How to Love Yourself

How to Love Yourself

 

     “And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment.  And the second, like it, is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31

            Read these scriptures carefully and you will see these are commandments from God.  He didn’t say we should try to do these things, but that in order to obey God, we must do them!  Today, I want to address part of this second commandment.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  I read this several times and wanted to make sure of what I was really seeing here.  I came to the conclusion that it was really important that I love myself!   That sounded a little more difficult than I first thought.

           The first thing I thought of was the story of Snow White and the evil witch.  The witch would go to a magical mirror and look at herself and say, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of us all?” Most of us don’t have the ego that she did.  We look in a mirror and here’s what we see:

·       Every little line and wrinkle

·       Everyone is better dressed

·       Everyone has prettier hair

·       Bigger muscles

·       Nicer Home

·       Bigger Car

·       Doesn’t meet other’s standards

Then we go from there to the ‘Poor Me’ syndrome

·       Has poor health

·       Loves to carry our own burdens

·       Complainer

·       Misses great opportunities because we don’t think we’re good enough

·       We think we deserve better. Why?

·       Self-indulgent because we think we earned it.

·       Depressed

Becomes critical

·       No one else can do anything right

·       Jealousy sets in

·       Judgmental

·       Looks for backsliders

·       Self-righteous

·       Unhappy with everyone including self

We know that we must not indulge in pride or thinking our selves better than others.  So we really need to understand that today we are dealing entirely on ‘loving ourselves’.  Again in Mark 12:31, we are told, “You must love others as much as yourself. No other commandments are greater than these.”

            I have come to the conclusion that unless I love myself with God’s love, I will have a very difficult time loving others.  We might go through the actions of being a caring, loving person, but our heart may not be in it and that is not the sacrifice God wants.

            We are an object of God’s love and it was He who made you. Did God the Father ever make ‘junk’?  God is perfect in all His ways, so therefore He made us perfect in the beginning.  What we have become is not how we were created.  It is disobedient to God to resent who you are.  There are certain things about each of us that we can’t change; eyes, structure, teeth, hair, foot size, etc.  (Unless by artificial means).  However, we can change the way we feel about ourselves. 

            What can we see about ourselves to love?  The Word tells us that we, who are born again, have Jesus in us.  Ask yourself, “Do I love Jesus?”  If you answer ‘Yes’, then surely we must love ourselves. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?”   [1 Corinthians 6:19]  If this is true, why not look at ourselves as precious, beautiful and rare; like God’s temple should be.    

Then we can say that we are amazing men and women of God, because God loved us so much that he sent his only Son, Jesus, to die for us; for you and for me.  God has given us favor because he sees us as His Bride; the Bride of Christ.   Have you ever seen an ugly bride?  No!  Every bride is beautiful.   

Men and women – rise up; you are blessed of God.  You are warriors, princesses and princes who have a Holy temple within you.  Your Father has riches untold and you are going to inherit them right along with Jesus Christ.

“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”   “You are - O daughter of God and Son of God!”