GoldSample

Love God, Love People, Love Yourself

How you see yourself has a profound impact on your life and how you live it out. Ultimately, your self-image doesn’t just affect you. How you see yourself affects how you see others. More importantly, how you love yourself has a direct impact on your ability to love others.

In Luke 10:27, when asked what the most important commandment is, Jesus responds:

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind…”

It is one of Jesus’ most well-known statements in all of Scripture. Then He adds,

“And, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”

I find this second part fascinating. In the Church it is very popular to distil these two clear commands (known as the Great Commandment and the Great Commission) into one phrase: 

“Love God and love people”.

However, in our desire to simplify Jesus’ command, to make it easier to understand and apply to our lives, we have lost a vital part of the picture. We have truncated Jesus’ words and eliminated “as yourself”.

Jesus points out that you need to love others as yourself. What happens then if, in fact, we love ourselves deficiently?

The truth is, in order to love others well, we first need to learn to love ourselves. We can only truly love others from a place of personal wholeness. So often we neglect ourselves, or at best have a dysfunctional self-image, and don’t realise that we are sabotaging our best efforts to love others. If we don’t really love ourselves, loving others isn’t just hard – it’s impossible.

Everyone is searching to find a sense of inner peace, but that peace can only be found in one place. It is critical that we learn to nurture an inward thankfulness and gratefulness for God’s grace. The issue of our self-identity and security can only be settled in God’s love for us, which knows no bounds and no restrictions. We will know who we really are when we are fully rooted, grounded and established in Him and His love for us.

Recognising the Gold that we carry as individuals is where we must start. Unless we attribute the same value to ourselves as God does … unless we learn how to be less critical of ourselves and more loving … until we become less frustrated with ourselves and more patient … we will never be able to go out and do the same for others.