By the Diseased Self, One Cannot Ever Love God
God has created humans to have fellowship in his joy and love. Humans have betrayed this extraordinary glory. In the garden of Eden, humans were deceived by Satan and broke the promise with God. Humans decided to leave the glory of being God’s beloved to loving themselves.
The greed to become like God! In God’s form and likeness, humans tried to reign on the throne themselves as the God of all. The moment they decided to lift and worship themselves, their relationship with God has been eternally broken, and their hearts became corrupted by being unable to react to God.
The diseased self that has lost the glory of God.
After Adam, all humanity was born with a corrupted heart. This corrupted heart’s characteristic is self-love. This toxic self-love broke every relationship including the relationship with God, with other people, and with creation that God has ordered us to have authority over. And life became imprisoned in “self” and it has become “for the self,” “about the self,” and “owned by the self.”
Humanity has become a being with a such a corrupt heart that it has nothing to trust other than one’s self, and nothing to love other than its own corrupted heart. Compromising and making excuses with one self to cover up, the corrupted heart has taken the bizarre form of a diseased self.
This diseased self is so different from the original form that God has dreamt of. This form has lost the God-loving being that it originally was. It became addicted to loving one’s self and putting one’s self on the throne and worshipping it. As reformist Calvin has said, all of humanity is a “idol making factory” that makes idols according to each of their wants. The Bible calls this diseased being as the “old person” (Romans 6:6, Ephesians 4:22, Colossians 3:9), “the being of the world” (Colossians 3:5), “Earthly body” (1 Corinthians 5:5, Romans 8:13, Romans 13:14, Galatians 5:24, 1 Peter 2:11). It says that we should “deny,” “put on the cross,” “take off,” “kill,” and “destroy” our corrupted beings.
》Prayer Topic
Are you still wrestling hard with the diseased self? Pray that you recognize your diseased self and nail it to the Cross with Christ, as it says in the Bible. Let’s ask Lord to make the death of the diseased self become the reality in our lives.
》Scripture Prayer
(2 Timothy 3:1-7) 1 But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. 6 For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, 7 always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
(Colossians 3:5-10) 5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming. 7 In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
》Pray that the Word may become the Conclusion.
1. The greatest agony of the last days is the symptoms of the diseased self and self-loving addiction being shown across the world. People end up loving their own pleasures more than God, being drawn by their selfish desires, ultimately unable and unwilling to embrace the message of the Gospel. Let’s pray for the salvation of this distorted generation through the Gospel of the cross.
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but have itching ears the will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4)
2. The Bible declares that loving and serving yourself is idol-worship. How can one escape from tis idolatry of self-love? Our Lord commanded us to kill the diseased self that has lost its original form and became an idol-creating factory. The Word became flesh; Jesus Christ came to this earth and died for all humanity and resurrected. Now that we have heard the Gospel, let’s throw away all forms of self-worship and pray with determination to believe Christ, moving forward.
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)
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