Loving God

The Christian teachings based on the Bible’s false blood sacrifice doctrines, run deep in our society. Many of us sacrifice our own wellbeing believing it is the right thing to do, that it is moral and ethical to do something that we believe will be good for another person at a cost to ourselves. Most of all we believe that this is what God expects from us and will reward us for our self-sacrifice. Many of us feel that it is our duty to self-sacrifice, even to the point of being willing to die, an example of this is choosing to go to war for “our country.” 

Majority of us who believe in self-sacrifice, have our worth tied into this belief. We feel we are worthy only when we sacrifice ourselves for another, or do things that we believe others will reward us for, or give us a feeling of approval, or at least not feel disappointed with us. We work hard for the approval of others in our relationships, in our jobs, in voluntary services.

Why self-sacrifice is a sin

There are several problems with living in self-sacrifice, because it is directly in opposition to how God intended for us to live. Before I explain the logic behind this, I want to clarify that I am not talking about the selfless acts of love, which compel us to save someone’s life, for example in a case of a child running out into moving traffic, or someone drowning. In such instances, the desire to do all that we can to help another person in a dangerous, life threatening situation is a selfless act of love, we do it without a consideration of any reward, we do it because it is the right thing to do.

When we sacrifice our own wellbeing, time, effort and other resources to gain something in return, we are actually sinning: acting out of harmony with God’s Definition of love. For example, as a wife and a mother, you do things for the family even though they can do these things for themselves, such a cooking, cleaning, washing etc. As a result you feel tired and sometimes resentful, because you are sacrificing your time, in which you could be doing something you love. The fact that you feel tired, resentful and dissatisfied with your life, are indicators of you sinning (being in disharmony with God’s definition of love). You have been taught in your childhood that a good mother, a good wife, or a good woman, sacrifices for her family, her husband and others in general. In return, you expect that those you serve will respect you, love you, appreciate you or do things for you in return. In other words you get your worth form self-sacrificing.

If you were to stop the addictive action of self-sacrifice, you would feel guilty, like you’re a worthless person, a bad woman, that no one will love you now, that everyone will be disappointed with you… etc. These feelings will come up when you challenge your addiction to self-sacrifice and you need to let yourself have these feelings in order to release the false belief of self-sacrifice being a good thing. This example can be extended to your friendships and work relationships and applies to men just as much as women. The bottom line is that in your self-sacrifice you are expecting from others to approve of you, to validate you as a good man, husband, mother, wife, friend colleague or worker.

The problem with self-sacrifice is that you are being untruthful with yourself and others. You are not saying to yourself: “I am doing this because if I don’t, this will happen (eg. I will feel guilty, worried about how others will react)”… “I am doing this because I feel I have to, or others might not love me, approve of me etc.” Admitting the truth to ourselves as to why we do things for ourselves and others exposes the fears we live by. The problem with living in these fears, is that you are not being generous but wanting something in return from others (approval, avoidance of their disappointment), you are bartering feelings with others. Self-sacrifice is insincere, it tricks people into believing that you are doing something as a gift, while you are doing it to get a seeming reward. While we live in self-sacrificial addictive relationships, we are not having love-based (gift-based) relationships, we are in effect having untruthful, fake interactions.

From God’s perspective, you are worthy of love regardless of what you do. A new born baby is loved by God just as much and equally to you, even though the baby cannot do the things you can do. God has designed everyone to be self-responsible for their own life, their own happiness and joy, and our role as parents is to teach children to be self-responsible. God never demands of any of us to do things that will cause us to be unhappy in order to make others happy. God’s desire is for us to enjoy our lives by loving ourselves (being emotionally, physically, sexually and spiritually responsible) and loving others by helping them to also be responsible for themselves. When others expect of you to sacrifice yourself for them, they demonstrate a lack of love for you, but you can love yourself and them by not yielding to their expectations. If you love, you will choose to do things for others as a gift, but never compromising yourself in the process. A true gift that you give to others will feel joyful to you and this joy is your reward.

An example of self-sacrifice and its effects

I am currently experiencing the painful consequences of having lived my life based on a self-sacrificial belief system. Having been taught as a child that worth is something we earn via self-sacrifice, I live this way on an autopilot, never considering the seriousness of the sin that it is and its life threatening dangers.

For over a year now (for years is more accurate, but my level of ignorance was higher), God’s Laws have been highlighting this particular problem to me via:

• ongoing lower back pain and other bodily aches and pains
• friends addressing my unwillingness to say no at the expense of my wellbeing, not loving myself 
• arthritis developing in my right middle finger
• feeling exhausted, unfulfilled and unhappy

In my devotion to self-sacrifice, self-punishment and self-harshness addictions, I’ve been resistive to acknowledging the signs and the sin they point to, refusing to change on the issue. About a month ago I’ve seriously injured my finger while working. Before the incident I ignored several feelings which were alerting me to the problem but I yielded to my addictive self-sacrificing beliefs instead, by

• not making the choice to use a different tool do the job, to avoid a potential confrontation with a co-worker, feeling I had to honour her way of doing the job
• not making the choice to find suitable gloves (despite having the feeling that I should in order to safely execute the job)
• honouring the belief that I would be harming my co-worker by leaving her to work on her own while I was gone to get gloves (ignoring my own safety)

Once the incident occurred I minimised and then ignored the serious pain I was in and continued to work. Here I have ignored God’s messenger of pain (one of the greatest messengers that God designed into our body and soul, to alert us to our sin). Two days later, in the emergency department, I failed to get the correct medical treatment because I wasn’t firm about the options they offered and yielded to a false belief that I will be fine.

Impact of self-sacrifice on others

This really highlighted my lack of care for God’s gift of the human body and my lack of self-responsibility. Lack of self-love automatically creates a demand upon others in the environment. Others that love and care for us will feel compelled to spend their time and effort trying to make us see the issue. A self-sacrificing addiction makes others responsible for our wellbeing which is an imposition on the gift of the free will of others, a serious sin from God’s Perspective. In our self-sacrificial sin (any sin, for that matter) we have false expectations of others, fear of their reactions, and a deluded view of what and how they feel, in effect we are falsely accusing others. This only serves to selfishly avoid our own feelings, our fears of what might happen, based on our false definitions of love.

In my example, I did not love my friends, believing that they would desire for me to self-sacrifice, that they would be disappointed with me if I said no, or disagreed with them. I also demanded that they should love me by having compassion for me, and address my lack of love of self, rather than being responsible for myself and my own wellbeing. I’ve used my body to gain feelings of approval, and to avoid feeling that I disappoint others. I have sacrificed my body, ignoring many signs along the way showing me it was wrong, paving the way to a disaster. 

The consequences of my sin of self-sacrifice

Three weeks after the original injury I ended up having a serious finger surgery, as a consequence of my lack of initial desire to love myself and respect God’s gift that the human body is. Ironically I am now unable to perform physical work and I do not know how long it will be before I can go back to manual tasks. 

In this example the cause and effect of the sin is very easy to trace and see, yet how many of us end up with severe debilitating conditions due to the same self-sacrificing addiction? While we do not link our health issues to our false belief systems, our sin, diseases like cancer are actually a direct result of us ignoring the signs and warnings God is trying to communicate with us. Pain, particularly emotional and eventually physical lets us know that we are sinning in some way, and in this case that having faith in sacrifice being righteous, is a serious sin, on the opposite spectrum of God’s definition of love.