Something I constantly hear in my counseling office is some variation of “I just need to love myself more.” I get why people would say this. These are people who have often been hurt, abused, and traumatized. Other people have denied them their value, so they see it as their job to restore that value. Perhaps you feel this way or have friends who feel this way. While the problem that gives rise to this feeling is real, loving ourselves only makes this problem worse. Why?
1. We already love ourselves…in the wrong way.
We are never told to love ourselves in the Bible. In fact, in the nine places where “love” and “yourself” stand near each other in Scripture, some variation of “your neighbor as” sits in between (Lev. 19:18, 34; Matt. 19:19, 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8). In fact, the Bible tells us that the love of self stands in direct contrast to a love for God.
For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.— 2 Timothy 3:2–4
We don’t need to be told to love ourselves—we already do that. We do need to be told to love our neighbor well.
Self-love is not a good thing, no matter what our culture tells us. Self-love is just another form of pride. Even when we feel horribly insecure, this is not because we love ourselves too little but because we value our opinion of ourselves too highly. In other words, loving ourselves—by our culture’s definition—is part of the problem, not the solution. When we focus on loving ourselves, it will inevitably come at the expense of our neighbor.
2. We can’t provide the love we need.
People would quote a famous proverb in Jesus’ day: “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23). The point is that we’re much better at caring for others than for ourselves. In fact, we are often our own worst caregivers. Why? We are constantly making ourselves sick on sin (Jer. 17:9). How can we possibly provide the remedy?
As Paul describes so eloquently, we are at war within ourselves, describing his own inner conflict like this: “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:22–24). How can we possibly love ourselves if we are at war within ourselves? Who will save us from this body of death?
3. We can only find value in the God who created us and saved us.
Brothers and sisters, before you were knit together in the womb (Ps. 139), God chose you, loved you, and adopted you into his family through Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:3–6). This means that your creator and God already loved you with a fatherly love before you ever had a chance to do a thing—let alone love him back (Ps. 103:13). But his love for you extends not only from eternity past, but into the very depths of your broken being. "But God shows his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8).
You see, he not only loved you before you could do anything, but he loved you knowing the depths of your sin and that he would send his son to die for you. What then can you do to separate yourself from this love? Nothing! The apostle Paul tells us that nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:38-39). "This is love," John says, "not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:19). And this is a love we cannot give ourselves.
4. We demonstrate that value in loving one another.
Love—of the sort shown by the God who has both defined and demonstrated perfect love—is sacrificial. This means our love should be constantly directed outward. “We love because he first loved us” (John 4:19). Out of his perfect love for us, we aim to love him with all of our hearts (Deut. 6:4-5) and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
You know what happens when a body of redeemed people love each other with the love God has poured out upon them? They look and feel like the church of the living God. They “stir one another up to love and good works,” constantly meet with each other, and encourage one another (Heb. 10:24–25).
What happens then? You realize anew that you are loved—first by God and then by God through his people—even as you’re loving others. It turns out that you find love by giving love away. And the love you find was the love that first found you (Luke 15), and this love of Jesus will never let you go.
