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Years ago I began to question the self-esteem message which was everywhere. They said you had to feel good about yourself in order to have a good life. But something in my spirit just didn’t jive with it. I couldn’t find anything like it in Scripture. I knew from Scripture that the best things I could do looked like filthy rags to God.
And furthermore, I had enough experience with me to know that I did not hold the key to my happiness. For ten years I took myself on a pursuit of self-esteem and ended up in a sinful lifestyle, unfulfilled and very frustrated. I fully got it—that trying to find joy and peace and meaning in who I am was a losing battle. And God was teaching me through his Word that my pursuit of good self-esteem was a dead-end street.
As one writer puts it: “We eventually figure out that being the star of our own show actually makes life a tragedy. When life is all about us—what we can do, how we perform—our world becomes small and smothering; we shrink. To have everything riding on ourselves leads to despair, not deliverance.” (Jesus+Nothing=Everything)
Jesus said it this way:
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it (Matthew 16:25).
If you are a Christ-follower, the life you were meant to live is to lose your life for Jesus. Paul said: “For to me, to live is Christ.” And, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
This completely turns the pursuit of self-esteem on its ears and gives us an entirely opposite recipe for life: Lose your life for Jesus. It’s not “Go find yourself” or “Discover the real you” or “Feel good about yourself.” It’s forget yourself! Come and discover the joy of self-forgetfulness.
When you can come to the place where life is so not all about you that you truly don’t think about yourself first and foremost all the time, you are beginning to walk in the freedom that Jesus came to give you. Believe me, there is great joy in self-forgetfulness. It’s really, really simple. But it’s really, really important. The life you were meant to live is found in forgetting about yourself.
What does it mean to lose your life for Jesus? Let me begin by saying what it does not mean. Losing your life for Jesus and forgetting about yourself doesn’t mean that you are not valuable and worthwhile. You are so valuable to God that he sent Jesus to purchase your redemption. He knows the worst about you and loves you with a love that will never cease and nothing—absolutely nothing—can separate you from his love. He knows your name, he calls you precious; he rejoices over you with singing; he delights in you. I’m not making this up—it’s all in the Bible. You are valuable because you are personally loved by the God who created the heavens and the earth.
Losing your life for Jesus doesn’t mean that you become a doormat or a victim. It doesn’t mean that you don’t take care of yourself or set boundaries or say no when appropriate. It doesn’t mean you wear long faces and ugly clothes (unless you want to!).
Here’s the best way I can describe it: Forgetting about yourself means that you put Jesus on the throne of your heart, and he’s there to stay. He becomes and remains the most important person and the most important commitment in your life. You get rid of other idols in your heart.
It means that you invest time and energy into getting to know him through his Word. It means that you truly want to help others; you truly care about others, you love others because you love Jesus and his love is spread in your heart and it overflows to others.
Losing your life for Jesus means anything you need to give up for his sake is okay with you. Money loses some of its allurement, its grip on your heart. Success becomes redefined as hearing Jesus say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” How high you climb that career ladder is no longer the glamorous road you wanted so badly. You begin to understand what matters for eternity and what doesn’t.
When you lose your life for Jesus and forget about yourself, you don’t shut the door on any possibility, because you’ve given Jesus a blank piece of paper and asked him to write the script for your life. You’re not asking him to bless your plans; you’re seeking to know what are the good works he purposed in eternity past for you to do, and more than anything else, you want to be there, doing that, because you want to please Jesus.
Do you get the idea? It’s all about Jesus, it’s all about doing the two things he said were most important: loving God with all your heart, soul mind and strength, and loving others as you love yourself. That’s losing your life for Jesus.
Here’s what happens as you begin to lose your life for Jesus and forget about yourself. One day you stop long enough to realize that you feel pretty good about your life. You’re not unhappy with who you are any longer. You’ve come to appreciate who you are in Christ, you respect how God has created you, you are more and more content with who you are and where you are, and you no longer find yourself wishing or daydreaming about being someone you’re not or some place you’re not.
In other words, losing your life for Jesus just happens to provide a remarkable side benefit: You do feel better about yourself, but it’s not self-esteem. It’s Christ in you, the hope of glory. It’s Jesus filling up the emptiness inside of you. It’s finding purpose in giving your life for others. I have to tell you that there is nothing like seeing that in ways you could never guess and in spite of all your issues and failures and sins, God uses you to make a difference in the life of someone else, to help them find healing in Christ, to show them the narrow road that leads to life.
When you lose your life for Jesus, then you find your life in Jesus, and you follow him because—well, because you love him and your deepest desire is to please him.
If you’re wondering how you get to that place of self-forgetfulness, well, it’s a process of growing more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ—not a one-time event. It is not overnight, and I know many people have issues from their pasts that must be addressed before they can truly forget themselves. But I believe if we could understand that getting to a place where we simply don’t think about ourselves all the time, we don’t see everything and everybody through the prism of ourselves, we could more easily and quickly put our pasts behind us and live in the freedom of self-forgetfulness.
And here’s another secret on this road to self-forgetfulness. You forget about yourself when your life is more and more entwined with the lives of others. When you are more and more focused on helping others, praying for others, being there for others—what happens is you just don’t have time left to think about yourself so much. It’s not that you decide some morning that you’re not going to think about yourself all day. No, it’s because you’ve invested your life in the lives of so many others that you just don’t have time to think about yourself so much because you’re thinking of others.
I love this passage from Isaiah 58:6-9
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? 8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. 9 Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
Isaiah is saying what Jesus said—when you lose your life by helping others, then you will find that abundant life. Or as Isaiah says, then your light will break forth and your healing will quickly appear. The best gift you can give yourself is to start down this road of self-forgetfulness.
It has to become a daily pursuit—very daily. It begins with establishing some new guidelines for yourself—disciplines that enable you to spend daily time with God and his Word. Disciplines that help you to unclutter your life from things that have no eternal significance and invest your time and energy in eternal matters—like people! You learn how to bring your thoughts into captivity and make them obedient to Christ. It truly gives you a new set of priorities. And mostly this is happening as you drown yourself in Jesus.
I promise you, if you talk to anyone who is on this narrow road of self-forgetfulness, who is truly in the process and on the journey of losing their life for Jesus and finding their life in Jesus, they will tell you without exception that they would not go back to the old life for anything. They will affirm that losing their life for Jesus is the life they were meant to live, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of building your life on Jesus. The more you understand Scriptures, the more you see Jesus everywhere. And as you fill your mind, your heart, your thoughts with Jesus, when you follow the two most important principles Jesus gave us—to love God and to love others—you just simply begin to forget about yourself, and you begin to discover the joy of self-forgetfulness. My prayer is that all of us who are Christ-followers will discover this life we were meant to live.