Daily Devotional

Growing up, my parents had a library of stock phrases that they gently quoted to us when we acted up. These were a sort “parenting shorthand” for the important ideas and values they wished to instill in us. A few examples: “Obey all the way, right away, with a good attitude.” “If you make a mess, you clean it up.” “M.Y.O.B (Mind Your Own Business).” One phrase, however, has stuck with me more than most: “It’s not about you.”

Although a model church kid and aspiring Bible knowledge enthusiast, young Mark was far from saintly. I was uber-competitive and would do whatever it took to win, regardless of other people’s feelings. I was passive-aggressive, manipulative, and oozed arrogance. In short, I was a prideful know-it-all who loved to show off. “It’s not about you” became my parents’ weapon of choice for deflating my gigantic ego. They used it to remind me of my need for humility, for thinking about others instead of just myself – exactly the exhortation Paul gives in Philippians 2.

“It’s not about you” inoculates against the cultural forces that insist it IS about you. Our post-modern, post-Christian, highly individualistic culture worships a god called SELF. We live in a world of endless personalization, customization, and targeted advertisements, bending our digital worlds to our will and remaking them in our own image. Our most sacred value is self-expression: the thing by which we decide our identity and define our destiny. Woe to the heretic who questions the legitimacy of another’s self-expression simply because it violates millennia of accumulated wisdom, biological reality, or even the innocent life of an unborn baby! This autolatry couched in innocent Disney phrases like “follow your heart” and “be true to yourself” is antithetical to “it’s not about you.”

Thus, the power of “it’s not about you”—or in Paul’s words, “count others more significant than yourselves”—is its ability to cut to the root of the issue. Both young Mark’s “all about me” behavior and our cultural premium on self-expression have the same source: pride and selfishness. These words both describe the orientation of the heart toward itself: an orientation with which we all are born and with which believers continue to struggle. Herein lies the origin of all human sinfulness: the substitution of the self for God as King of my heart and life, thus violating the first of the Ten Commandments. This pride, according to C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, “leads to every other vice. It is the anti-God state of mind.” Essentially, all sin is saying to God that we prefer our way to His way. We know better than He does. My life is about ME, not Him or anyone else. “It’s not about you,” then, strips away our pretenses and lays bare the true condition of the rebel human heart.

But “it’s not about you” also points toward the solution. If it’s not about me, then it must be about Someone else. It is a gentle reminder to those of us in Christ that God sits on the throne of our lives. It points us toward the opposites of pride and selfishness: humility and selflessness. Humility is not a self-deprecating groveling about our perceived worthlessness, but a proper understanding of one’s place in God’s universe. Selflessness is a genuine concern for others over and above one’s own needs or wants. Pursue these, and we’ll be well on our way to fulfilling the Great Commandments of Jesus: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37-40). And what better model to follow for this than Jesus himself? Jesus’ willingness to leave His heavenly glory, to experience poverty, rejection, and shameful death, is the ultimate expression of humility and selflessness. Everything Jesus did was to glorify His Father (John 17:4) and to serve and not be served (Mark 10:45). Jesus perfectly modeled “it’s not about you.”

I am so grateful to my parents for introducing me to “it’s not about you.” I’m no longer a child, but I’ll never outgrow my need to be reminded of it daily. If we desire to let God rule in our lives and not our own sinful selves, it’s a phrase I think we all need to hear more often.

"English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers."