I'm thinking it may be easier to love yourself if you don't know God.
You measure yourself against others in your life stage and life bracket, and depending on your view of success, you work hard enough and act well enough to meet or exceed your own standards.
A sort of performance-based love.
God puts love yourself into a completely different cauldron.
When we bump into holy God, holy Jesus and holy Spirit through our belief, the mirror in which we view ourselves shatters completely. Self is so sinful and so unholy that to measure ourselves would be to hate ourselves.
How do we resolve that?
We learn to absorb the staggering truth of how much God loves us--every last one of us, none more than another. Somewhat akin to how we love our own children unconditionally, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are completely mesmerized in love with their creations.
If we grew up under sturdy parents who knew how to express unconditional love, then even when we misbehaved, we rested in the knowledge that their love did not quit on us. That love fueled us to get up, dust ourselves off, and move through life again. Their love held us in place until we could love ourselves enough to live out of that love.
God takes that to a whole new level. Nothing can separate us from the love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are loved because we are fearfully and wonderfully made by their hand. That perfect love becomes the fuel that drives us to love ourselves. We love ourselves because we are loved out of a perfect, never-ending love.
Hard to accept? You betcha. Every time we use our own eyes to see ourselves, we forget. Self-measure need not exist when we are comforted by the Father's love. We can simply remember that we are wholly and unconditionally loved by God.
A God-directed cauldron of love yourself immerses us in a tension that is only relieved when we learn to rest in his love. We live out of love yourself, knowing that we are so loved with a perfect love that we can tap into it every day.
Loved. Beyond all words.
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