Those of you who have been in our Sunday morning class in the small auditorium have probably heard my dad say on occasion: "We do what we want to do." I agree with this statement or observation, and I think the converse is also true: "We don't do what we don't want to do." These are obviously broad generalizations, and there are of course exceptions, but I think in general, we as humans typically do what we want to do.

You may have never thought about it, or you might disagree. We could say, "Well, I get up and go to work every morning, and I don't want to do that." But even so, there's a motive that makes us want to do that - a paycheck. We need a source of income to pay our bills. (To pay for the stuff that we bought that we wanted).

When you look at the world and observe people on a daily basis, you see people doing what they want to do. Even if you exclude what we would consider evil or immoral behavior, people are still doing what they want to do. Look at the stores, malls, ball fields, restaurants, theaters. We line up to go to those places because that's what we enjoy. Of course there's nothing wrong with any of these activities, but if we do them to the exclusion of God's will, then we may need to re-prioritize our lives.
Human nature has always been that man has a tendency to do what he wants to do instead of what he should do. The Bible is full of examples:

• The Israelites continually turned away from God in order to do what they wanted to do.
• Jonah, instead of going to Nineveh as God told him, turned around and headed in the opposite direction.
• The Pharisees outwardly made a show of being religious, but their religion was superficial. They were looking for loopholes and technicalities to justify what they wanted to do.
• Jesus told of the parable of the rich man in Luke 12, who was so successful he decided to tear down his barns and build bigger barns to store all his crops, and then he planned to "eat, drink and be merry." That's what he wanted to do.

Even the apostle Paul struggled with doing what he should do instead of what he wanted to do. In the last part of Romans 7, he writes about the conflict of the two natures of man - striving to do the will of God, yet giving in to the temptations of the flesh.

The definition of altruism is selflessness, self-sacrifice, putting the interests of others first. As always, the best example for us is the example Jesus set. The ultimate example of doing something for the sake of others is His literal self-sacrifice. He didn't want to do that. He prayed to "let this cup pass from Me," and Paul said in Romans 15:3, "For even Christ did not please Himself."

To me, part of our challenge as Christians is to control and limit doing what we want to do and try to do what we should do - what God wants us to do. The more we strive to live by that greatest commandment that Jesus gives us in Matthew 22:37, to "Love God with all our hearts," then the more what we want to do will align with what God would have us do. Hopefully, as we mature as Christians, we'll want to do His will.

If you're a Christian, but you feel you've been doing what you want to do to the exclusion of what God would have you do, you need to re-prioritize your life and to make that known publicly. Or if you've never submitted to God's will and you want to become a Christian, to accept Jesus as God's Son and your Savior, you can do that through repentance and baptism