Holger’s weblog

Loving your neighbor – loving yourself

June 5th, 2006

I don’t want you to think I’ve had a sudden flash of inspiration when a lot of articles in the “Christian Living” category turn up now – I’ve been digging through my little archive of “Service on Sunday” sermons and other texts I’ve written in the past and am now slowly translating the most important ones to English, so that I can make them available to you. It would be great to get some feedback – sometimes it’s encouraging to hear that the work I put into it was actually helpful to someone . Anyway, today I dug out a text on loving your neighbor (please forgive me if the British spelling with “ou” slips in every now and then…) and how that’s difficult if you don’t love yourself.

“The entire law is summed up in a single command: Love your neighbour as yourself. If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” (Gal. 5, 14+15, NIV). This, for me, is the single most important scripture when it comes to dealing with conflicts, relationships and all that comes with them. It’s not something that Jesus came up with in His teaching, but something that He took from Old Testament law and highlighted as one of the two most important commandments. It’s actually in Leviticus 19,18 and when in Matthew 22, the disciples asked Jesus what the most important commandment was, Jesus answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” You can tell that it was important to him.

Now, this is not going to be one of the standard sermons about loving your neighbor and how we need to have more of that, you’ve probably heard enough of that already. This is about the question, why this commandment is often so extremely hard to follow. I have a theory that more often than actually getting it right, we actually fall into one of the following two extremes. We either have too much love for ourselves and thus love ourselves more than the other or we do not have enough love for ourselves and thus assign a few others much more importance that they are due. I would like to focus on that second extreme because I believe it to be the more common one.

So, let’s look at the commandment from that angle once more. There are two important words that we often fail to notice: “as yourself”. Jesus knows how important it is to be able to love oneself. How can I love my neighbor if I can’t even love myself? If I don’t love myself, if I don’t understand my own value (and sometimes I may understand it in my head, but it just doesn’t find its way into my heart), the most natural thing to do is to search for acceptance. The problem is that we rarely turn to God to find that acceptance, instead we look at others to give us what we need. We form little groups of people that assure each other of their superiority by looking down on others outside the group. We see gossip, division, a separation from those outside (and this group could even be a church, let’s not think that we are immune against this) and thus a deficiency when it comes to loving our neighbor.

One of the major reasons for not loving ourselves: we often define others by the sume of their negative attributes – “good news is no news” could be the motto here. Instead of being happy about what they can contribute to our community, we focus (and talk behind their backs) on what we don’t like about them. And believe me, they notice. Now, if they have a low self-esteem anyway, that just confirms their own self-image… even more loss of self-love and the circle begins again. In many ways, this is a breakdown of communication – we have stopped communicating what we value in someone. A while ago I had an evening with two friends of mine and we did something extraordinary – for an hour or more we talked about other people we knew and tried to only teel each other what we like about them. That was quite an eye-opener.

So, now that we have established the cause of many of the problems, what can we do? First of all, as a group we can start paying attention to how we actually talk about other groups, churches, generations and individuals and how we define ourselves as a group. We can try to call to our attention the good things in somebody we find especially annoying. Try to see them the way God sees them. Communicate positively… not in a formal kind of way (“I need to say something positive before I can start with the negative things”), but from the heart. And as someone who is actually a victim of a lack of self-love? Try to see yourself with the eyes of God. He made you and it was good. Ask yourself why you are looking for acceptance with others, what you are willing to do to gain that acceptance and how that affects your other relationships. I believe that many people are trapped in destructive groups, forced by group dynamics and that yearning for acceptance to look down on people they actually like. Ask God to feel this self-love in your heart, so you can give love to others.

I think that it’s important to talk with God, but also to talk with people and to remedy the things that may stand between people, groups and churches. It’s good to ask for forgiveness and to be willing to forgive. Sometimes that’s hard and may take time because the wounds are deep and healing doesn’t come over night, but do bring these things before God and experience healing, so that forgiveness can follow.

I have one verse to challenge you with as I finish, it’s in Acts 2, 46+47: “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” Can we earnestly expect to find “the favour of all the people” and see them understand and accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ while we still don’t have that unity, not even in the smallest groups in our churches?

Technorati : bible, christian, jesus, love, self-love, sermon, unity

Entry Filed under: Christian Living, Sermons