"As Yourself"? What We Love When We Love God (part 1)
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength… [And] You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” – Jesus, in Mark 12:30-31
What does this phrase mean, “as yourself”?
Nine times, from Leviticus 19 to James 2—nearly cover to cover—the Bible repeats this command to love our neighbors. Every time it qualifies this command and says, “as yourself.”
It’s natural for people (in our psycho-therapeutic culture) to wonder: Does this mean the Bible commands us to love ourselves? That seems odd. Is that what’s going on here?
Now, let’s start with the most obvious explanation, and why it’s wrong.
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” does not mean, “You know how you are sinful, selfish, and preoccupied with yourself? Okay, good, now I want you to use that as a guide for how to love others.” Sinful self-love is not a good guide for Christ-like love for others.
People have tried to do that. Like, the same way that we are wrapped up in ourselves, we get wrapped up in other people. This ends up becoming a different kind of idolatry (E.g. “codependence”). Only now, instead of being focused on my self, I’m focused on them. Instead of being dedicated to pleasing my self, I’m dedicated to pleasing them. Instead of me being the center of my life, they are. You have likely run into this in your Christian life, or seen this in others. It is unhealthy and not at all what Jesus is describing.
The problem is that this either fails to result in a situation in which the other person feels loved, or it fails to result in a situation where you are actually loving them. Either they feel, rightly, that this is about you being loving more than it is about them feeling loved. Or they feel like you’re trying to do things you think are loving, but you don’t actually love them—which you, in fact, don’t. Love is not just feelings, as they say, but certainly kindly feelings ought to be involved!
What does it mean to love our neighbor as ourselves? Let’s check the immediate context and see if there’s any help there.
The previous phrase is, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Perhaps “as yourself” refers not to something outside the text, but something implied here in this immediately previous command.
What if there is a holy, healthy, way to “love yourself”? What if that is contained in what Jesus is referring to when He says “love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength”? In other words, what if obedience to that command results in a holy, healthy, appropriate regard for one’s self, which then becomes the template for how we show love and care to our neighbors?
Our love for God contains a love for ourselves, which instructs us in loving others?
Let’s think about this.
Let’s think about what it means to love God. Let’s see if it’s true that loving God ends up giving us what we need to love others. And let’s see if it’s also true that, along the way, loving God does something in us that puts us in a position to love others well.
This is the beginning of a short series of reflections on What We Love When We Love God. What we’ll find is that, Yes, our journey into His love will do something to us that will prepare us for doing something for others.
What We Love When We Love God will begin, next week, by considering His Beauty (or, His Glory), and then His Word, His Works, His Will, and His Ways.
As we reflect on what it means to love God, and to love these things about Him, we’ll continue to widen the frame. And I think we may be surprised by the person we find in the picture of what we love when we love God.
LORD, we love Thee too little, it is true. And we too little love the neighbor whom You have given us. But, O Lord, we do love You. We do. And we desire to love our neighbors well. Better. And we know that this is Your will. It is Your will, and it is our will too.
So help us to understand what we need to understand, to draw us more and more into Your love, into love for You, into Your love for others. And amidst the ebb and flow of Your love, Lord, You know we need Your love too. We need Your love to love You well. We need Your love to love our neighbors. And so, please continue to pour out Your love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who You have given to us—continue to draw us into the breadth, length, heigh, and depth of Your love, in Jesus’ Name, Amen. (Rom 5:5; Eph 3:18)
Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash