top of page

Love Your Neighbor...As Yourself

Writer's picture: Mike SonneveldtMike Sonneveldt

a man embodies the words love your neighbor by watering his elderly neighbors plants


Love Your Neighbor


The other day, a friend of mine invited me out to breakfast. As we sat down, he mentioned some obstacles in life that were frustrating his steps forward.


After a while, we zeroed in on something that I've been working with lately and coming to understand.


He needed to learn how to love himself.


In Matthew 22, Christ has this particular exchange with a lawyer. Matthew says, "34 But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him: 36 "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" 37 And He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 Upon these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets."


We take this passage and tend to nod our heads in agreement and move on to verse 41. But something is interesting in what Christ is saying, and extremely interesting in what He's not saying.



Love Your Neighbor...But God First

First off, He places the greatest commandment as a "duh" moment for both Christians and Jews. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."


It makes sense. God above all things. Love Him more than anything else in the world. No idols before Him. He is the beginning and the end of everything.


Got it.


Then Christ gives the second commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Again, we all nod in agreement.


In fact, it's very similar to the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." What most people don't realize is that the golden rule did not start with Christ's utterance. That concept previously came through Jewish culture as well as others. But God took it a step further in the Old Testament and stated we must love our neighbor.


Not just treat them well...but love them.


What we typically miss is that the phrase has two parts. We agree with loving our neighbor. But why define how to love them? Couldn't Christ have just as easily said, "Love your neighbor,"? In fact, it might have made more sense to say, "Love your neighbor as you love your God."


The problem is, that wouldn't work. We must love God above all things. This means "hating" our father and mother (or neighbor) in comparison. Yet, in plenty of places, we're told to love both our neighbors AND our enemies. In other words, our love for our mother, father, and others should look like hatred in comparison, but we're still called to commit to loving our neighbors and enemies alike.


When a tension between loving God and loving other people comes into conflict, we choose the higher love. This doesn't mean we lean into hatred for others, but we align with loving God. That dynamic ALWAYS remains the same. God comes first always. And when a contest comes up between God and mother or father, then your alignment with God and misalignment with mother or father should be apparent. No attempts to compromise to win both. And that may appear like hatred to some. But it's merely determining priorities in the hierarchy of love.


Simply put: Never compromise on your love for God.



Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

But we still have to deal with loving your neighbor as yourself. Once we decide that God's love is the first priority, we must still deal with how to love our neighbors. What does it look like? How do we love our neighbor the way God wants us to?


More importantly, Christ Himself tells us to love our neighbor AS WE LOVE OURSELVES. This means we have to understand what it means to LOVE OURSELVES to shape proper love for our neighbors.


And He placed it in there for a reason. We can't ignore or deny that phrase. If we believe Christ said all things with intentionality, then the words "as yourself" are a specific condition to meet.


Loving ourselves is a foreign concept...especially in America. After all, we're told repeatedly how we're sinful wretches and worms. We're evil, awful people who God held His nose to and showed love to.


But that idea is also a reaction to the pendulum swinging too far the other way. I believe plenty of Christians are so skeptical of the "God loves you" movement that we hesitate when we see the words "Love yourself."


I get it. We've watched an abuse of a "self-centered Christianity" that really just bolsters greed, selfishness, and a self-centered nature. It creates a victim class that is only interested in God as a genie to grant wishes and give you "the best life ever."


So we back away from that teaching and back right into another destructive fallacy.



Love Yourself With Destruction?

I've watched brutal mindsets DESTROY people. I've watched it in myself. And I've witnessed perfectly good Christians take on the identity of "wretched sinner" so closely that they believed that giving themselves that identity repeatedly was more righteous and upright than ever uttering anything that even hinted at a compliment.


Is that how we love our neighbor? "Jim, you're an evil, awful, horrible wretch. You can't get anything right. You're honestly a waste of space. But Jesus loves you."


We spend so much energy battering ourselves with destructive words. We then pat ourselves on the back, telling ourselves, "At least I'm not prideful. I'm the penitent sinner."


You may say you're loving yourself that way. But is that loving your neighbor Jim?


I argue: you're so full of accusation (who's the accuser?), self-loathing, hatred, and bitterness that you refuse to ever utter something positive about a creative masterpiece of GOD. That's right, you seem to forget you are a creative masterpiece of God WHO BEARS THE IMAGE OF GOD. When your inner thoughts tear you down all the time, you are in fact INSULTING the IMAGE OF GOD.


We never think of this. But carry it out. Would talk to your friends and family even to a degree of the way you talk to yourself? Is that how you love? By tearing down, destroying, and belittling? By calling a worm, unrighteous, and unclean?



Love Your Neighbor by Knowing This...

