Jesus said there were two great commandments that He wanted us all to follow. The first was to love God; the second was,
“Love your neighbour as you love yourself.”
Was Jesus commanding us to love our neighbour and also to love ourselves? Technically, no. The command was to love our neighbour in the same way we already love ourselves. However, the assumption here was that we do love ourselves.
How can we follow this formula if we hate ourselves? Imagine looking in the mirror and scowling at yourself. Then imagine turning to the people you love and keeping that same scowl in place. That’s kind of what our attitude ends up looking like when we hate ourselves and yet attempt to love others.
I truly believe God wants us to love ourselves.
Four relationships were broken when humanity fell. 1) Our relationship with God, 2) our relationship with each other, 3) our relationship with Creation, and 4) our relationship with self. All these relationships have been broken, but I believe our Creator wants to restore us to these relationships that we may experience the joy of right relationships.
God wants us to learn to love ourselves.
But, some would ask, isn’t self-love wrong? Isn’t that selfishness?
Of course there is such a thing as selfishness, and that is destructive. However, there is also such a thing as a healthy self-love, a love that does not put self on the throne but which — at the same time — has a deep respect for the person God made us each to be. God doesn’t want us to hate what He has made. While that means we shouldn’t hate others, it also means that we should never hate ourselves.
We’ll explore the difference between a healthy love of self and selfishness more in another post but, for now, let’s begin to consider what a healthy self-image looks like.
Many believe that 1 Corinthians 13 is the best description of what real love looks like. That description of real love helps to describe the healthy attitude we should have toward one another, but I believe that the same principles can appropriately be turned upon ourselves as we ask how to rightly relate with the one person we can never get away from…ourself.
Let’s look at just a few of the statements the Apostle Paul made about love in this chapter and consider how they might relate to our relationship with self:
- Love is patient
Many of us are hardest on ourselves, expecting things of ourselves that we would never expect from others. We expect more of ourselves than God does, and I believe God wants us to stop being so hard on ourselves. We need to be patient with ourselves.
Sometimes people get a new job, and they expect to be able to do it perfectly the first day. It’s not likely to happen, however, if we haven’t learned how things are done yet. We need to give ourselves the time to learn and not be impatient with ourselves.
I remember, when I was learning Spanish, I often got impatient with myself. I wanted to know it NOW, but it didn’t work that way. I had to be patient with myself and learn it step by step; I later reaped the benefits of that. I can speak it fluently today but, if I hadn’t been patient with myself, I would have given up before I ever reached my goal.
You may not have accomplished everything you want to in life yet, and you may not be where you want to be, but be patient with yourself. Live life step by step…that’s part of loving yourself as God loves you!
- Love is kind
A lot of Christians are really good at beating up on themselves. We may try to be kind to others, but we are unkind to ourselves. Sometimes we try to punish ourselves when we don’t think we’ve measured up. However, the Bible says “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)
“Love is patient and kind.
Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.
It does not demand its own way.
It is not irritable,
and it keeps no record of being wronged.
It does not rejoice about injustice
but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.
Love never gives up, never loses faith,
is always hopeful,
and endures through every circumstance.”
– 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 - Love is not jealous
How can I be jealous of myself? Jealousy is the feeling we have when we envy somebody else, and it often has a lot to do with our own self-image and relationship with self. We may look at somebody else and like their hair, we envy them and wish we could have what they have. Why? Because we’re not happy with who we are. We look at somebody else who has a nicer car than us or a nicer house or a better job…and we yearn with jealousy for what they have. Why? Because we’re not happy with who we are or what we have.
The Apostle Paul said he had learned how to be content in every situation:
“I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” — Philippians 4: 12-13
What did he say was his secret to living, his secret to contentment? “I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.” Through his identity in Christ; He had learned to appreciate that whatever he had, he had because that’s what God was going to use in his life and, wherever he was in life, that’s where God wanted to use him.
Where was he when he said this? Prison. What did he have of the world’s possessions? The best carriage or the nicest house? No, nothing. He was a prisoner at the mercy of an oppressive government that hated Christians. But he was content.
No jealousy there. He didn’t want somebody else’s life. He realised God had given him the life he had for a reason.
In my next post, we’ll continue to look at 1 Corinthians 13 and consider how a few other statements in it about God’s kind of love can be applied to our relationship with self.
-=::Harvest India::=-
-=::On Eagles Wings::=-
-=::SEED International::=-
[...] Yourself, Part 2 3 09 2009 In my last post, we began a discussion about the statements Paul made about God’s kind of love, agape love, [...]
I would respectfully suggest few, if any, people don’t love themselves. You are right to say Christ’s command to love others as ourselves assumes we all love ourselves. We all do. People who say they hate themselves, actually hate how they look, their lack of talent or success, or their lot in life. But if one truly hates another person, one is not bothered by his or her ugliness, obesity, or lack of success. These things upset us about ourselves precisely because we really do love ourselves and wish we were better looking and more talented. If we truly hated ourselves, we would be glad the person we hated was a failure or unattractive. Neither self-hate nor self-love is biblical — only self-forgetfulness as we joyfully follow the Savior. “I [self] have been crucified with Christ died, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.” Those who think poorly of themselves and suffer depression are best helped, not by convincing themselves they really are quite talented and attractive, but rather by forgetting themselves and following Christ with abandon. As they lose their lives serving God, they will find their self-worth and true worth as children of the King — princes and princesses ruling with Christ.
Webmaster’s note: the verse referenced is
Galatians 2:20
Thank you for your comment. I would still hold that everything I wrote is theologically and psychologically correct, but I always appreciate hearing the views of others as without healthy debate we can never grow and learn. It is true, of course, that self-love as selfishness is a sin, which is what I also said in the blog entry. The reality is, however, when one has counseled as many people as I have, that one quickly discovers that a great many people look down upon themselves (and not just in the superficial way of not liking the way they look or their lot in life) and do not appreciate the person God made them to be.
Self-forgetfulness, in the way you have worded it, is what my writing is aimed at, but not in the sense of forgetting to take care of the Temple of the Holy Spirit or in not having a healthy appreciation for who we are in Christ, which is the unfortunate way it has been interpreted by some. Only by following Christ with abandon and falling upon His grace can we begin to see ourselves as He sees us and to be free to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Many people are incapable of loving their neighbor because they haven’t let self be dealt with on the cross and a new self created, which is Christ in them. To hate Christ in me is a sin that too many people practice in subtle ways under the guise of humility. True humility, however, recognizes that I am nothing without Him but that in Him I am a new creation. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” To hate THAT is sin, and whether we allow ourselves to recognize it or not, it is a sin that too many of us have been guilty of.
[...] consider that next,. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Closed…Oh N..!!Scenes We Love: BladeCarrie [...]