Learn to Love Yourself God’s Way
Adapted from Managing Your Emotions
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
When a Pharisee asked Jesus what the greatest commandment in God’s law was, He responded with the words of today’s Scripture verses. What is most important for us as Christians is to love God, love people, and love ourselves. We often feel we do well in terms of loving God and loving others, but we struggle to love ourselves.
Part of loving ourselves involves liking ourselves and feeling good about who God made us to be. The best way to feel about ourselves is to feel positive, not negative, about who we are. If we don’t like ourselves, we will have a hard time liking other people and getting along with them. We may pretend to like ourselves, but pretense doesn’t alter fact. Eventually, the truth will come out.
To be everything God has created us to be and do all He calls us to do, we need to have godly attitudes toward other people and toward ourselves. We need to be emotionally stable and rooted and grounded in God’s love for us (Ephesians 3:17).
When we are rooted and grounded in God’s love, we are secure in who we are. We can be relaxed and at ease. We are confident that our worth as individuals has nothing to do with our performance or anything we do; it has everything to do with God’s heart of unconditional love and acceptance toward us. When we begin to understand how God feels about us, not only can we love ourselves, but we can also like and enjoy ourselves.
Prayer of the Day: Help me, Lord, to understand how You feel about me so I can love, like, and enjoy myself. Teach me to rest in Your love and live with confidence, peace, and gratitude for who You created me to be.
