Love Yourself!

Matthew 22:39
A second is equally important. "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Found myself parked in this verse last night. Probably read it a gazillion times and yet God kind of tweaked me to see it in a different fashion.
I don't know that I'll fully be able to put in today's posting all that I came away with, but I will continue it tomorrow if that be the case.

In the Matthew passage, Jesus was being set up by the religious police. They were so confident in their interpretation of the Law that they wanted to trap Jesus. Of course Jesus was aware of their plans and never spoke out of turn or in a way that gave them ammunition to use against him. If you remember, at Jesus' trial they even had to hire people to bring an accusation against Jesus because they did not have grounds to charge him. There is probably an entire other teaching just in that idea alone. The idea of guarding our mouth and being careful of what we say in public. Anyway, I digress.

The idea of loving our neighbor is not far fetched to most of us. It would incorporate doing good to them. Looking out for their best interest. Speaking truth in love and in general, just being a good servant that would follow God's instructions and help our neighbors. The hard part comes when we start looking into the area of "loving ourselves."  We find that to be a little more difficult. In dealing with people in addiction, what you find is that most of them don't even like themselves, much less love. They have created such a history of destruction and broken relationships that the very thought of loving themselves is foreign, yet Jesus commands us to. In Galatians 5:6, Paul writes that "What is important is faith expressing itself in love." In other words, this learning to love our self requires faith in God. Faith that He will indeed direct us on this journey of learning how to love. Faith gives us access to all of God's favor and grace. In this way, learning to love ourselves leans more on God's Spirit in us at work than in our own efforts and strength. Learning to love yourself involves changing the way you see yourself.  In addiction, we all see ourselves in the worst possible light. We see ourselves through our past behavior rather than who we are as a people. We allow our past deeds to color and define who we are rather than letting God do that.

All through out Scripture, we see God renaming people.
Abram to Abraham....
Sarai to Sara.....
Jacob to Israel....
Saul to Paul.....
Simon to Peter.....
God redefines the person and renames them.
Maybe we have named ourselves wrongly based on our past performance or behavior.
Maybe we have gone around with the name  "Junkie" or "alcoholic".
Maybe we have called ourselves "Looser" or "no good /worthless".
Maybe it's time we lay those names down and let God redefine who we are and then see ourselves as being worthy of loving.
Learning to love our self!
What a concept.
God on you.....
mb