Loving Yourself

My pastor, Erwin McManus, pointed out a very small part of a passage in a message that I have memorized and read all my life, yet missed this small part.  It’s in the details of the Bible that many of us miss.  It’s to love yourself.  “Jesus replied, ‘Love the Lord your God with your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Matthew 22:36-37 (NIV) Check out the last two words, “Love yourself.”  How do you love others if you don’t love yourself. 

I get being selfless.  I get putting others first, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t love yourself.  In order to love others, you need to love yourself. A celebrity this last week on Twitter asked how come people were so angry?  I responded with an answer that I hope revealed my love for God, others, and myself.  When we love ourselves, we don’t allow others to have the type of authority over us that is harmful for us and others.

Loving ourselves means letting go of the past wrongs and hurts and living in the present.  Loving ourselves means we treat others better than they treat us because we want to show them how we need to be treated.  Loving ourselves means we serve others joyfully because we know that our service is making a small difference in someone’s life. 

Loving ourselves means we make time to do what we were called to do and not just out of obligation.  It’s a change of heart that requires a love from and for God.  When I truly understood that God loved and liked me for who I am and not for who I am not, the love for myself became stronger.  I try to see the good in others that I know, because I want them to focus on the good in me.  For the people I do not know, for me to judge them is inviting others to judge me the same way. 

Being selfless works.  It works that you are selfless and others give a strange look, but positively respond.  It’s buying the coffee for the person behind you in line at the coffee shop.  It’s letting the car in front of you who needs to get over on the freeway.  It’s listening and truly taking time to think before responding to criticism.  When you love yourself the way God intended, you have a life that is much more fulfilling. 

It’s one of the most difficult concepts I’ve had in my spiritual journey, but I work on it daily.  If it were easy, everyone would do as the verse says and love others as they love themselves.  It starts with loving oneself.  It starts with one.