in your marriage. Not your spouse, but the evil. The London Times, a number of years ago, put out a plea for different authors, writers to write an essay on the topic, what is the main problem with the world? What's really wrong with the world? And the clever English writer, GK Chesterton, wrote the shortest essay of all, he said, he said, dear sirs, I am, sincerely yours, GK Chesterton. What's the problem with the world? Can you say iron? Or is it political system? Is it poverty? Is it your neighbor? Is it your spouse? Now, taking away the extreme situation, or extreme situations where frankly your spouse maybe is the big problem, where there is highly dysfunctional situation, maybe your spouse is psychotic, pathological liar, taking those few situations away into the extreme. Nevertheless, you come to see yourself as the main problem in your marriage. Then you will have no hope to buy the teachers of making any headwork. This is the beginning. It's conquering the monster of pride and beginning to come to terms with it from the inside out. Some people would say, Leo, I'm here with you saying that I really do think it's my spouse, because I get along with everyone else, it's my spouse that I have this problem with. I know that's the reason, since I get along perfectly with everyone else, it's really my spouse is the problem. Really? Think about it. Isn't marriage qualitatively a completely different relationship than any other relationship? You get closer to your spouse, and we're going to spend an entire sermon next week on this, but you get closer to your spouse than any other human being possible. Isn't it also true that others, if they want, can get up and leave, can move away, can distance themselves from you? If you sit down somewhere, say in a restaurant, next to someone who has a really bad body, you can get up and distance yourself and that person, you can move and leave that person. But if you get on say a nine hour plane flight and the plane is completely full and there's no other seat, you can't get up and leave, just stop. In marriage, there is a sense in which you are closer to anyone and you would ever be otherwise, and you can't get up and leave, and they can't get up and leave from you, just naturally. Everyone else in life, when they get, when you get too close to them, and that kind of spiritual body odor begins to invade and they can distance themselves from you. I think a really big problem, the main problem, all of us, for honest, is our own selfishness. And it may be helpful to understand there's different kinds of selfishness. There's sort of the, I'm so wonderful, then a fraud in selfishness. But then there's also kind of the reverse of that, which is I'm so horrible selfishness. Because some of you out there that have a very low self identity, concept of who you are, you might be thinking, you know, this is not a sin for me, I'm not a selfish person, I'm just the opposite. But really, what is selfishness? It's just a way of being consumed with yourself, even if you hate yourself. Christianity does, it comes in and offers healing. It says, look, it's abnormal to be both consumed with how wonderful you are, as well as consumed with how horrible you are. Jesus says, if you understand who you are, in need, because of my goodness, and not begins to breathe, if you know a thing, and a healing, where you have a healthy understanding and self image to you are. And it comes from what we have here in this passage, what Christ offers. It comes from a self humiliation, from purposely giving up your life on your own. That's what the passage teaches about Christ, who being in very nature God did not consider a quality with God something to be grasped but made Himself nothing. Theologians have written countless dissertations and articles and books on this called a Kenosis, which is talking about the emptying of Christ. And it's not talking about the fact that Jesus exchanged anything that had to do with His divinity. It has to do with the fact that Jesus had every right and every moment of His existence here on earth to be, to exercise all of the glory of His divinity. But He set that aside. Jesus who could have demanded that His disciples, rightfully, wouldn't even have been selfish, demanded His disciples to wash His feet in His greatest hour of agony. What did He do? He gets down and washes their sins. This is that idea of Jesus conscientiously, purposely, becoming a humble servant. And He did, of course, to purchase for you and me heaven. But He also did it to begin to carve into our brains what it looks like to be a humble person, to completely set aside what is your right and your prerogative and to submit to Yourself. That's the beginning of the great passage that we are going to send several weeks on in the season 5. It begins by saying submit to one another out of reverence to Christ. That is, die to Self before Yourself, why? Not because they are the greatest things to spread. It's because out of reverence for Christ, because of His Christ, because of His Self-impings and dying for You. And as I said earlier, I think the great frustration is that you can't change this yourself. When you begin to try and be an unselfish person, I don't know about you, but I knew this week, all week long, I was preaching on Selfishness. And I got to the end of yesterday and I just had to look at Ellen and say, just what I'm preaching on them all. Selfishness, it's just hugged me, because I have been so selfish this whole week, and it's that odd thing about human nature, but don't think about the pink elephant. Do you think about the pink elephant? Don't sin, don't be selfish, you're going to be selfish. And if you're not recognizing that friend, I don't think it's because you're not being selfish, it's because you don't see it. It's like the person in the middle of their living room has a giant gaping hole, and it pretends it's not fair. They decorate it, they put beautiful oriental rugs over it, and distract it with magnificent paintings. We have mastered the art, particularly in the socioeconomic level that is typically represented in this church. We've mastered the art of masking, our selfishness. We are savvy people, aren't we? We've become very savvy and sophisticated about our selfish ways, particularly in the close relationship like Mary. But what's this path of thinking? That it's you want to know, increasing humility, and decreasing selfishness. Like John the Baptist said, I must decrease humanity. If you want that to begin to be the heart and soul of your life and