The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no commandment greater than these. Mark 12:31
If you want great relationships, you need to learn to love yourself.
Yesterday we began a new series about how to develop a healthy love for yourself. This healthy love isn’t a narcissistic, selfish or self-serving love. It’s a healthy respect for yourself based on your true worth as determined by who God made you to be and what he says about you in his Word.
In developing this healthy love for yourself, two keys are involved. Mark 12:30 reveals the first: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Step one is to love God.
You see, as you pursue a relationship with God and begin to develop love for him, you also begin to experience his unconditional love, and this love empowers you to love yourself and others.
Part two of how to develop a healthy love for yourself is found in the next verse: love your neighbour as yourself. As believers, we often hear about the “love your neighbour” part, but what about “as yourself”? If you don’t love yourself, how are you going to love your neighbour? If you don’t respect yourself, it’s hard to respect others and if you are overly critical of yourself, you will be overly critical of others.
As believers, we need to give ourselves permission to love ourselves. “Self-love” has such a negative connotation, but we need to redefine it in biblical terms. The more gracious we are to ourselves and the more we learn to accept ourselves despite our imperfections and flaws, the more gracious we will be with others.