Love Yourself for Jesus' Sake
We are constantly taught, as Christians the most important commandment, right? To love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. AND because Jesus is just a little bit of an overachiever and pretty sassy and sneaky in the way He teaches, in the same answer He stresses the importance of loving our neighbor as ourselves. And to be truthful, in the midwest, for the most part, I think we do a bang up job of most of that command. I think we do try really hard to love God AND I think we try really hard to love our neighbor. But we miss that little nugget at the end there. “As ourselves.”
If you ask me, this is the missing piece of the puzzle. Why aren’t people coming to church when I invite them? Why isn’t this sticking? Why do I feel like I am constantly falling short of making God proud?
The answer? I don’t think we do a very good job of loving ourselves. In fact, I think we pride ourselves on not loving ourselves. We are motivated by that unloving-unkindness. In fact, we were unintentionally raised to be terrible to ourselves. We take humility to the next level around here. And we take loving others to the next level too. How can I possibly love myself when I’m taking all of my time up loving others so well? And we just sort of bask in the glory of all of our hard work of loving others at the detriment of loving ourselves. We take on the martyr role and we feel good about that. It’s fine. I’ll be fine. When harvest is over I’ll take care of myself. When Planting is over I’ll get back to normal. After football season or basketball or track season is finished, then I will have time for myself. We bake another batch of bars for another funeral. We volunteer for another thing. We listen to another friend for two hours over coffee while we smile and pretend we don’t have our own stuff we’d like help sorting through, we’d like grace for, we could use a pep talk for.
And this no room to love ourselves thing? This believing that we aren’t really worthy of self-love thing? It’s a huge problem for two reasons: First and foremost, forever, Jesus died for you. And Second? Why on earth would anyone believe that line you’re selling about Jesus loving You if you’re not acting like it.
A professor once said to us: Your talk talks and your walk walks but does your talk walk the way your walk talks?
So allow me to dig into these points a bit, because they line up directly with this big job we’ve been given as Christians. Love God and love others as ourselves.
The scripture from Romans today points to that first part beautifully but not necessarily very clearly, so let’s say it the easy way. At our very worst. That terrible thing you can’t forgive yourself for, that thing you don’t share with anyone. Christ died for that piece of you. That thing you can’t forgive that other person for? He died for that piece of them. And now that we are saved by Him because of this, and trying to live for Him, we are even better off. We are justified by faith. Justification was once described to me this way: It is Just as if I had never sinned. We have peace. We get to stand in grace. We rejoice in hope.
These things we just GET. They are gifts. They are the fruit of Jesus’ death for us. To not accept that, and I mean really accept that for ourselves. Me personally. You personally. Is arguably the most disrespectful, ungrateful thing we could do. To sit and feel awful about ourselves, to let that stream of negative self-talk run through our minds and bodies. To starve ourselves, to work ourselves to the bone, to deprive ourselves of joy and goodness and Christ’s love because we have deemed ourselves screw-ups is just plain thoughtless of us. That man died for us. That God. The God. sent His son to die for us. The least we can do is be gentle with ourselves. To love ourselves correctly. To receive this gift of death and resurrection.
What does your self-loathing, self-hate do for the world or God anyway? Do you think He stands up there arms, crossed, nodding His head going “that’s right. You did screw up today. Punishing yourself is definitely the answer.”
No! You are His beloved child. So BE LOVED. And love yourself while you’re at it. Because You are the way that Christ, the living body of God, the Son of Man, continues to make His way along the Earth. The Holy Spirit, God is within you. You are continuing Christ’s work. Treat yourself that way.
If not, what sort of example are you setting? You can stand in your driveway and tell your actual neighbor that Jesus died for them because He loves them but you aren’t living as though you are loved, why should they believe you? If the God of the universe finds something to be precious, don’t you yourself also consider it precious? Let’s bring it down about abjilion pegs: if that influencer your follow on instagram falls in love with a product and tells you how wonderful it is, don’t you also want to try that product? And aren’t you predisposed to like it because someone you love loves it? So if God finds you to be precious, and you are called to love Him and to love your neighbor as yourself. Don’t you think you should probably love yourself before you go around trying to love others?
We are not called to hypocrisy and we are not called to half-way work. So if we are going to be sharing the good news, and it is good news. We must live out that good news the whole way. Fearlessly, recklessly, and with abandon. Because Christ died for all of the bad stuff your neighbor did and you believe that. But before you go and tell your neighbor that crazy amazing news, make sure your walk talks the way your talk walks. Are you living like that good news, that amazing love is just as much yours as it is everyone else's'? If not, don’t tell anyone about it.
