How God's Love Changes Us: Part 2 - Overcoming Pride & Insecurity Sýnishorn

“Love your neighbor as yourself” is a command written in the New American Standard Bible eight times. It is a foundational principle that we as followers of Christ must stumble toward and sacrifice daily to achieve. It is important to understand that we cannot truly love our neighbors until we develop a healthy love of ourselves. The love of a self-loathing person is love with a lid on, so saddled with dysfunction that it’s nearly impossible to give or receive.

The opposite way to state Jesus’ words might be, “Hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.” Self-contempt inevitably morphs into  other-centered contempt. We can’t love deeply from our cores when we hate our cores at the same time. Vulnerability and intimacy can be terrifying proposals, so we use other-centered contempt to shield ourselves from this risk.The elder brother most likely feels betrayed and abandoned by his younger brother as well as used and unappreciated by his father. He probably is envious of his father’s ability to forgive and love more fully than he can.

But instead of facing what was inside him and approaching his brother and father with his genuine, vulnerable feelings, he lashes out with contempt for his brother as a way to ricochet his own rage. Most of us are angry at something. The elder brother in us rages at all that is not right with the world. If you are not angry at something, I would ask you why. There is much injustice in this world to be angry about. Healthy anger can be a powerful agent of liberation and justice.

Historically, what has been your relationship with anger? What about your own anger? Would you consider how you engage anger to be either repressive or indulgent (both missing the mark of healthy anger)? If so, have you considered what another possibility could be?

How has your own unaddressed anger been projected on those around you?