No More Self-HatePrøve

I was teaching at a youth retreat when a young man looked up at me, his eyes welling up with tears as he asked me, “Ms. Carol, what do you do when you hate yourself? When you make the same mistakes over and over again, and you just can’t stand yourself?”

I was so proud of this young man because of his willingness to be honest and vulnerable with me, his peers, and his leaders.

The bottom line is that we have all been there. We have all hated ourselves at some point or another, for some reason or another.

He posed an excellent question. What do we do when we hate ourselves?

This reading plan will examine “No More Self-Hate” overall. In particular, we will look at self-hate that can arise from sin and condemnation and from feelings of inadequacy and failure. We will also look at the ultimate solution to all self-loathing.

To begin, if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you have done something or are doing something sinful that makes you hate yourself, my first question to you is this: HAVE YOU BROUGHT THAT SIN TO JESUS? Have you repented of that sin and confessed it to Christ?

1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

In this verse, the term for “confess” is the Greek term homologeo, which means “to say the same thing.” In other words, have you said the same thing about your sin that God says about your sin? Instead of defending your sin, saying, “Everyone is doing it,” or “It isn’t such a big deal,” have you repented? Have you turned your back on your sin and confessed it to God?

If so, believe that God has forgiven you. He has cleansed you from that sin.

Never forget the life-changing words from Psalm 103:11-14, that God has removed your sin as far as the east is from the west.

Did you catch that? If you head north on the Earth, you ultimately head south once you cross the North Pole. Not so with east and west! Those two directions never meet. When you travel east on a globe, you are always traveling east. East never becomes west. That is how far God has sent your sin away!

But the question I have for you today is this - do you believe it?

Believer, if the source of your self-hate comes from sins you have committed, repent of those sins, and trust that God has forgiven you because you have His Word for it!