Self-Love and Self-Focus

As I've mentioned before, so often I will find myself being confronted with the same spiritual theme through different books I'm reading and other sources (like a sermon or my John Stott Daily Thought subscription) right at the same time. It feels like God is focusing my attention on something He is trying to impress upon me. And I am always amazed at how this happens again and again. It's one of the reasons I enjoy reading more than one book at a time. Again and again, I just "happen" to hear the same message coming to me from every direction. Some people might consider it coincidence, but it is very encouraging to me. For I believe with all my heart that God is leading me and speaking to me every time this happens. Sometimes this leads to painful self-revelation and subsequent discomfort. But we cannot grow and mature in the love of God and stay comfortable at the same time. So I'm learning to embrace the discomfort.

I am so thankful that God loves me enough to expose my heart to me on a daily basis. Seeing myself as I am, in all my sin and selfishness, makes me even more grateful for His love and mercy in my life. Seeing myself as "good" leads to a perception of worthiness, which I never want to embrace. He alone is worthy.

In "Respectable Sins" I have just read Chapter 12: Selfishness. I have also been reading "When People are Big and God is Small." I read several chapters yesterday and, in this book, the author repeatedly touches on our culture's preoccupation with self-esteem as the solution to all our problems and sheds biblical light on why this is not in line with the gospel. I read just yesterday about the false notion that the Bible is telling us to love ourselves through the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.

And then, this morning, I was amazed when I opened my email and read today's Daily Thought:

'... our neighbours as ourselves ...'

It is sometimes claimed that the command to love our neighbours as ourselves is implicitly a requirement to love ourselves as well as our neighbours. But this is not so. One can say this with assurance, partly because Jesus spoke of the first and second commandment, without mentioning a third; partly because *agape* is selfless love which cannot be turned in on the self, and partly because according to Scripture self-love is the essence of sin. Instead, we are to affirm all of ourselves which stems from the creation, while denying all of ourselves which stems from the fall. What the second commandment requires is that we love our neighbours as much as we do in fact (sinners as we are) love ourselves.
--From "The Message of Romans" (The Bible Speaks Today series: Leicester: IVP, 1994), p. 350.

Edward Welch, in "When People are Big and God is Small," says it this way:
Consider Nathaniel Branden's comments from 'Honoring the Self,' a book praised in Melody Beattie's best seller, 'Codependent No More.'

"To honor the self is to be in love with our own life, in love with our possibilities for growth and for the experiencing of joy, in love with the process of discovery and exploring our distinctively human potentialities. Thus we can begin to see that to honor the self is to practice selfishness in the highest, noblest, and the least understood sense of the word. And this, I shall argue, requires enormous independence, courage, and integrity."

These words would not have been written prior to the 1800s. Or, if they had been, they would have been condemned as the words of a heretic. Today, they are the words of the person on the street. They are a foundational cultural assumption: we are good people who must love ourselves in order to be healthy.

"Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt. 19:19) is considered the biblical proof text (for those who need one). When interpreted through cultural spectacles, this verse means that we must love ourselves in order to love other people. But in reality the passage doesn't even suggest such an interpretation. Jesus spoke these words to a rich young man who clearly loved himself and his possessions too much. There is only one command in the passage, and it is "love your neighbor." Nobody, including the writers of Scripture, could have dreamed that this passage taught self-love. It took some cultural changes to reinterpret it and turn our eyes inward.

The Bible assumes that we have more than enough self-concern. We dress ourselves. We get depressed when things don't go our way. We can be consumed with what someone thinks about us. But cultural assumptions have blinded us. We no longer see the smog we live in. So pastors of many growing churches preach almost weekly about healthy self-esteem, as if it were taught on every page of Scripture. Too many Christians never see that self-love comes out of a culture that prizes the individual over the community and then reads that basic principle into the pages of Scripture. The Bible, however, rightly understood, asks the question, "Why are you so concerned about yourself?" Furthermore, it indicates that our culture's proposed cure -- increased self-love -- is actually the disease. If we fail to recognize the reality and depth of our sin problem, God will become less important, and people will become more important.

In "Respectable Sins," Jerry Bridges writes about selfishness with our interests, our time, our money and in the trait of inconsiderateness:

In 2 Timothy 3:1-5, Paul provides a list of really ugly sins that will be characteristic of the "last days" -- that is, our present age. Included in this list is "lovers of self." Lover of self is a good description of a selfish person. This person is first of all self-centered. At its extreme, the self-centered person cares little for the interests, needs, or desires of others. He is interested only in himself...

The greatest example of unselfishness is the Lord Jesus Christ, who though He was rich, for our sake became poor so that by His poverty we might become rich (see 2 Corinthians 8:9). And Paul urges us to cultivate the same frame of mind (see Philippians 2:5). Apart from Christ, one of the most notable examples of both selfishness and unselfishness occurred during the time of the bubonic plague that reached Euroope in 1348 and was responsible for the deaths of 30 to 40 percent of Europe's population. The plague spread so quickly that when one member of a family was infected, often the whole family died. Because of that, sometimes the entire rest of the family would quickly get out, leaving the sick one to die alone. Many priests cared for the sick and dying, and as a result, they too died. Other priests refused to help. It was said at that time that the best of the priests died and the worst of them lived.

Living unselfishly will likely not cost us our lives, but it will cost. It will cost time and money. It will cost becoming interested in the interests, concerns, and needs of others. And it will cost in learning to be considerate of the emotions and feelings of others...I said early in the chapter that selfishness is easy to see in someone else but so difficult to recognize in ourselves...Ask the Holy Spirit to show you evidences of selfishness in your own life, and let Him use your family members as His agents.

Another manifestation of our self-focus is the elevation of our personal feelings and emotions. Welch writes that "Even in worship services, the goal for many is that people feel something."

This exaltation of feelings has changed the way we think. For example, I just heard a sermon that offered a new, romanticized purpose for prayer. "The purpose of prayer," began the preacher, "is an awareness of the presence of God." I gleaned helpful applications from the sermon, but his lead statement was wrong. The awareness of God's presence is not the purpose of prayer. The preacher was appealing to experience junkies who wanted an emotional boost out of worship, sermons, and prayer.

There was a time in my own life when I would "practice the presence of God"; then, when I felt his presence, I would pray. All went well until the day I didn't feel his presence. I waited for hours, filled with tears, but I never felt The Presence. I tried to pray but I felt that both I and my prayers were in a hermetically sealed room. The Presence finally came the next day when I was asking for counsel from a good friend. His comment was simply this: "Why didn't you just pray by faith?" He taught me one of the most important lessons of prayer; that prayer depended on God and his promises, not my own quixotic emotions.

Keep looking around. You can find the exaltation of feelings everywhere. For example, you can find it in the way we have revised our idea of shame. Shame was originally viewed as the result of a problem between God and ourselves. Now it is reduced to whatever prevents us from feeling good about ourselves...Is it possible that our feelings are often more important to us than faith? Too often, if our faith is weak, we don't see it as a serious problem. It is only when our feelings are distressing that we decide to ask others for help and prayer.

Throughout the history of the church, emotions were always viewed with suspicion because they could vacillate so wildly. Now they are praised. Too often they are the standards by which we make judgments.

When feelings become more important than faith, people will become more important, and God will become less important.

Comments