Or does it not say in Scripture in Acts 10, "A voice came to him, "Get up, Peter, kill and eat!" 14 But Peter said, "By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything unholy and unclean." 15 Again a voice came to him a second time, "What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy." 16 This happened three times, and immediately the object was taken up into the sky."


Now, the scholars among you may argue, "But that was talking about the Gentiles to Peter."


You're right.


Now, put your thinking cap on.


What was God saying to Peter? He was saying, "Petey? My son died and was resurrected for them. They're part of this whole thing. I've made them holy. I cleansed them. Don't you go back to believing they're dirty, filthy, awful creatures that you're not allowed to associate with. Times have changed. They're redeemed when they accept redemption."


So if Petey is not allowed to view his gentile neighbor as unclean and unholy, then neither are you as a believer allowed to view yourself as such. You're redeemed. You're made holy. Get over it.


Loving yourself means understanding that you are a creation of God with immense value. You've been bought by the blood of Christ.


But we don't get to talk to ourselves and our neighbors any way we want and still call it love. We're on the hook for our words.



Love Your Neighbor And Yourself With Your Words

Every word we utter matters. Christ says in Matthew 12:36, "But I tell you that for every careless word that people speak, they will give an account of it on the day of judgment."


This means that every word we speak to our neighbor matters, and we'll give an accounting for it. But if we're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves...wouldn't that mean that every word we speak to ourselves or allow to become a belief matters?


Didn't Paul tell us, "We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ?"


Every. Thought. Captive. To the obedience of Christ. Not just the things raised against God, but every thought we have should align with obedience to Christ. I firmly believe that our inner talk to ourselves matters and should be taken captive and aligned with obedience to Christ.


Do you wonder what loving yourself looks like?


Corinthians 13 discusses what love looks like (which we always reference in loving others).


Imagine what it would look like to love yourself properly with Corinthians 13 as a guide. Imagine how many destructive, accusatory thoughts would get taken captive. (After all, isn't Satan the accuser of the brethren?)


Let's do an experiment. Read through Corinthians 13 and imagine showing that type of love to yourself.


1 Corinthians 13:4-7 says, "Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."


Can you truthfully say you love yourself that way?



How You Love Yourself Matters

How you love yourself is how you're supposed to love your neighbor.


Christ attached loving yourself to loving your neighbor precisely because you cannot hate yourself and yet turn around and love your neighbor really well.


What is in your heart gets poured out. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. This means that what is in your heart (hatred) will naturally pour out. You can't get good fruit from a bad tree. You can't magically turn off the hatred switch and truly love others. You must love yourself as a creation of God so that you can pour out love.


Mind you, it's not that we can't commit acts of love in Christ's name while we wrestle with loving ourselves. But your impatience or bitterness against yourself will sooner or later make its way to the surface in how you deal with others. Your inner world WILL define the world around you.


This is why loving yourself means that you must recognize your true identity in Christ.


Unfortunately, this is where people get stuck. They believe that loving themselves means falling into self-centered pride.


God accounted for that. We are to love Him with everything we have. We are to love Him above all else. THIS means that our will, desires, and wants do not supplant God in some misguided attempt to love ourselves.



You're Not Your Desires

And here's the dirty little secret: your desires, wants, and will are not YOU. They are expressions of you, but they are not you. If you were to lose all of your desires, wants, and will...you would still be you. If you lost all of your limbs and ability to move, you would still be you.


These things can be added, taken away, or modified. But a proper identity does not change with the loss or addition of these things. When we identify with those things, we are not properly aligning ourselves with Christ.


This is why we're called to deny ourselves and follow Him. He doesn't say "hate yourself." He says to deny yourself. That means denying the desires, wants, hopes, and paths that would keep you from following Him. But he never says "hate yourself." Because as a follower of Christ, your identity is as a creation of God everlasting, a man or woman so loved as a child that you bear His image as the redeemed.


In other words: would you talk to Christ the way you talk to yourself? Would you beat Him down the way you beat yourself down? Would you ignore Him the way you ignore yourself?


It's time to change it.


Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

You need to figure out what it means to love your neighbor and apply that to yourself.


  • If telling your neighbor a truth salted with grace is loving them, then love yourself that way.


  • If having compassion for your neighbor is love, then love yourself that way.


  • If covering over a multitude of wrongs (forgiveness) is loving your neighbor, then love yourself that way.


  • If sacrificing wants, desires, and possessions for the spiritual good of your neighbor is love, then love yourself that way.


  • You'd be amazed to see what kind of person you became if you applied 1 Corinthians 13 not just to others, but to yourself...




3 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


© 2035 by The Artifact. Powered and secured by Wix

bottom of page