He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. (2 Corinthians 5:15)
If you live for yourself, you make yourself both the boss and the servant. The demands you set are the demands you must meet. If you live for yourself, you will often find yourself in the strange position of beating yourself up because you’re unhappy:
You look in the mirror and ‘self the boss’ is not happy because she wants to have a more pleasing image, so she beats up on ‘self the servant’ for not being pretty enough. Or ‘self the boss’ tells you that you should have accomplished more, and ‘self the servant’ gets beaten for not measuring up.
Then suppose you say to yourself, “This is no good, I am living for myself and I am not happy. I’m being too hard on myself. I need to lighten up and give myself a break.” But then, when you lighten up as the servant, you end up being shortchanged as the boss. You cannot win! And all around us is a culture that says, “Live for yourself!”
But if you live for yourself, who will reward you, embrace you, and rejoice with you when your work is done? Live for yourself and one day you will find that you’re all alone, because the one for whom all your work has been done is yourself.
We all have a default life and death. The default life is that we live for ourselves. The default death is that we pass into condemnation. Christ died our default death to change our default life.
Do you identify more with the unhappy boss or the unrewarded servant today?