I’m serious, too. God loves you so deeply and I know you head know that, but if you don’t know that in your heart and bones and fingertips, let Him show you. Sit your self down and don’t say another word. It’s time for you to do the listening. Don’t disrespect Him by disrespecting Him, His work, His death and resurrection, His beloved child. To share this news, this love with someone before you not only know it but live it IS hypocrisy. It’s okay to take the time to let God work in you before He sends you out to tell others of His love. Check your gospels. Jesus didn’t send those boys out immediately. And while I know from experience He takes great joy in sending you out while you still feel ill-equipped and unprepared, He doesn’t do that with strangers.
So do you know Him? Truly? To know Him is to Love Him. Right? And to love Him and to know Him, means that you know He loves His babies. Oh how He loves His babies. Do you love His babies? All of them? Including you? Especially you?
Because back to that verse, that sassy one where Jesus sneaks two commandments into one, I am hoping you are starting to see that sneaky Jesus sneaks in another. It’s actually Love God, Love Yourself, Love others. This is relational spirituality. This is the purpose, the intention, and the method of Christianity.
The more we fall in love with God the more it is only right to love ourselves. Not in a way that distracts, but a way that respects. We all know someone who loves themselves a little too much and little too Not for the Kingdom of God. But that’s not this. Loving ourselves correctly means that because of our Love of the Father in Heaven and the Brother that died and rose for us, we must through faith and grace and peace and mercy and hope, love ourselves. Not because we have suddenly come to the realization that we actually are pretty great, in fact. On this Earth, before it’s our turn for resurrection, we actually are still pretty crummy. BUT! Christ who is in us, and who we live for isn’t crummy.
And if we really believe He died to justify our sins, then to do anything but love ourselves is like saying that we don’t believe what He did really worked. “Thanks a lot Jesus for what you did, but I just can’t imagine that’s true so I’m going to keep treating myself poorly, punishing myself, living with depression and guilt and anger and fear, just to be sure.”
When we can see how Jesus loves us, we can start to love ourselves well. Rightly, correctly, for the Kingdom. And it is only then that it does us any good to love our neighbors. And you might be thinking, but isn’t it better to love them a little until I get this sorted out and then when I finally get my act together I can do the real loving my neighbor as myself? To a degree, yes. We should certainly do everything with love, that’s all over scripture. But what I mean is, don’t be trying to bring people who don’t know Christ to a Christ you don’t live as though you trust. That’s why those who don’t yet know Him think we are hypocrites. We are walking around like we really know what’s up when we have no idea what’s going on.
When we were pregnant with my first, we got all of these cute little books about crazy big concepts. “Quantum Physics for Babies,” “General Relativity for Babies.” And they are fun. They walk the baby through what an atom is, the first page says, this is a ball. The ball is an atom and they walk the baby through a really general idea of what is going on in the world of quantum physics. But even we don’t understand quantum physics. My husband, while we were dating tried to explain to me how little we know about quantum physics and how there is this whole unbelievable world of quantum physics that we can’t even try to understand. Still, we research it and we work with it and we try to understand it. And just because we can’t possibly understand it at this point, doesn’t mean we should let my little Audrey there teach quantum physics at a collegiate level.
The love of God is the same way. We are all sitting in this room today with an intern’s level understanding of God’s love. We have the skills required to fetch coffee and pick up the mail. Until we really learn to live out the love of God, it is probably best we don’t try to run the board meeting. If we have an intern’s amount of experience of God’s love, let us not try to hire more interns. We are not the CEO.
It’s about time I circle back around to my point so you don’t think I’m trying to tell you to quit loving God’s people.
Do love God’s people. That’s wildly important. But before you go out and try your hand at TV evangelism, make sure you are receiving and believing in and living out that love God has poured out to you. Live in the justification through faith, the peace of God, stand in the grace He has given you. Rejoice in hope and in the glory of God. And do all of that with a gentleness. And understanding that while we are on this Earth, we will fall short. We will have bad days. We will use swear words and leave notes on other people’s cars and we will accidentally say things on Facebook we don’t mean. We will burn chicken and forget about reports and we will lash out because of it. There will be sin in the world because that is the cold hard reality of the curse.
And yet, we’ve already won. Jesus took care of it because He loves us. And we get to let that love wash over us anew every day like the most rejuvenating shower and then we get to go out and share that love with our neighbors. And in this order, they will see it. They will believe it. They will know that you’re walking and talking the same way. They will trust you and our God because of that. That is when the real Kingdom work can be done. That is where what Jesus died for get’s to grow in significance.
And I’m going to let you in on a little Christian Life Hack: When you are really living out the love of God for yourself and then naturally to others, you don’t have to work very hard to convince them of anything. They will see it and be drawn to it naturally. Because it IS different than this worldly way of life. Good different. Work smarter, not harder at the advancement of the Kingdom folks. And so instead of nullifying what He died for by living like we don’t believe it, we can instead make it mean more. Make it more true. For more people. He can give out His Holy Spirit gift to more people. And that’s what it’s all about for Him. More of His love, to more of His children. So please. Love yourself. For Jesus’ sake.