Have you discovered that being moral and religious will never free you from the misery of living for yourself? Moral and religious people can be as selfish as they come, because being moral and being religious do not have the power to break the default life of living for self.

That was true of the rich young ruler. He was living for himself. He wanted everything he could get in this world, and then he wanted heaven too. So when Jesus said, “Sell everything you have and then come follow me,” he couldn’t do it. That’s why he went away sad.

A Christian is a person who no longer lives for himself or herself, but for Christ who died for their sake and was raised. You have lived long enough for yourself. Why would you carry on any longer in the misery of trying to be your own Lord and Saviour?

What would keep you from praying these words? “Jesus, I’m done living for myself. In the light of who You are and what You have accomplished on my behalf, I can no longer live for myself. I must give myself to You and live for You, so that Your love will control me.”

One of the barriers that holds many people back from knowing, and being controlled by, the love of Christ is the idea that true happiness can only be found if we are free to live for ourselves.

Living for self is the default life of every person. So, unless something happens to bring about a change, we will end up living for ourselves. The Bible says this quite clearly: “All seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 2:21). What does it mean to live for yourself?

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 better 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’m living for myself but I’m not happy. I’m being too hard on myself. I need to lighten up, give myself a break. But then, when you lighten up as the servant, you end up being short-changed as the boss. You can’t win. And all around us is a culture that’s telling us, “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.

Do you identify more with the unhappy boss or the unrewarded servant today?

The book of Hebrews was written to people who believed in and trusted Jesus Christ. It tells us what is true of us when we are in Christ. In chapter 12, the writer recalls the scene from Exodus 19, the giving of the Ten Commandments, and he says:

You have not come to... a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them... So terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” (12:18–21)

He is telling us that the terror of entering the presence of God without a sacrifice is not our position. What is our position then if we are in Jesus Christ?

You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (12:22–24)

The contrast is not between heaven and hell, it is between standing before God without a mediator and standing before God with Jesus and His shed blood applied to our lives. With Christ, death will be entering into celebration: “One has died for all, therefore all have died” (2 Cor. 5:14). Jesus entered the death that you would have died, so that when death comes for you it will not be a passing into condemnation but an entrance into celebration.

In your own words, how would you describe the difference between these two positions?