Is Your Life Christ Centered Or Self Centered?

 We often act as though the test for maturity as believers is becoming a pastor or leader in church. Maybe it was, but a major yet simple test is - is your life Christ-centered or self-centered? If your life is built on anything else, it still suggests self-centeredness because your ultimate goal in “worshipping” that thing is self-benefit. We are called to a Christ centered life; Christ will not share the throne of our lives, even with us. I am by no means suggesting that we therefore punish or cease to care for ourselves, even Christ does not advocate that; but our lives must be built around Him whom we recognize as supreme, for therein is the link to hope without which we suffer great loss. If we are self-centered, we only see our ability to remotely or directly fix things and our mind registers anything we can’t fix as impossible since self is our supreme being displacing Christ with whom nothing shall be impossible.

Psalm 146: 5 “But joyful are those who have the God of Israel as their helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God.”

If therefore at any point in our lives we find that life is all about us, we must realize that we have become carnal believers on the way to losing our salvation. Self-centeredness causes us to model our lives against something conceptualized in our mind that pleases us and is not Christ. This would most likely take us back to who we were before we got saved; meanwhile Christianity is all about us becoming new creatures. We cannot be born again and find it okay to be variations of our wicked self. This new life calls for a total overhaul of our old personality. It also demands that we deal with our weaknesses instead of celebrating them and compelling other believers to accommodate them forgetting that they also have the right to demand that their weaknesses, be accommodated. It would be interesting to see what the church would be if we all continue to be just who we desire to be, weaknesses and all.

2 Corinthians 5: 17 “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun.”

This evil, selfishness/self-centeredness, has eaten so deep that believers think it is okay to take advantage of others; pretending to love or in pretentious acts of friendship, we plunder others and deal treacherously. Dealing deceitfully and disloyally, we use our victims really bad and get very angry when they insist they no longer want to be used. We then put ourselves out like the victims. We unwittingly lend ourselves to be used by satan to steal from, kill and destroy other believers; we do it so well satan may no longer need to deploy demons for such jobs. Unfortunately, there is a curse upon the treacherous so that in being treacherous, we set ourselves up for future pain. Selfishness and/or self-centeredness will take us nowhere; though it appears good in the immediate, the long term effect is terrible. 

Isaiah 33: 1amp “woe to you, o destroyer, you who were not yourself destroyed, who deal treacherously though they (your victims) did not deal treacherously with you! When you have ceased to destroy, you will be destroyed; and when you have stopped dealing treacherously, they will deal with you treacherously.”

Christ demands that He is the center of our lives and unlike these very selfish believers who use people and dump them when they can no longer use them, Christ is not a user nor is He a dumper; He rewards and that He does in exceeding abundance. I am aware that some of us feel we have excuses for being selfish but any such excuse is a sure reason you will fail because you will pay for it in the future, your excuse notwithstanding. We must deal with selfishness/self-centeredness and learn to prefer one another instead of taking advantage of people. Self-centeredness, no matter how amusing it may seem, is the height of wickedness, somebody is suffering pain for your selfish self to feel fulfilled.