LOVE YOURSELF

 FEBRUARY 17, 2023

GALATIANS 5:14

"The entire law is summed up in a single command: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Today, I invite you to look with me at the importance of love, that is directed toward ourselves. Above we read that the apostle Paul said that, the entire law is summed up in a single command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Could it be that the love that we direct toward ourselves, the quality of that love, the generosity of that love, has a great deal to do with how well we love our neighbors, with how we love others. I had a colleague who argued, that if you can't love yourself well, you cannot love others well. He wholeheartedly believed, that inability to love ourselves had a huge impact on how we could respond to loving God “With our heart, soul and strength.”

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' there is no commandment greater than these." Mark 12:30-31

Loving your neighbor as yourself is found eight times in the Bible. Not once. Not twice. Eight times. Loving your neighbor as yourself is so important to God that He not only repeats Himself, He makes it a command.  Jesus put together the command to love your neighbor as yourself with loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

I believe most of us understand it's right to love our neighbor, that Jesus challenges us to do so in the gospel teaching. Yet, for many we miss that it's also God's intention and desire, for us to love ourselves well. We need to understand this correctly. We should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought (Romans 12:3). But we must remember God placed a high value on us, we bear the image of the creator, and God stepped toward us in giving Jesus to restore us and to give us a life that is blessed and full. So, when we view ourselves as hopeless failures. When we hate on ourselves, or when we put ourselves down or speak critically of ourselves and our worth, I believe this must grieve our creator. Believe me I have grieved my creator often with an unhealthy defeating thought life.

Ephesians 2:10 says we are God's workmanship (literally God's work of art). For us to be critical of God's work of art is not respectful of God. When we realize we are valuable and precious -- not because of what we do, but because of our identity in Jesus, then we can love our neighbor as we should, not because of what they do, but because God also loves them. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us what love acts like. It is patient, kind, and accepting.

How should we love our self? We should be kind and respectful, just as we should be with others. We should forgive and forget the past rather than beating ourselves over the head with our failures and mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Why let them be a weight holding us back from making progress toward the abundant life God has for us? We are taught in the bible the importance of forgiveness; forgiveness we extend to others, too often we overlook forgiving ourselves. Self-care is a biblical principle that is God-honoring.

I believe we all know that loving your neighbor as yourself isn’t always easy. Loving ourselves isn’t always easy. The Bible tells us “this is love. Not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice…” (1 John 4:10). We are the object of this love. God loves us/YOU. We are not just loved in a general kind of way, but deeply loved and unconditionally loved. We grasp this truth when we understand that God loved us first. He’s the source of our love. God the Father is the source of all love. Before we can give this love, we need to experience it for ourselves. “You can’t give what you don’t have.”

I need to say that learning to love yourself is not an easy task to take on, but it is a vital one. It is something you will have to practice your whole life, but it will get easier the more and more you work towards loving yourself.

Sometimes we need help getting to a point of self love, and maybe the reasons are deep rooted in the past and need to be worked through. Reaching out to a counselor might be a good idea. We did not learn these thoughts and patterns overnight.

Working through the issues that have caused you to not love yourself will not be easy work, but it will be worth it. Imagine living a life with the scope of what God wants for you and not in the shadows of self hatred. Learning to love yourself matters because you matter. We all matter to God.

LET US PRAY

Dear God, thank You that You love us even when it’s hard for us to love ourselves. Help us receive Your love in a way that makes us become so incredibly generous in our souls to give love away. Thank You for always meeting us where we are, not where we wish we were. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.”

Song of Solomon 4:7