What is real self-love?
So, I want to try to write for thirty days straight —
thirty things I’ve learned leading up to thirtieth.
I may or I may not actually write everyday.
We shall see.
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So, Day 1 of lessons I’ve personally learned in my almost thirty years:
You will never love people past the extent that you love yourself.
“Jesus answered him, “‘Love the Lord your God with every passion of your heart, with all the energy of your being, and with every thought that is within you.’ And the second is like it in importance: ‘You must love your friend in the same way you love yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37, 39 TPT)
I think culture tends to swing both ways when it comes to the best way to love yourself -- one side focusing heavily on self-care, the other focusing on only loving God and loving other people. I used to think that the “Christian” thing to do was to love people well, and to come back to myself later. My life was consumed with loving God + loving people while secretly rejecting myself. That is, until one day when the Holy Spirit revealed that until I learned to accept all of me, I would never have the grace to do the same for others.
We love God first. It’s here that we’re filled, that we learn and know His character. We read His Word and form a relationship with Him. We learn what it means to be made in His image and to walk in the authority that He has given us.
We love ourselves. From our relationship with God, we see ourselves rightly. We learn to stop living from people’s affirmation or people pleasing. Our emotions don’t rise or fall on how great our relationships are going, or whether or not people agree with our decisions. & we don’t fall into this lie that somehow we’ll love someone else past that extent that we’ve been healed.
No, from this place, we know the One who delights in us (Psalm 18:19), the One who rejoices over us with gladness, quiets us with His love, and exults over us with loud singing (Zephaniah 3:17).
It’s here that we see ourselves through the lens that the Holy Spirit sees us.
It’s here that we learn to love all of us -- the quirky parts, the funny parts, the parts that still need some work.
It’s here that we take the mask off and heal.
It’s here that we slowly learn to mirror, for ourselves, the same grace that God gives us.
It’s here that we learn to marry self-love and loving people.
& from the overflow of all of that -- from the overflow of His presence and His love that casts our fear we learn to love other people in the same way that we’ve received love.
