Self-Love

Luke 10:27
He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind' ; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' "


Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Do we really do that? Oh I know we all love our God, and we even love our neighbors. That is not what I am questioning. I call in to question the key to the second law. Like you love yourself…….many people tend to drop that part out when reflecting on that verse.

The concept of loving others as we love ourselves is mentioned twice in Leviticius, it is in Matthew, Mark Luke, and John. The same concept appears in Romans, Galatians, and James. The key to making it work is loving people like you love yourself. Yet there are so many out there that might love God, they might love their neighbor, but they are far from loving themselves.

Today it is common for people to do one of two things they will hold themselves up to such a high standard that they will never reach it. As a result they live their lives in disappointment. They don’t love themselves, they hold themselves as “not good enough” or they go the other way and don’t believe that they can accomplish anything, and as a result they have no feeling of self-love, only self loathing.

I know many people who are spending so much time running around doing for others, that they take no time for themselves. They worry so much about others spiritual life, that they do not make time for the Lord in their day. I have said it many times before, but I believe that we all should get ourselves on the steady path BEOFRE going out to save the world. That means we should be taking a small amount of time for improving ourselves, for acknowledging what we have a accomplished. If we think about it, what did God say at the close of each day? HE looked at what he created and said it was good. We too should take some time and tell ourselves we have done well. We have to allow the love of Christ to fill our hearts, and overflow out to others. For us to receive love, we have to know that we are worthy of love. After you were born, I can promise you the Lord looked at what he created and said it was good!
So today we should all ask, do we love ourselves? DO we take the same time and the care for ourselves that we so eagerly give to others? Perhaps we should all schedule in a little time for us. Time we can spend with the Lord reflecting not just on his greatness, but the love that he pours inside of us daily. It is that love that should give us the grace and peace to love ourselves. Maybe we can all learn to be a little more forgiving with ourselves. I would think it would give us that much more love to give to our God, and our neighbor!

Peace,
Rev. T