I don't understand why I do it. I mean, I do, but the odd part is that I know in my mind that God's way is the right way, but somehow I resist and follow my own path, because I want to, or at least I think I want to, or is it that I feel like I want to. Yah, that is probably it, I feel like I want to follow my own way, because I still have these emotions that make me say to myself; self, you know you want to do this, or that. Well, of course I don't actually talk to myself that way, it is more like; I want to do this because it feels good, or I don't want to do that because, well I just don't. Selfishness is one of those traits that we don't need anyone to train into us, it is built in naturally. I guess you could say that selfishness is a manifestation of the sin nature. Wow, there is a big word, but it just means "the display of". Actually though selfishness is a display of the sin nature, for those of us that have accepted Christ as our Savior, selfishness is just a remnant of our previous sin nature. As Paul (the one in the Bible) says, "who will free me from this body of death?", and then goes on to say "I have learned the secret of being content". You see, as a child of God we know the secret to being content, but we sometimes display selfishness, because we forget who we are, and fall back into those old habits. The good news is that those little slips don't define who we are, they are just a manifestation of the remnant of our old self, that God is carving away at as He molds us into the person He wants us to be. Now, how long that takes, does depend to some extent on us, and on how long we resist what we already know is His perfect will for us. He has already made us perfect, the problem is simply that sometimes we just don't act out of who we are, and instead choose to act out of who we were. We have a choice.
Tom Zimmer