One of God’s most defining Characteristics is His massive ego. God loves Himself, and He never gets enough of exalting Himself. Everything He does has some Self-serving motivation behind it. God doesn’t create or sustain anything that doesn’t benefit Him in some way.

You are a human. God has designed you with a special ability to bond with Him. He wants to have a personal relationship with you—a joyful soul communion that will continue to deepen for all of eternity. But for this to be possible, there must be some degree of understanding on your side. Making you a selfish, egocentric being was an essential part of God’s plan to draw you closer to Himself.

If you’re going to know God, you need to understand what it means to want the whole universe to revolve around you, because this is what God wants. You need to understand what it’s like to think you’re better than everyone else and that everything you do is justified, because this is how God thinks. Now of course when you think such lofty things about yourself, you’re being delusional, and you will have to be taught better. But your intimate understanding of selfishness is priceless and that is not something that God wants you to grow past. If you did, how would you be able to really grasp what He means when He says that He is the most magnificent Being in the universe and that He is looking forward to the day when every knee bows before Him? If you were not a selfish being, you’d have no clue what He was talking about. You wouldn’t understand His obsession with glory or His outrage when someone worships another being in His place. If you don’t understand the concept of selfishness—really understand it—then you and God would have a very limited relationship. But because God created you with a massive ego and an inability to do anything without a self-serving motive, a wonderful foundation of identity is now available for God to build on. So then, on the one hand, it’s not good to be selfish. It tempts you to make bad choices and it makes it much harder for you to submit to God in the way that He demands. But on the other hand, it’s a wonderful thing to be selfish, for once you do submit to God, you have a much better chance of really knowing Him. All things considered, your ego is one of the greatest gifts God has given you, for it opens the door to a world of understanding that you would never have access to if you’d been designed differently.