Last year I was watching a reality tv show. It was a finding love sort of show. And one thing that really struck me was how selfishly most of these people approached relationships and marriage. It was all about them. They were always criticizing others and complaining about how the other person/or people were rotten, horrible, and selfish. They personally never did anything wrong unless they messed up their game plan.
There was plenty of tears. Tears that felt, in the context, to be selfishly poured out. So and so hurt me and now I’m going to cry. It was never remorse on their part. I’m sure some of the perceived conflict and anger was escalated by the editors, and I only watched one episode, but still.. I later looked up statistics on the show, in regards to the marriages that have happened and such, there was somewhere around 5%* of the couples who ended up getting married. Many of them got engaged, but many of those broke off.
Looking through the list of them, one thing that did interest me was how many couples just decided to try it. Take a test drive. There wasn’t a commitment made. They were treating the relationship like a new toaster that you could take back without any consequences. Yet, every single one of those relationships that was treated in that way broke off and was quite messy.
The problem that I see with todays culture is we’re very selfish and want everything to be good for us. We want to have sex without marriage. We want new friends who are better and more entertaining. We only cry when someone hurts our pride. We want the perfect life without any real hard work or commitment. As I understand it, marriage is rough on your flesh. Men and women both have to be incredibly unselfish to make it work. But all good things are difficult to achieve. It’s the bad ones that come easy.
I think ultimately as a non-Christian it’s going to be impossible to not worship oneself. It’s because the ultimate belief as a humanist is that you are god. Therefore you must honor yourself. And that’s why you can’t do things without some sort of selfish desire. Even though what you do may be good, the whole idea of seeing yourself as a god means you must treat yourself as one and therefore everything you do has to be done in self-promotion or with selfish desires.
As a Christian, we are given much. We are able to worship God. We can look to God who honors himself and then we follow him, love him, and honor him. Who greater to honor and love? And as the verse I posted yesterday says, “If ye love me, keep my commandments. ~ John 14:15″ Then in Luke 10:27 it says “And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And there we see that in obeying God we must love our neighbor as ourself. And who is our closest neighbor? (For those who are married) Your husband or wife would be your closest neighbor. And now, finally we know that when one is unselfishly loving ones wife/husband we are loving God.
P.S. I saw this video a couple weeks ago and thought it kind of ties into this..
*Part of this has been sitting in drafts for awhile, my stats may be off now..