Let's be a little less selfish

June 18, 2018

Good books challenge the way we look at life. They give us new perspective that can lead to a shift in the way we think about ourselves and the people around us. We’ve all read books that make us consider and reconsider our lives and the people we want to be.

Those are the books we can’t stop talking about. We discuss them over coffee, quote them at dinner parties, recommend them to everyone who asks what we’re reading or the books we’d recommend, write out the moving passages we want to remember, and read the books again and again in times of need. These books have a profound effect on our lives.

Freddie Pimm, author of The Selfish Gospel, is also a doctor. Doctors and their work can also change and transform our lives. The way they help us and treat us can have a profound effect on how we live and consider ourselves in the world.

We can all pinpoint a time in our lives when a visit to the doctor has changed everything and divided our lives into Before and After: a prognosis, a test that yielded heartbreaking results, an unanticipated or unexpected problem that previously showed no signs. We all know people who left a doctor’s office feeling profoundly changed, for better or worse. Those people know that their lives will be different.

News from the doctor can recalibrate what is most important to us. We draw our friends and families closer. We can spend more time at church and more time with our church leaders. We look to the gospel and our congregations for support. We return to our most basic needs: faith, family, and friends.

The Selfish Gospel calls for the same sort of personal transformation – one that involves less selfishness and more focus on how the gospel can change our lives. Freddie Pimm argues that this not only leads to a transformation within ourselves, but in the people around us, in our churches, and in our generation.

‘When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.’ – Dr Wayne Dyer