Loving Ourselves

Self-love is a trending topic these days. There are so many books out there on loving yourself, accepting yourself, building your self worth, developing self esteem, and on and on and on. The contention is that you can’t love others unless you first love yourself. Society tells us that loving ourselves is the first step to loving others around us. Not only does the world tell us that we have to love ourselves before we can love others, but it tells us that we have to love ourselves before anyone else can love us. None of this is true, of course. You can love others regardless of how you feel about yourself, and others can love you even if you find yourself unlovable. So how do we make sense of it all? We look at what God says about the idea of self-love.

The world defines self-love as ” introspective prioritization of self, aiming at a deeper love and acceptance of self. It is a meditative focus on one’s own positive traits. Self-love seeks freedom from negative thoughts about oneself — whether guilt or insecurity or even awkwardness.” So the danger here is in the inward view. If we focus and prioritize our self, we focus on the wrong thing. We run the risk of being selfish, arrogant, unteachable, dismissive of others. That’s NOT the kind of self-love that God wants us to have. In fact, the Bible strongly warns against this type of self-love. “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy … “(2 Timothy 3:1-2) Pride goes before a fall, and self love can very quickly turn to selfish love if we are focusing solely on ourselve.

Instead, God wants us to love ourselves based on His love for us. Instead of the focus being turned inward, the focus is turned to God. We love ourselves because God first loved us. (1 John 4:19) We love ourselves because God made us in His image. (Genesis 1:27) We have value to God. (Matthew 10:29-31). We recognize how much love God lavishes on us on a daily basis. (1 John 3:1). How can we hate what God loves? We can’t. If God loves us so much that He was willing to die on our behalf, then we must also love ourselves, recognizing in ourselves the qualities that God sees in us.

Satan wants to twist this idea to his own uses, of course. If he can’t get you to think of yourself as worthless or to struggle with depression and lack of worth, he’ll get you to love yourself so much that you excuse sin in your life. You ignore it under the heading of “self love.” “Well,” you say, “that’s just who I am. I accept myself. I’m only human. It’s okay if I make mistakes.” Yes, you are only human. Yes, you will make mistakes. But God does not want us to be content to stay in our sin. He doesn’t want us to justify it or rationalize it away.

God wants us to confront our sin and repent–turn completely away from it. When the woman who committed adultery was brought to Jesus, he said, “Is there no one who condemns you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” He replied, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” ( The story can be found in John 8:1-11.) Jesus loved her. He accepted her. He wanted her to feel freedom from condemnation. It was not His desire for her to feel shame. He simply wanted her to repent and leave her life of sin behind her. Overwhelming feelings of guilt and worthlessness are not from God. God convicts us of our sin so that we see how much our sin does not fit with our position as a child of God. We recognize our sin. We feel sorrow for it. And the end result should be that we cast it aside and follow after God. The purpose is for us to see our true place in Christ and lay aside anything that keeps us from fully living in that place.

If you are accepting your sin, if you are using self-love to say that you are perfect just the way you are even if you are doing things contrary to God’s will, then you’ve fallen into Satan’s trap. The same is true if you believe Satan’s lies about your value and worth to God. Both are positions God does not want you to be in. In his article Do You Love Yourself Enough, James Beevers says, “True self-love is acceptance of ourselves as redeemed people. Yes, we are loved and accepted, but it is precisely not because we are worthy in ourselves, but because Christ is worthy. ” When we see ourselves the way God sees us, it pours out into the way we live our lives. We take care of our bodies because we recognize that we “are fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14) We seek to be our best because we “are Christ’s ambassadors.” (2 Corinthians 5:20) We honor God with our attitudes and thoughts and with our actions, loving others as we love ourselves because we recognize not only the honor God gives us through His grace and mercy toward us, but that the likewise extends that same grace and mercy to everyone else who is made in His image.

We can start by looking at how God sees us. Ephesians 1 and 2 are great places to start. Look at these chapters and write down every adjective God uses to describe you. Articles like this one from Joyce Meyer Ministries can give you valuable verses that tell you who you are in Christ and how God sees you once you are united with Christ through His work of redemption in your life. Books like this one from Neil T. Anderson, along with its accompanying devotional, can help as well. As you study these scriptures, begin to speak them out loud over your life. Speak them every morning if you need to. As you begin to speak God’s word over yourself, your image and perception of yourself will change and shift to come into line with God’s truth. Your mind will begin to be renewed (Romans 12:2), and you will begin to experience self-love the way God intended it to be. God’s love for you will flow into you and then flow out of you to others, just as God intended all along.