I was selfish, self-centered, angry and much more. People call that self-love but these things grow out of self-hate. When I discovered how to love myself it was totally different than I thought. But first I had to learn how God loved me and then find a way to love like Him. It was not easy. My story follows.
Matthew 22:37–39 (ESV)
37 …“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
These verses give us a three-part command: We should love God with all our heart, soul, and mind; we should love our self; and we should likewise love people we know and meet.
At first look, it does not seem right that we would be instructed by Jesus to love ourselves. The term “self-love” has a negative connotation. We usually think it means “self-centered”; having to have our way; self-promoting, self-absorbed, and all the other ways of putting a fence around ourselves in our rebellion against relationships. But, what we usually think about self-love is a misreading of what God means when He says, “love.” We need to look deeper.
Christian psychologists and counselors tell us that the reason we cannot love God is that we do not love ourselves. So, what is it like to love ourselves? Are we not instructed to be humble, to empty ourselves, not to source our life out of ourselves, to die to self daily, to get over ourselves, to stop boasting, to pray in our closet, and not to let our left hand know what good thing the right hand is doing, let alone tell other people? (Matthew 6:1-4) If God wants us to love ourselves, it cannot be any of these self-centered things.
The reason love is not what we think is because we do not define love. God defines love; in fact, He is the very definition and substance of love. So, I should love myself the way that God loves me, and I should love other people the same way. God loves me unconditionally. His love is not based on merit or on how good I am. I can never be so good or do so much good that God would love me more, and I can never be so bad or be so destructive that God would love me less. God does not slap us down or punish us when we sin. He is the one who loved us while we were yet sinners—so much that He died on the cross for us (Romans 5:8). He is not anxious to send us to Hell: He is calling in His loudest voice “Do not go there, come back to Me!”
Surely God does not love bad behavior, selfishness, anger, and putdowns, and God does not excuse bad behavior. So, what is there in us that God loves? In a few words, it is our unique person or personality. God loves and wants to have fellowship with the wonderful person He created. God knows that once He is in an open relationship with us that our damaged self will be whole, complete, good, and loving. It is our true self, made in the image of God, but unique, that God loves. Some people are so steeped in self-hate that their unique personalities do not show through. Some do not know who they are. The question is can we love ourselves the way God loves us and can we love others the same.
We need to see ourselves and others as God sees us. Without God, we see in ourselves hurt, anger, condescension, destruction, stupid ideas, name calling, abuse, hatred, poor looks, poor performance, mistakes, heresy, false spirituality. Contrary to popular opinion, self-centered people do not love themselves; they hate themselves. Because of our past, the pain can be so great that we cannot find God no matter how hard we try, or how much we pray, or how much we read the Bible, or how much we dedicate our life to service in the church. The pain that stands in the way of love is centered deep within us. We are unable to believe that God loves us, and so love does not have a beginning in us.
So, what causes this great obstruction that keeps us from loving? Most of us need to go back to our past experiences, even back to childhood, maybe with the help of a counselor, to discover how we began to hate ourselves. Our childhood can teach us one of two things: either that we are a person who has value and is loved and accepted and allowed freedom or we are a person who is of no value. Perhaps we were never loved or touched or received confidence from a parent or perhaps we received condemnation from a parent, a sibling, or another person.
