
2:6 Too often, self still shows its ugly head. An inspired writer wrote that "Jesus emptied Himself, and in all that He did, self did not appear." ( Thoughts from the Mount of Blessings, page 14) Phil. Granted, I'm not nearly close to the way Jesus lived His life. I was too busy thinking of others to think of myself very much. Somehow my "low self-esteem" pretty much disappeared.
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By the grace of God I learned to focus more on others and how to make their lives better. But what I discovered at that very same school in approximately the same year was that "low self-esteem" was actually a result of self-focus. I surely had it, so I supposedly needed to love myself. Psychologists and would-be psychologists argue for self-love to combat "low self-esteem," which used to be called an "inferiority complex" in my youth. He took self-love as a "given." Everyone born on this planet has the impulse to protect/look out for self. But I don't believe that's what Jesus meant. The argument was that to love others "as yourself" meant you first had to love yourself. I want to encourage everyone out there, “Let’s do our own Spring and Fall cleaning”, while we have the strength, so that no one else will have to do it for us later.Īh, yes, Wendy, I well remember the first time I heard the "Love yourself first" admonition in a worship service in the girls' dorm in my senior year in high school. And I’m trying really hard not to replace it with more stuff. I want to throw away at least 70% of all my accumulated stuff by the end of this year. There was so much stuff that we had to hire a local trash hauling service to take it all away (I’m really sorry, but yes, all that junk is now in a landfill somewhere). We threw away old furniture, beds, old books, just generally performed a good spring/fall cleaning on our house.

If I haven’t worn it in the last two years (or a year before the pandemic), then I threw it out. I’ve already getting rid of all my old clothes I donated some, and threw the rest away. I can’t take it with me, as the saying goes so, why am I holding on to all this stuff. I’m in the process of cleaning out my own stuff (or junk), or fall cleaning. Why is it so easy to become proud and boastful of either our positions or achievements, or both? How does keeping the cross before us prevent us from falling into such a trap? Here are the mysterious origins of evil in the universe.

The enemy was not afraid of accusing God of what he himself was and of spreading his lies to other angels. This was the beginning of a new and hostile situation in which God’s altruistic love and cooperation would be challenged by Lucifer’s selfishness and competition. The text explains that Lucifer planned to exalt his throne above all heavenly hosts and make himself “like the Most High” ( Isaiah 14:14). Then, Isaiah 14:12-15 moves from the historical realm to the heavenly courts and highlights that a similar proud and arrogant spirit generated the original fall of Lucifer. Isaiah 14:3-11 describes the fall of the haughty and oppressive king of Babylon. As in the case of the king of Tyre ( Ezekiel 28:12-19), the king of Babylon also became a symbol of Lucifer.
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Challenging God’s revelation, the king made an image entirely of gold - a symbol that his kingdom would last forever - and even required everyone to worship it ( Daniel 3:1-30). God had revealed to King Nebuchadnezzar that Babylon was only the gold head of the great image of successive empires ( Daniel 2:37-38). In the Bible, the city of Babylon stands for a power in direct opposition to God and His kingdom and the king of Babylon (with special allusion to Nebuchadnezzar) becomes a symbol of pride and arrogance. What far-reaching consequences did Lucifer’s pride while in heaven bring to the universe and to this world? At the end of their long exile, the Jews left Babylon and returned to Jerusalem ( Ezra 2:1-70). And in the book of Revelation, God’s people are called out of end-time Babylon ( Revelation 18:4) to abide with Him eventually on Mount Zion and the New Jerusalem ( Revelation 14:1 Revelation 21:1-3, Revelation 21:10).
