You Will Always Love Your Neighbor The Way You Love Yourself

If you’re anything like me, at some point you’ve wondered, “Where’s the line between sacrificial love and being a doormat?” Or, “If we are called to forgive over and over again, at what point am I just enabling them?” How do we resolve these apparent tensions?

When Jesus is challenged to recall the greatest commandment, he responds, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37 CSB)

The religious authorities of Jesus' day sought every opportunity to test him and to catch him in error so as to discredit his claim as the Messiah. Jesus saw through their veiled attempt to dismantle his credibility and seized this opportunity to remind them of another crucial commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39).

Jesus wants to remind them that perfect obedience to the greatest commandment includes obedience to this second greatest command—to love your neighbor as yourself.

This command to love your neighbor as yourself contains a key element that we often overlook in thinking about what it means to love the manipulative people in our lives: we’re commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Jesus isn’t asking us to act unloving toward ourselves in the work of loving others. In fact, to love our neighbor well, we must understand how to love ourselves well. Loving ourselves informs how we love others.

This isn’t a "me first" manipulation of Jesus' teaching. This is a corrective to our distorted idea that loving others means disrespecting ourselves. The truth is quite the opposite: you can’t love your neighbor well if you don’t love and respect yourself well in the first place.

When I love others without respect for myself, my love for them ultimately becomes fear-based, self-serving, and manipulative. I end up asking, how can I love them in a way that gains their approval or avoids their rejection? This isn’t love. It’s codependency.

Sacrificial love isn’t something we are manipulated to give, or that we give because we fear rejection or disapproval. We offer sacrificial love as an autonomous decision of our own freewill and are free to withdraw that love without fear of retribution.