Are you seeking self or God ?

Jesus said in Mark 16 : 24 "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."

In this verse, Jesus told explicitly that discipleship starts with self-denial. Self - denial is the first step to our journey of discipleship.

Today, we are living in a self-seeking world, we all want to take control over our lives. We want God to satisfy our needs and bless us, we want our relationships to meet our expectations and please our desires. We want to make our dreams come true at any cost. We feel so depressed, so discouraged and downcast when things wont work the way expected it to be.

But God says we are not here to satisfy our desires and live our lives as we plan, we are here to please our creater and fulfill His divine plan and vision for our lives.

Self-denial does not mean having no desires or killing our desires, it means that placing the will and desire of God above our desires and placing the needs of others above our own needs.

It is perfectly exemplified in the life of Jesus. Jesus did not come to this world to fulfill his desires but to accomplish the plan of the Father. So God the father exalted the name of Jesus above all names.

When we are too much occupied to please our self,  we not only hurt our selves we hurt the people around us. Self-seeking always ends up in destruction.

Satan always uses our desire of self-seeking and exploits it to fall into his trap. He used the same template from the beginning at Garden of Eden to tempt Eve by luring Eve to gratify the desires of her eyes, which ended up in a fallen world. It used the same strategy to tempt Cain that he could not accept when God rejected his offering, which, resulted in murder. Even it tempted Jesus by claiming that it can offer whole world to Jesus if Jesus can worship him.

So let us examine our lives and discern the cynical schemes of devil whether we are too much occupied to please our selfish desires or we are placing our desires in the hands of our creater to be blessing for many people.