No More Self-HateSmakprov

A few days ago, we looked at God’s tremendous tenderness to Elijah at a moment of great difficulty and weakness for the prophet.

But you may say, “Well, the prophet Elijah had an angel minister to him, and God spoke to him directly. I would hate myself far less if I had what Elijah had.”

Please hear me when I offer this public service announcement to all SELF-HATERS out there. Every day, God is sending us precisely that type of help!

First, He is doing it through the local church. God created the local body of believers to give you the same support that the angel gave to Elijah! If you don’t have a healthy, local, Bible-teaching church, please find one! Write to me, and I can even help you find one!

Second, as we have said before, being in God’s Word offers that still small voice we desperately need to speak truth into our lives. His Word is sharper than any two-edged sword and is the truth that dispels the lies we believe about ourselves.

God’s Word has changed my entire life. In college, the truth directly spoke to me, showing me whom to date and whom, not to date. When I faced severe emotional distress, God’s Word, spoken through Colossians 3:2, taught me to set my mind on things above. God’s truth, spoken through His people, dispelled my lifelong belief that I was invisible. Today, God’s Word is convicting me to stop speaking hate to myself.

In his writings on Spiritual Depression, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones suggests that instead of speaking hate to ourselves, we begin talking to ourselves differently. He writes,

“Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?

Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your yourself is talking to you.

[But in Psalm 42], instead of allowing this self to talk to him, [the Psalmist] starts talking to himself. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, “Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you.”

Listen to me, those self-haters, insecure, struggling perfectionists out there!

Speak the truth in love to yourself. Proverbs 18:21 says that death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Speak God’s Word to yourself. And watch it change everything.