A few weeks ago I wrote about how to live our life without making what we do the focus of our life. Right now my full-time job is to raise support. I have been called as Church Planter Recruitment Director for Mission to North America, but this is not a salaried position. I must raise my support for this position. So that’s what I’m doing. And it is a consuming task, especially considering that it is the source of my income. In other words, if I don’t work to raise my support, then I don’t pay my bills and provide for my family. But there is a real danger here. How do I do something of such necessity without making it the focus of my life? How do I raise support without letting the task of raising support drive me or control me?
And I really think this is true for any of us, support-raising or not. We have jobs, we’re in school, we have family relationships. We are involved in important things that occupy our thoughts, that greet us first thing in the morning and keep us up at night. How do we do those things without letting them consume us?
Two weeks ago I answered that question from Revelation 12:11. We must live our life without loving our life. I think another way of saying that is to say that we must live our life with a great amount of self-forgetfulness. And this is really hard because we can only experience life through our own self. Naturally, it seems that we can’t help but be self-focused, self-remembering. It may be natural, but it is not super-natural.
To be self-forgetful means that you live life not thinking about you: What will she think if I do this? I probably should not have said that; he’s not going to think very well of me. We end up doing a lot of behavior management. Really, we end up doing a lot of sin management and righteousness management. We become occupied with doing the right things and not doing the wrong things (whatever we think, or whatever somebody else thinks, those things are). So we ask ourselves questions like: Am I doing things right? Am I doing what I am supposed to do? Am I messing up too much? Why I can’t get this right? And our focus is on ourselves and not God or others.
Self-forgetfulness, then, is the basis for love. You can’t love God or others if your focus is on you. But self-forgetfulness doesn’t mean that you hate yourself. It has nothing to do with self-esteem. You don’t hate yourself, and you don’t love yourself. You forget yourself. To be self-forgetful means that, as Tim Keller says, you don’t think less of yourself; you think of yourself less.
You see, I think when Adam and Eve were in the Garden before that first sin, they were perfectly self-forgetful, and at the same time they were perfectly happy and fulfilled. They were occupied with the wonder of their Creator and the delight they found in each other. They didn’t have to clamor for their needs to be met; they were met by God and each other. And when we get to heaven, we will again be self-forgetful, occupied by the worship of God and the joy of others.
And self-forgetfulness is the answer to worry and fear and anger and discouragement. If you worry or fear or get angry or get discouraged then the focus is on you. Your own feelings are paramount. You see, to be self-forgetful means that you are also Christ-remembering. You don’t focus on your worries or fears or anger or discouragement; to do so says that you believe that your solutions to the issues that make you worry or fear or get angry or discouraged are found in yourself. But they are not. To be self-forgetful you must also be Christ-remembering. His goodness, his benefits, his promises, his love, his forgiveness (all of which have been secured for us at the cross) are your solutions. To be self-forgetful is to live by repentance, to be Christ-remembering is to live by faith—this is the gospel.
To be self-forgetful means to rest confidently in my status as a loved, adored, delighted-in child of God and to put the needs of others before my own.