Selfish or Unselfish -- What Are You?

By Rev. Ernest O'Neill

There are two streams in humanity and you actually at the moment are swimming in one or swimming in the other. Because I think some of us say, "Oh, do you mean that before Jesus, everybody was selfish and after Jesus everybody has been unselfish?" Well, the very facts of history show that that's silly, it's foolish.

No, it wasn't that before Jesus everybody was selfish and after Jesus everybody has been unselfish. But the fact was that God perceived the perversion in our natures that was being transmitted to the rest of us by our predecessors who had rebelled against Him. With his great computer like foreknowledge, He saw that that selfish streak would begin to dictate all our lives so that we wouldn't be able to escape from it at all and that's what many of us feel when we say, "the good that I would I cannot". God foresaw that.

He saw that we would never be able to escape from that selfish streak ourselves. So he took each one of us and he put us into a pre-creation death of his Son because the lamb was slain from before the foundation of the world. So, he put us into a pre-creation death in His Son and raised us up with Jesus as new, unselfish people so that we would then have a choice.

So actually in God's repair shop, on his shelves there is an unselfish, free, liberated version of you at this moment. That's what it means. That there is an unselfish spiritual version of you in God's repair shop at this moment and you are able through submitting to the Spirit of Jesus' resurrection, you are able to have that version made completely real in your life. You are able to trade in the old selfish, angry version, you are. That's what it means, loved ones.