The Great Command – Part Five
This is the good part of the Shema. We are to love ourselves. This gives no quarter to ego, just opportunity for gratitude and grace.
Love yourself? Yes. Some egotists might well sit up straight and say, “This is the part I have been waiting for.” However, this is the part that strips us of ego. Failure to understand this principle causes much misery. This doesn’t mean that we must love ourselves before we can love anyone else; it means that in the same way we take care of ourselves and are concerned about our own interests, we should take care and have concern for the interests of others.
A person all wrapped up in self is poorly dressed.
A “me-tight world” is a miserable world. It is impossible to be self-centered and Christ-centered. Conversely, it is impossible to be Christ-centered and self-centered. Only one can be God. Before understanding this one wrote of his life in this manner:
“I lived for myself, I thought for myself,
For myself, and none beside —
Just as if Jesus had never lived,
As if He had never died.”
When you properly love yourself in light of God’s love for you, there is a desire to be used by Him in fulfillment of His plan for you. Ego vanishes and obedience begins.
Jesus warned us against this “me first” mentality: “Whoever will save his life will lose it.”
The root of Christian self-love is self-reverence. This comes from an awareness that it is God’s supreme productive and creative power that has produced you. You were made in the image of God. You are the temple of God’s Spirit.
You are more than a member of a herd of guzzling, lecherous little mammals seeking to satisfy the lust of your flesh.
If you love yourself properly you long for self-development; you have a passionate eagerness to become all you can be in God’s will. Your trouble might be that the self you are trying to love is too small and undeveloped.
True self-love involves loving Christ first and foremost.