Man, I wish I didn't. But, up crops my flesh on a daily basis. All of the "I wants", "I need", "I can't handle", "I deserve better", "I need time for me."  "I need to be shown love before I can show it." "I love my time too much to give it up", etc., etc. ... I LOVE ME!!!

All these thoughts are not pure in the sight of God. What is it that He desires? Sacrifice. Death. A laying down of our agendas, comforts, dreams, for the sake of another. For His sake. And, as my two year old has been running around saying, "For Goodness 'Sake!" There's truth to that remark. For the sake of Goodness, we must die to ourselves and what we think is supposed to be good. We love ourselves too much and don't like the pain of death. Therefore, we don't die, we complain. At least I do. Ouch.

Yet, Christ deserves our all. We so glibly and easily say, "I give you my all" in prayer, but do we walk that out in our lives? Are we constantly thinking of ourselves first or thinking of God first, others second, self last? I think that we put ourselves up higher than we should because we don't really trust His promise that if we seek Him first, then He will take care of us. We plain don't trust Him to take care of us. By overly loving ourselves to the place of avoiding death, we are saying we don't understand the love of God. Because if we did, we wouldn't need our own love.

His love is one that lays down it's life and requires us to do the same. But it is in those places of pain and death that His humanity of pain meets ours and we can then have fellowship in suffering together. The great biblical paradox is that only from death comes life. After death, then the resurecction power of Christ shows forth in our earthen vessels and gives us the power to live for Him and others - especially when our flesh doesn't think it can. His resurrection won the victory at Calvary, and His resurrection power in us wins the victory in our lives as well.

This is the verse that started all this thinking in me today: 

 “...by love serve one another.” Galatians 5:13b

 What do you think?

Deborah