Why Love Myself?
Love songs have always been my favorite. Especially when it's a story. After awhile, you can kinda sing along to any new love song without ever having heard it before. 'You' rhymes with 'too.' 'Miss' rhymes with 'kiss.' 'Might' rhymes with 'night.' 'Maybe' rhymes with 'baby.' And so on.
Most lyrics are familiar, understandable, and beloved except one line that's pretty rare...
"You can't love, if you don't love yourself."
Natalie Grant's song Better Hands uses this line. Whatever It Takes by Lifehouse also centers around this idea.
As a Christian, the concepts of selflessness, loving others, and loving God are constantly megaphoned into my ears. Consequently, I thought that the concept of loving self was worldy and dissonant with Scriptural teaching.
Psalm 51:5, "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."
How could a sinless God wish us to love an inherently sinful thing? Definitely a wordly concept. The Christian's charge is to love the sinless and pure God alone.
Yet, as I've studied the concept of self love, I remembered that Jesus also charged us with this: Matt. 22:39b, "...love your neighbor as yourself."
My honest question is: why would Jesus command us to love our neighbors as ourselves if we aren't meant to love ourselves?
"Love your neighbor as you simultaneously distain or ignore yourself" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
Biblically, there is an appropriate amount of self love that believers must have in order to love both God and our neighbors like we are called to.
Today, I want to explore what loving self is, why we must love ourselves, what it looks like when we don't, and what freedoms come when we do.
Here is what loving yourself does not involve: being arrogant in your belief that you are sufficient.
Loving yourself involves taking the truth that we do not deserve love and covering it with the truth that we are loved. It involves looking our imperfections, insecurities, and fears straight in the eye and saying, "You do not control me."
This is the medium between hating yourself and thinking you're the best thing since sliced bread.
Essentially, we need to agree with God's perspective of us. His perspective is that we are fully loved and thus able to love fully.
God has set up the universe this way: we can only love if we believe that we are loved. 1 John 4:19, "We love because He first loved us." We are not required to love God before He loves us back. We were drawn to Him by His love and grace in the first place.
Since this is true, He knows the only way that we can love Him with our heart, soul, and mind (Matt. 22:37) is if He has made it clear that He loves our heart, soul, and mind. Which He has made very clear.
Because we are fully loved, we are able to love fully.
By agreeing with God's perspective of us, we worship Him.
Will we keep resisting to love ourselves when He has called us His Beloved? Will we continue to disagree with God?
Will we continue to limit our awe of Him and love for Him?
If the amount of love we have for ourselves didn't matter, God wouldn't have made sure we knew that we were so loved and "as yourself" wouldn't be needed in the commandment. Whether or not God's core is love wouldn't matter. But, God knows who He is and how He set up the universe.
Whoever does not love himself cannot love God or another.
It truly is a lie of the Devil when we believe that we are unworthy and unloved.
But it is truly freeing to believe that we are unworthy yet so loved.
It's a hard belief to grasp for sure, but God is in the business of changing hearts.
He loves to work on our hearts so that we are able to be the loving machines He created us to be. But, sometimes, in order for us to let Him do His work, we need to acknowledge that there is work to be done.
Think back to our definition of loving yourself. The second half of it is: "Looking our imperfections, insecurities, and fears straight in the eye and saying, 'You do not control me.'" I want to explore some symptoms of self loathing in particular, how to be free, and why we must be free.
Outside looking in on a self loather:
You can't tell if someone doesn't love himself until you want to love him more than he loves himself...
He won't accept a compliment.
He may run when there's a riff in the relationship.
He may always make you feel bad about yourself.
He may guilt trip you if you confront him.
He may be constantly apologetic for his personality.
He may have multiple personalities.
He may take on an unreasonably large amount of responsibility.
He may consider himself worthless or a failure.
Sound familiar in friends? Yourself?
Inside looking out from a self loather lens:
One of the most blatant symptoms is that it's hard to commit. Mostly, in relationships.
If we who think low of ourselves try to love someone else, as soon as the other person sees the darkest, most filthy corners of our hearts and minds, we can't love them.
They've seen our imperfections, insecurities, and fears and we don't know if they will still love us. We assume no and stop trying to love because we're sure our filth will hurt them anyway.
As soon as we see the other person's dark parts, we are reminded of ourselves who we hate and the person becomes the object we run from or attack because we just want to escape ourselves in the first place.
If you don't have any love or respect for yourself, how can you expect to love, respect, or commit to someone else who has just as much darkness?
And here's what freedom looks like when we choose to believe our Beloved state and agree with it so that it penetrates how we live: we can look our ugly in the face and say, "You don't define me,"and, we aren't afraid of other's ugliness.
We aren't afraid of judgement and we don't give it.
We stop chasing perfection and stop expecting it.
We feel free to mess up. Badly. And feel free to forgive. Profusely.
We know our disgusting hand is held and that other's are not too dirty to hold.
We begin to be patient, kind, content, humble, honorable, selfless, serene, forgiving, joyful, a safehouse, trustworthy, hopeful, and tenacious.
(1 Corinthians 13: 4-7)
Too many of us are still trapped in the lie that our unworthiness disqualifies us from love. We let our imperfections do way more than they are meant to. Instead of allowing them to remind us of God's mercy, grace, and crazy love, we let them decide how much we will love and be loved.
If we don't love ourselves, we don't understand how much we are loved. If we don't love ourselves, we haven't allowed Christ's consuming love to penetrate us.
What are the walls and fears for if we know we are loved despite full disclosure of our darkness?
Jesus sees all of our filth. All of it. That time you lied to your parents when you came home late. That time you looked at porn. That time you justified gossip. That time you drank too much. That time you purposed to hurt with words. That time you went too far with her but didn't stop. That time you dressed a little too intentionally to catch an eye. Every single disgusting part of us is laid totally bare. Christ's response?
"Get me on that cross. Drive nails through my hands and stab my side. Let my innocence be overlooked. Let me feel the intense heat of God's wrath so that the guilty don't have to. I'm going out of my mind that these people have so much pain, guilt, and shame. It hurts me more to know that there is no love between us than this crucifixion or experience of God's wrath ever could. This ends now."
If our filth was a scarlet, smothering curtain, then He just tore it and covered us in tears of sheer joy, love, and release because there is no more separation.
It is finished.
So, do we have permission to remain in self loathing after Jesus died for us?
Do we have permission to believe that as long as our dark parts are hidden we can be lovable?
We were never, ever given that permission.
We don't have that permission because we have to love other people by overcoming the dark and we have to love the Lord by agreeing with His perspective of us.
For those of us who push those closest to us away because they've seen too much or because we are afraid that they will someday, please, let's wait for their reaction to darkness. If they strive to love how Jesus loves, they might just say, "Let me love you more. The lack of love you know hurts me more than filth ever could."
And we might begin to live freely covered in God's love. No longer bound in chains of imperfections.