your marriage, then it's not from looking in, it's not from relentlessly trying to manipulate your behavior, it begins by looking out at what is presented in this chapter, that Christ himself. And particularly in his self-humiliation on the cross. One of my great men that I have modeled with the creature Martin Lloyd Jones, put it this way, listen to these words. He said, I am told that I am to esteem others better than myself, and there's only one thing that can make me do that, and thank God it does not make me do it as this. When I read the Bible, as I see the simple nature, when I read the Bible, I see the simple nature that is in me, I see my failures, I see my shortcomings. But even there is a tendency to try and defend myself. There's only one thing I know of that crushes me to the ground and humiliates me to the dust, and that is to look at the front of God and especially to contemplate the cross. It's something mysterious, it's odd, it's not rational, it's super irrational, but as you meditate upon Jesus Christ and his humiliations, which is crowned as a cross, it begins to shift the patterns of your heart and reprogramme, even as you think. Of course, this is the thinking that Isaac Watt had in his great hymns, when he said, when I surveyed the wondrous cross, excuse me, when I surveyed the wondrous cross, I went to Prince of Glory died, my richest gain, I count but law, and poor contempt on all my pride. It is the odd shifting of the patterns of your heart, the more you think about Christ and his action of life, death and resurrection for you, in the less you think about yourself, the more it begins to shift these categories. The Christ is the one that we build upon. There's a story several years ago about two brothers that used to love to play on the banks of a river in the town where they live, and in this particular town that river was critical to the commerce of that city. And so the dredges would have to regularly clean out the muddy mire beneath the waters of that river, and they would push it aside and see mounds on the river banks. And what would happen is as the sun would dry those mounds, it would develop a hard crusty external layer, but it could be that as the water was removed from that pile, that while there was a hard exterior, there was sort of a sinkhole, there was a cavern inside, and that's where these boys liked to play. One day, they were out playing, and they didn't return home for dinner, for dinner. So their parents and neighbors set out to search, and eventually they discovered the youngest boy, and he was buried in one of those sinkholes up to his net. He was unconscious because of the great pressure of the sand, and so they began to dig and dig, and once they got down to his way, he regained consciousness and they said, where is your older brother? And he said, I'm standing on his shoulder. You see, you and I are powerless to deal with the most powerful things in our lives. That is destroying our relationship. If you're single, there's no escape clause. Why are you single? Could it be that there's such a selfishness in you, that puts a barrier between you and many people? I know particularly for guys, they tend to walk into a room with full of people, full of women, and in the first ten seconds, they have immediately mentally disregarded about 95% of the people in the room as a potential marriage partner. Why? You're not beautiful enough. Not their body type. Maybe it's that you say that people don't appreciate you for who you are, but maybe it's because you're so concerned with yourself that no one can even get close. The spirit will be up. As soon as you and I try to work on this, it becomes more complicated than we ever dreamed. If I can sinkhole it, sucks us in. But that will Christ come to us. That's where He is, self-humiliation, His suffering and death for you becomes critical. See, there are many of you that have heard this for years, and you go, yes, yes, get on to something new. But until you fasten your attention and your affection upon that gospel truth of Christ, until it begins to reshape your heart, until He begins to be the one that is beneath you in this sinkhole selfishness and lifts you up, the gospel has not taken aim upon your greatest enemy. Cornelius Plantinga said this. He said that it's scary about self-deception. It's scary in that it will insulate you against Jesus Christ. See, that's what it does. We, our souls are like an onion. There's all these different layers of this self-adventure. And we cut through one and we think we've done it. And what it's saying is that self-deception, what that does is it insulates you from Jesus so that the gospel becomes practically speaking irrelevant. Meaningless. Emphasis to you. It's for the other people, for those non-Christians, sinners. It's for you. The carves deep, deep holds into you to bring you out of the sinkhole of your life. Guys, I've heard that it's important to speak on something that you're well acquainted with, because when you do that, there will be much more convincing than what you speak about. And so that's put to me this morning. I stand before you as a very selfish person. But I would beg each one of you to resist the temptation of thinking, well, it's just my spouse could have heard this thing. Well, if my friends could have heard this, if my mom or dad, he said to think, what about me? What about my soul? How about the self-deception that's there? If you don't deal with it, it's like the beast that leads the misery. And you can't earn it like the beast earns the love of the beautiful bell. But we have received the love and the kiss of the beautiful Lucera, Lord Jesus Christ. He is our elder brother who lifts us up. He's the one who suffered and died and self-humiliated in self. Not just as an example, but to give us the power and the ability to be the impossible. The happily ever after the joy of life and of marriage comes only when you get these truths down deep in your heart and the mind of Christ begins to read. Father, as St. Francis of old praise, would you make us an instrument of your peace? Whether it's discord, would you so love, whether it's injury parties, whether it's doubt faith, whether it's a spare hook and whether it's sadness, joy, oh, divine master and Lord, grant that we may not so much speak to be controlled as to console, to be understood as to understand and be loved as to love. For it is in giving, Father, that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. And it is in fact in dying that we are born to turn a lot. Amen.