self centeredness on Comfort Zone

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Small Town Boys The towns in this area were small and close together, but they were not particularly large.  As such, even a few thousa...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Small Town Boys The towns in this area were small and close together, but they were not particularly large.  As such, even a few thousa...

Know thyself — but don’t tell anyone.

A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

“The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

“Would I rather be feared or loved? That’s easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our wo...

Happy are those whose self-centered lives have been crushed and reshaped by the Master's hand to be full of mercy.

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.

Almighty God, we too often live in fear. Fear drives our self-preservation, our self-centered decisions, and prevents us from comprehending the wonder of your presence among us. Like Peter, we would d...

Free us, Lord, from our obsession with ourselves long enough to care for others; to be so concerned about the well-being of the human community that me don’t have to worry about our place, our church,...

To me, growing into spiritual maturity is becoming less self-conscious and more God-conscious.

Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling comp...

There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...

"There are who never learn to see anything except in its relation to themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by themselves; and, this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing dr...

We are molding Jesus into our image. He's beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is who we are most comfortable with. The danger now is when we gather in our church buildings to ...

Perhaps the greatest irony in the life of continual comparison is that while it involves so much attention to the attributes and gifts of other people, it’s actually quite self-focused. From that hype...

Self-hatred and self-love are equally self-centered.

Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves.

It’s too easy for us, God to place other things before you. We fail to completely follow your will, we live for ourselves, and we settle into sinful ways of life. Please help us to see that there’s mo...

Former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple describing original sin I am the centre of the world I see; where the horizon is depends on where I stand…Education may make my self-centeredness less ...

Great and gracious God, we have run after things and others instead of coming home to You. We have lived as though we were the centers of our universe. We have avoided the harder issues in life so o...

If Jesus sets the divine standard for morality, I could now have an unwavering foundation for my choices and decisions, rather than basing them on the ever-shifting sands of expediency and self-center...

Merciful God, in your gracious presence we confess our sin and the sin of this world. We are a people torn apart by racial, national, social, and theological divisions. We fail to welcome the foreigne...

To really be gripped by your identity in God’s greatness you must wade out of the shallow waters of self-absorption into the deep waters of praising Him at all times for all things. Remember, God form...

We may find it hard to believe Jeremiah’s words that the heart is “deceitful above all things.” We would rather look outward and think, Yes, others may be quite foolish and misguided. But I have a ...

This is the ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know Him.

Lord, we confess that we sometimes prefer the darkness to your light. We turn away, we hide, we seek our own way. Forgive us Lord, and renew in us a desire to walk in your light and to reflect your li...