My father was the obstruction in my life. He never touched me or said he loved me. When I was in fourth grade, I heard him say, “Of course we love our children” but I thought then that he could not show it or say it. What he did do was to beat me, slap me, call me names, criticize me and make fun of everything I did. I walked carefully around him. I never knew when I would get hit. One time my older brother told my dad that when I reached for the light switch going upstairs, I missed the plate and touched the wall. Dad hauled me down the stairs and in a fit of anger beat me to the floor of the living room. If I showed affection for my mother, he would laugh at me. Nothing I did pleased him. He told me my piano playing was just pounding on the piano. I played sports, and he never came to see me. From the fifth-grade on, I worked summers to buy my school books and then to save for college. He told me I was despicable. I was a boy scout, but he ridiculed it. I had one pair of good blue jeans and a couple of clean T-shirts, and that was what I wore to school until I was old enough to buy my clothes. My mother could not completely save me. She would show wonderful love part of the time, and that was my only hold on life. But she threatened me with dad and would tell him when I was bad. I could not trust her. More than that, she was usually depressed and frustrated and at times would go into screaming fits that scared us all. Dad told me that it was my fault and if I didn’t behave I would send her to the insane asylum. So, now, I was responsible for my mother. Something a child should not have to bear. My relationship with Dad finally came to a head when I was a junior in high school. I came home late, and he was waiting for me in the breezeway with a rolled-up magazine. He was very angry, but by then I was bigger than he and I just looked in his eyes and walked directly at him and he backed down and dropped the magazine. I went to bed, and I never had a problem with him again. As an adult, we became good friends. It was easy to have forgiveness for someone who could be my friend, but I was not free from the effects of my childhood with just forgiveness as an adult. I found the Lord when I was a freshman in college, but I still was not free. It was many years later that I was finally free. I had to put myself in the memory of childhood and forgive the scary monster who hurt me. I still need to go back and do that from time to time. I could not be free from myself to love God and others until I could be free from the repeated put-downs that programmed my self-concept and that held me captive.
We have an automatic part of us that follows programs of which we are not directly aware. It is the way that we can reach for a glass of water without having to coordinate and instruct the many muscles and senses that are involved. It is the way we learn to play the piano or learn sports or drive a car. The programming is usually accomplished by much repetition. These are all good things, but there is a downside. Our self-concept is also programmed through repetition, and it is out of our immediate control. When we are repeatedly told that we are worthless, it impacts the rest of our life, and it is almost impossible to be free. Sometimes a single event is traumatic enough to set the program of our self-concept. It is reinforced as we naturally mess up, and it confirms to us that we are bad, or weak, or stupid, or of no account.
The central and conscious part of our soul is our personality. This is who we really are. It is our characteristics, our uniqueness (no one else is like us), our traits, and our temperament. It is our wonderful self. It is the self that Jesus loves, but it is often hidden by the programming that produces hate and our self-centered life. Many people do not know who they are.
The big question is first, can we, through counseling, or honest introspection, love our selves despite what the programming tells us? Can we reprogram over time with the help of God? Because, until we get past our self-centered self-hate we will never know the love of Jesus. We need to be released from our past through forgiveness. We must be free from every encumbrance (Hebrews 12:1). Then we can love ourselves as Jesus loves us—unconditionally– and we can love the person who hurt us and held us captive. “What good is it if we only love those who love us” (Matthew 5:43-48).
This is what we learn from Jesus. He sees the bad behavior, the hatred, the anger, the jealousy, the pride, the selfishness and He still loves us. The reason is that He knows why we are broken. We got it from the evil world in which we live. In that sense, we are all equally victims of an evil world. Broken people break people, and on and on it goes. God understands that about us, but He loves the core person that He made in His image that He may have an intimate relationship with us. He longs to rescue us.
Once we understand how God loves, we need to love the same way.
We begin with an understanding that we live in an evil world, and we are all naturally molded into its form. We then understand that this evil world has caused hatred and destruction within ourselves and others. Some effects are worse than others. Some people have an easy time finding the love of Jesus; others find it extremely difficult. We must be patient with ourselves and others. Once we have this understanding, we must find forgiveness for ourselves and others. Then we are free to love and seek the best for each person. And the best is the love of Jesus within us and potentially within every person we know or meet. We do not fix people or the evil world. We do, however, play a part by demonstrating the love of Jesus within us which can transform the life of people we know.
We are like a garden. We first must do some weeding before we can plant the seeds of love. Love is what we want, but our self-hate keeps us from the love that we desire. We must love ourselves in response to the love of Jesus within us and then we are able to truly love others.
Please contact us for questions, comments, or help in loving you.
For further study see The Missing Commandment: Love Yourself by Jerry and Denise Basel.