English 
Chinese 
Dutch 
Arabic 
Spanish 
Portuguese 
Russian 
French 
Italian 
German 
Japanese Yes, selfishness is a sin. The Bible calls it by several names: selfish ambition, covetousness and love of self. Paul lists “selfish ambition” among the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:20, NIV) and tells Christians to “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit” (Philippians 2:3). Augustine and later teachers describe sin itself as love of self set against God.
Paul does not leave the warning bare. In the same breath he asks the Philippians to “count others more significant than yourselves,” and a few lines on he shows them Christ, who “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:3, 7). Against a heart turned in on itself, Scripture sets a person for us to follow.
What does selfishness mean in the Bible?
Scripture has no single word for selfishness. The New Testament word most often translated “selfish ambition” is the Greek eritheia. It comes from erithos, a hired worker, and Aristotle used it of intriguing for public office. In the New Testament, according to Thayer’s Greek lexicon, it means “a desire to put oneself forward, a partisan and factious spirit.” It occurs seven times: Romans 2:8, 2 Corinthians 12:20, Galatians 5:20, Philippians 1:17 and 2:3, and James 3:14 and 16. English versions render it differently. In Galatians 5:20 the King James Version has “strife,” the ESV “rivalries” and the NIV “selfish ambition.”
A second word, philautos, “lover of self,” appears only in 2 Timothy 3:2. It heads a list of the vices of the last days, “lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant,” which ends with people who are “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (3:4). The King James Version reads “lovers of their own selves.” Paul’s description of love in 1 Corinthians 13:5 names the opposite: love “does not insist on its own way” (ESV), “is not self-seeking” (NIV), “seeketh not her own” (KJV).
The Old Testament describes the same attitude without a single term. “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment” (Proverbs 18:1), and a psalmist prays, “Incline my heart to your testimonies, and not to selfish gain!” (Psalm 119:36).
Is selfishness a sin?
Yes. Jesus summed up the law in two commandments, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He added, “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37–40). Christian teaching treats selfishness as a failure of both. The tenth commandment forbids coveting “anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17), and Colossians 3:5 calls covetousness idolatry. Galatians 5:19–21 places selfish ambition among the works of the flesh and warns that “those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
Christian teaching has gone further and found disordered self-love at the root of sin. Augustine gave the idea its best-known form in The City of God (book 14, chapter 28): “two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” Thomas Aquinas traced every sin back to the same place, “inordinate love of self is the cause of every sin” (Summa Theologiae I–II, question 77, article 4), and the Catechism of the Catholic Church still says that sin is “love of oneself even to contempt of God” (paragraph 1850).
Selfishness is not one of the seven deadly sins by name. The Catechism lists the capital sins as “pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia” (paragraph 1866). On Aquinas’s argument, inordinate self-love is the source of every one of them.
Is all self-love selfish?
No. Scripture assumes that people care for themselves. The command to “love your neighbor as yourself” takes self-love as its measure (Leviticus 19:18). Ephesians 5:29 says that “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it,” and Philippians 2:4 asks each person to look “not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Nor does Scripture treat selflessness as a sin: Philippians 2:3 tells Christians to “count others more significant than yourselves.”
Christians disagree over what place self-love should have. Aquinas held that “well ordered self-love, whereby man desires a fitting good for himself, is right and natural” (I–II, question 77, article 4). He also taught that in spiritual goods a person ought, out of charity, “to love himself more than he loves any other person” (Summa Theologiae II–II, question 26, article 4). John Calvin rejected any reading that assigns “the first place to self-love, and the second to charity.” Because people “are naturally prone to excessive self-love,” he wrote, “there was no need of a law to inflame a love already existing in excess.” In his reading the command “as yourself” makes self-love “as it were the standard” and “transfers to others the love which we naturally feel for ourselves” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 2, chapter 8, section 54).
Examples of selfishness in the Bible
Several Bible stories turn on selfishness. Nabal, a rich sheep owner described as “harsh and badly behaved,” refused food to David’s men, who had guarded his shepherds in the fields. “Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to men who come from I do not know where?” he asked (1 Samuel 25:3, 11, 15–16). About ten days later “the Lord struck Nabal, and he died” (25:38).
Jesus told the parable of the rich fool, who planned bigger barns for his crops and told himself to “relax, eat, drink, be merry,” until God said, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you” (Luke 12:16–20). Jesus drew the lesson himself: “So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (12:21). In another parable a rich man “feasted sumptuously every day” while a poor man named Lazarus lay at his gate and “desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table” (Luke 16:19–21). A man who asked Jesus about eternal life was told to sell what he had and give to the poor, and “went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Mark 10:21–22).
Selfish ambition appears among Jesus’ own disciples. James and John asked, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,” and the other ten “began to be indignant” (Mark 10:37, 41). Jesus answered that “whoever would be first among you must be slave of all,” because “even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (10:44–45). In the early church Paul wrote of some who preached Christ “out of selfish ambition” (Philippians 1:17), and 3 John 9 names Diotrephes, “who likes to put himself first.” After the exile the prophet Haggai told the people of Judah that their labor had come to little “because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house” (Haggai 1:9).
Consequences of selfishness in the Bible
The letter of James traces disorder and quarrels to selfish desire: “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:16). “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (4:1). Romans 2:8 warns that “for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.”
Proverbs sets greed against generosity: “One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want” (Proverbs 11:24), and “Whoever is greedy for unjust gain troubles his own household” (15:27). The First Letter of John asks of anyone who “sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 John 3:17).
How does the Bible say to overcome selfishness?
The New Testament answers with self-denial after the pattern of Christ. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Paul points the Philippians to Christ, who “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7), and tells the Romans, “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves,” because “Christ did not please himself” (Romans 15:1, 3). He sets the works of the flesh against the fruit of the Spirit, which begins with love (Galatians 5:22), and writes, “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (5:16). The freedom to which Christians are called, he says, is not “an opportunity for the flesh”; they are to “serve one another” through love (5:13).
In his farewell to the elders of Ephesus, Paul quoted a saying of Jesus that is not recorded in the Gospels: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). To the Corinthians he wrote, “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor” (1 Corinthians 10:24). Preaching on Paul’s words a few verses later, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (11:1), John Chrysostom called it “a rule of the most perfect Christianity” to seek “those things which are for the common profit,” and said that “nothing can so make a man an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbors” (Homily 25 on First Corinthians).
Selfishness asks what we can keep. The one we follow “emptied himself,” and the saying of his that Paul left with the elders of Ephesus still opens the door of our own full barns: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
Leave a Reply