Faithbase

Hey everybody, I want to give in an additional thought to yesterday's post on Love Does Not Boast and Love Is Not Proud. I talked about putting ourselves above others and the verse that we looked at was Philippians 2, 3-7. And it says, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves. Okay, well, listen, I know that some of you are thinking, how am I supposed to get my needs met? Who's looking out for me, right? I know I've thought that. Okay, if I always am giving myself away, who's looking out for this guy, right? Well, let me just get really practical, can we? One, number one, the first person who we are supposed to trust with taking care of our needs is the Lord, right? God wants to be the first person that we turn to to get our needs met. This is why with physical needs, we talked about the Lord's Prayer. He says, when you want your daily bread, you come to me. He says, when you want the weight lifted from your shoulders, you go to Jesus Christ, because he said, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest, right? Jesus says, come to me, right? So first, we go to God. Second, others. Others are supposed to be the ones who are looking out for us. Now listen, if every single person in the body of Christ was looking out for others, that means there would be a host of people looking out for you. That's the way it ought to be. I know it doesn't always end up that way. But we should be surrounding ourselves with the body of Christ in such a way that they know our needs and they can anticipate them and care for us in the same way that we are caring for them. Lastly, you are supposed to care for yourself. And we could see this example in Jesus. We could spend a lot of time on this, but Jesus had limits as a human. He acknowledged those limits and he stuck to those limits. He had 12 disciples. He could have had a million, but he knew that this was going to go down a very particular way. And that as a human being, we can only have a certain number of close, intimate friends and inner circle, right? We can have a certain number of people watching us like a crowd or followers. Sure. But there's limits. Jesus was patient. He started full time ministry at 30. He was not rushing into that. Jesus made space. He would true to quiet places and he tried to take the 12 away to quiet places, right? To pray and spend time alone. There were times where Jesus said no, that he would not do things right. So we can look to Jesus as an example of ways that we can do things that acknowledge our limits, acknowledge our humanity. And this is in fact, what a lot of people call self-care, right? But our first go-to is the Lord. Our second is others. And third is let's model our life after Jesus and say no to some things. Do nothing. This verse, this part of the verse that says, do nothing out of selfish ambition and vain conceit. This does not mean that anything that you do for yourself is selfish ambition, right? We just talked about how Jesus did things for himself and he was not vain or ambitious. So it's a lot to say. We just got to acknowledge some of these things. I hope that you find people who care for you, that you find yourself in connection with the Lord and he's caring for you and that you're able to do some of these things. Where do you struggle? Put it in the notes. Let's get moving. God bless you.