Love Your Neighbor as YOURSELF

How do you talk to yourself? It is a question I have thought about recently and been reminded of how important self-talk is, mostly because I have been in a place where I have been talking bad about myself in recent months. What are the things you tell yourself when things don’t go right, or you messed something up, or life just gets stressful and throws us for a loop (as many in Western KY have experienced the last couple of weeks)?

You are the only one who knows what you think. Everyone else can only see what you do. The things you think probably aren’t too different from what everyone else thinks, meaning it is a common human struggle. Because we are so aware of all our own doubts and fears and the thoughts behind every action, we judge ourselves by that. Others can see none of that and can only see what you do.

The greatest commands are to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. Part of that command is to love yourself. I have heard some say they need to love themselves less and others more. They are afraid that this will lead to arrogance and selfishness. The opposite is true, instead of becoming selfish and doing whatever we want for ourselves, we learn to treat ourselves with the same respect that we show to others. I have noticed that I will talk to myself in ways that I would never talk about another person. It’s wrong to mistreat and talk bad about others, but for some reason it seems okay if we do that to ourselves.

I have to be very careful about how I think about myself. When I doubt myself, what inevitably happens is I become self conscious and concerned about how I am coming across or what others are thinking, and I project my own insecurities about myself onto that other person, and then start to believe that that other person must have a problem with me. The focus turns from others to myself and I can no longer see needs, hurts, ways to encourage, reasons to rejoice, and ways to reach out and love. I become obsessed with my own impression which is all imagined anyway, preconditioned by how I am thinking and talking to myself at the moment. When I am confident in God’s love, and I understand what He has done for me, then I am free to love others without being self conscious. It doesn’t matter because I have been accepted by Christ, and He tells me who I am.

To “love your neighbor as yourself” challenges not just how we think about others, but how we think about ourselves. It allows us to be humble because we become willing to receive love we do not deserve, and we love others not based on their own merit, but on God’s acceptance. The best definition of I have heard of humbleness is “not think less of ourselves, but to think of ourselves less.” Loving ourselves has the opposite effect of arrogance and self-consciousness. It opens us up to loving like God loves and keeps us from trashing ourselves and in turn, others. Think about what you tell yourself this week, and when negative thoughts creep in, remind yourself that you are a child of God who He has redeemed. He thinks so very much of you, and do not trash what the Lord loves so much.