Do you love yourself? Jesus tells us in Matthew 22:37 and Mark 12:51, “To love our neighbors as we love ourselves.” How can we fulfill Jesus’ instruction to us to love our neighbor if we don’t love ourselves?
What does it even look like to love ourselves? What it is not is having a haughty spirit or thinking of yourself more highly than you should. In Romans 12:3, we are told not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. So what should we think of ourselves? How do we remain humble but truly love ourselves? We need to first see what God’s Word says about who we are, and what He says about us if we have declared Him as our Lord and Savior.
We are told in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” As we accept Christ as our Savior, we become a new creation. This new creation is now no longer a part of Satan’s kingdom but is now a part of the Kingdom of God. We are citizens of a whole new Kingdom with rights as a citizen given to us by Christ.
Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.” We did not create ourselves. We became new creations through Christ when we accepted Him. We became His workmanship. We need to see ourselves as the workmanship of Christ, being aware of the value of His workmanship. Think of the value and worth placed on a great piece of art created by a gifted artist. Now think about how much more valuable and worthy you are as a creation or workmanship of the Master Creator of all Heaven and Earth.
We need to remind ourselves of what great worth we are when Satan or his demons try to tell us otherwise. At times the enemy tries to lure us into self-loathing and depression. Depression is one of Satan’s most commonly used weapons against us. If he can get our eyes off Jesus, he can feed us lies about ourselves that can bring on depression, anxiety and self-loathing. His goal is to make you ineffective in the Kingdom of God through isolation and lies about yourself. But, we have Scripture (John 4:4) that says, “Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.” and James 4:7, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
This is why is so important to remind ourselves who we truly are as citizens of the Kingdom of God and what great worth we are. We need to search the Word of God and learn what God says about us and learn to love ourselves as the children of God. When we love ourselves as God’s valuable workmanship is when we can then fulfill His commandment to love our neighbor as ourself.
