Bible Verses About

“Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.” 1 Corinthians 10:24

Aren’t Bible verses about humility and sacrifice fun?  This verse just sounds so wrong doesn’t it?  Of course I need to seek my own good.  How else will I survive?  This is a Bible verse that really separates the men from the boys, so to speak.  All of us would like to consider ourselves good people, people who have other’s best interests at heart.  But how many of us actively think about how to seek someone else’s good above our own?  I confess that I rarely do.  I don’t have this type of humility. I hope, by the grace of God, that I’ll one day have it.  But I don’t know if I ever will.

My own human nature is powerful.  It wants what it wants, and it wants quite a bit.  I have so many ambitions, so many things that I want to find in life.  And many of them are good things, things that I don’t just want to abandon so that I can actively seek the good of others.  But luckily, I don’t think the verse is telling us to abandon all of our hopes and desires and instead to wholeheartedly just seek the good of others.  But it definitely is telling us that we need to live differently.  Most of us live above our means.  We spend just as much or more money than we make, and spend almost all of our time trying to pay back the bills we incur.  Most of us don’t even have the opportunity to think about someone else’s good because we’ve so entrapped ourselves in debt and liabilities.  For those of us that this is true of, maybe we ought to really make a concerted effort to spend less on ourselves and to think of ways that we might use our time and our money in ways that benefit other people.  Just a thought.