Then
add on “Love your neighbor” (Matt. 22:38) and the self-deception thickens.
“Yeah, I love people. I don’t get mad at the slow cashier or the bad driver.
I’m kind to the foreign kid waiting tables. I mow my neighbor’s lawn
occasionally.” But is that really love or just kindness, or perhaps just
tolerance? Paul Miller said, “I honestly don’t know how to love someone if I’m
not praying for them. How did I learn that? By trying to love people when I
wasn’t praying for them. Mess after mess. Frustration on top of frustration”
(interview in byFaith magazine). How
many of our neighbors are we actually praying for on a regular basis? Even
family members and close friends tend to slip on and off our prayer lists
depending on their immediate needs. If we don’t care enough about someone to
pray for them frequently, are we really loving them as God has commanded? Prayer
is just one measure of our love for our neighbor.
The
final part of Matthew 22:38 is, “Love… yourself.” It’s not enough to profess
love for God and neighbor, but we’re to love ourselves too. I read an
illustration recently where a man said, “I’ve always heard that verse as ‘Love
your neighbor but hate yourself,’ and I’ve done very well to fulfill the second
part.” I’ve heard some preaching over the years that might lean toward that
interpretation, telling people to always put others first. While that sounds
like a godly thing to do, for those with low self-esteem (and I include myself
in that group) it can be interpreted to mean that your own needs don’t matter,
you aren’t important, and perhaps that God loves others more than He loves you.
When that is the case, we have to learn to accept what God says is true of us:
we are loved with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3); we belong to the Beloved
and His desire is for us (Song of Solomon 7:10); we are His adopted children
(Ephesians 1:5); and so many other words of truth! If God so loves me, then I
am free to love myself as well. Jesuit Bernard Bush writes, “We cannot assume
that [God] feels about us the way we feel about ourselves, unless we love
ourselves intensely and freely.”
Only
when I know and accept who I am in Christ can I begin to love others with the
love that I have received from my heavenly Father. That is true love. Without
that foundation, all my acts of love are generated from my own strength and are
motivated by the changing feelings of fondness and appreciation. Whole-hearted
love comes from a heart overflowing with the love of God. “I pray… that you,
being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the
saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the
love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the
fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17-19). When we allow God’s love to fill our
lives, that love is reflected back to Him in our daily choices and it’s
reflected in our interactions with others. Only because of His love at work in
us can we fulfill the commands to love God, love others, and love ourselves.
Anything else is a faint imitation at best. Love is part of the Fruit of the
Spirit, which means it can only be grown by the Holy Spirit at work in us.
There’s nothing we can do to make that fruit grow except to abide in the Vine
(Christ)—believing and accepting what He says to be true and letting Him
transform our hearts and lives one day at a time.
While
I write this from personal experience, you can be sure that I have a long way
to go in the growth process! Just because you know something is true doesn’t
necessarily mean that you’ve worked it into your daily faith walk. “Beloved, if
God so loved us, we also ought to love one another… We love because He first
loved us” (1 John 4:11,19).
