What is your image of God? I don’t mean what is your Bible class answer to the question about who God is. I mean in those moments when your subconscious is guiding your actions and reactions to what is going on around you, what is your image of God? How does He behave? How does He treat you? If you’re like me, it is not always a great image.
I received a heart-rending letter this week from a brother who is suffering the earthly consequences of his heinous sins. He had heard a sermon I preached entitled “We are Allowed to Love Ourselves.” You may remember the series on this very topic that I wrote on this blog. The brother wanted to know how he could ever forgive himself. Having committed some heinous sins myself, I want to know the same thing. What does it mean to forgive ourselves? Should we forgive ourselves? How can we?
I was humbled last night. I don’t know whether to make this post a family post because it had to do with my relationship with my kids or to make it about our individual spiritual lives because it taught me about my relationship with God. I’ll just tell you the story and let you draw your own conclusions.
(If you’ve stumbled across this post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)
When we live in fear and self-hatred, the future looks dim and dark. We look ahead and see nothing but dismal failure. Why would anything good happen to us? We are pathetic and pitiful. We don’t love ourselves, we can’t imagine that anyone else could, even God. So why would good things ever happen to us. We can begin to rewrite even the blessings of the past to imagine that God has completely abandoned us. How much worse will this be if, as happens in life, some bad things really have happened to us. I can’t help but think of Job here. In the midst of his suffering, he couldn’t imagine a bright future at all.
In this state, we are certain that we are worthy of nothing good. Why then would God allow something good to happen to us or for us?Why would anyone else bestow much good on us? Why should we even seek anything good? We begin to catastrophize and awfullize our future. We play a video tape in our head that says everything is going to be bad. The very sad part about this is when we believe this, we live like it, and most often we cause the very things we fear.
As we wrap up this look at healthy love, we need to understand that God does love us. We are allowed to love ourselves. We are allowed to believe all things and hope all things. We are allowed to believe in our own worth. After all, God believes we are valuable. He thinks we are so important He has numbered our hairs. Not a single hair falls out that God doesn’t notice (cf. Luke 12:6-7). If God thinks we are that valuable, we can rest our own sense of worth in our relationship with Him.
We can look to the future and see good things. Matthew 7:7-11 explains that God does in fact want to bless us with good gifts. He refuses to give us serpents and stones. He wants to give us fish and bread. He wants us to have His great blessings. No, this doesn’t mean nothing we deem bad will ever happen to us. But it does mean that we know God will carry us through it all and use it all to bring us out on the other side. We know that because we love God and He loves us, He will use all things to bring about our ultimate good (Romans 8:28-30). We don’t have to view the “bad” things that happen to us as our lot in life or the limit of our coming experiences. Rather, we can see them as stepping stones that God will use to accomplish our own glorification.
You are God’s beloved child. He loves you. Love yourself. Then love others. Believe that good is coming. Hope for the best. Then pursue it by the grace of God who loves you.
God loves you. I love you. Why not let you love you.
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I hope this series has been a blessing in your life. If so, please make sure to share it with others. Click one of the links in the “Share and Enjoy” section below to pass it on to your friends.
If you read this post and found it helpful, make sure to check out the whole series. You can start here.
(If you’ve stumbled across thist post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)
I’m told that anger turned inward is a working definition of depression. Thus, to help ourselves overcome depression, we must learn to relieve that kind of anger. We don’t have to be irritable with ourselves.
Don’t misunerstand. We do things wrong. There are times when anger even at ourselves is justified. But we don’t need to let that anger turn into a simmering, just-below-the-surface irritability.
Irritability is not out and out anger. It is not the clamoring and wrath and explosion. Rather, it is that low-lying frustration we carry with us just below the surface. It is something not easily seen. However, when little things happen, this irritability ignites the flame of clamor, wrath, and explosion. Irritibality is not the flame. Rather, it is more like the pilot light that stays lit all the time so that when the fuel hits it, the fire gets going. If we can remove the pilot light, we can prevent many of the burns.
We are allowed to love ourselves. We don’t have to be continually exasperated, frustrated, or irritated with ourselves. The fact is we all mess up. We all make mistakes. We all sin. We are growing; we aren’t perfect yet. While we must not ignore these sins and we must take them seriously, we do not have to respond with a constant barage of berating ourselves. We do not have to hang on to the irritation.
We need to be comfortable in our own skin instead of always being under our own skin. This means we have to learn to be gentle with ourselves, patient with ourselves, accepting of ourselves.
One of the best ways to remove this irritation is to remember that God is working on us. According to Philippians 2:12-13, God is working in us both to work and to will for His good pleasure. Further, according to Romans 8:28-30, God is working on conforming us to the image of His Son. According to I Peter 5:10, God will restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish us. When we remember that God is working on us, being patient with us, and accepting us where we are while working on our weaknesses, we can do the same.
If God is accepting me right now, I can too. I’m not improving myself or my standing with God by carrying the irritation or berating myself. If you’re like me, there is part of you that thinks you can make up for the sin by ranting and raving at yourself, being really angry at yourself, and not letting yourself live down the sins. That doesn’t work. What works is allowing the blood of Jesus to cleanse your conscience so you can be set free to serve the living God (Hebrews 9:14). If you are carrying irritability, you will simply provoke yourself to the same or different sins.
Please understand, loving yourself does not mean ignoring your sins. Rather, it means dealing with your sins properly. Instead of trying to pay for your sins by your own anger, take your sins to Jesus and let Him pay for them. Let His sacrifice purify you and your conscience, but not so you can just keep sinning whenever you want. Rather, let Him purify your conscience so you may serve the living God.
Don’t live in a fantasy land that says you don’t sin or your sins don’t matter. That simply isn’t true. But neither must you let your sins, mistakes, or weaknesses, push you to continued harshness and exasperation with yourself. Even Paul was gentle with himself about his weaknesses. He said he would boast in his weaknesses rather than be irritated with himself about them. Why? Because his weaknesses were what reminded him he needed God. Without the recognition of his weaknesses, he would not have known how much he needed God (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). He would have been lost on his own way which would have ended in death (Proverbs 14:12).
Yes, you make many mistakes. You are growing; you aren’t perfect. But instead of being irritable, love yourself. God loves you even though you’ve made all those mistakes. You can too.
(Come back next Monday as we learn to love ourselves God’s way instead of resenting ourselves.)
(If you’ve stumbled across thist post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)
At first glance, this one seems to be difficult to apply to ourselves. Obviously when we love others we won’t be rude to them. But what does this have to do with how we treat ourselves?
Some translations say love does not behave unseemly or inappropriately. But how does that change our quandary? I really struggled with this until I did some more searching on the web forum I quoted in our very first article. There I learned about one woman who so hated herself that she was looking for love anywhere she could get it. Actually, it wasn’t love. It was her distorted perception of love. She turned to committing sexual immorality with those she described as “dirty OLD men.”
That story could be repeated again and again and again with differing people and different sins. Many times, our sins are simply responses to or attempts to escape from the seemingly overwhelming burden of self-loathing. As we wrongly believe we are worthless, everything that happens to us seems to reinforce that message. Therefore we respond to even minor issues with overwhelming fear, depression, shame, anger. These emotions become chaotic and unbearable so we seek an escape. Along comes our favorite sin to take us out of the reality of our emotions, to numb the feelings. It might be sex, gluttony, drinking alcohol, gambling, drugs, pornography, outbursts of wrath, self-mutilation, or any other number of innappropriate behaviors.
Can you readily see the cyclical dilemma here? Using our sins to numb our feelings may get us out of reality for a few minutes, but once the sin is committed, then we have another reason to see ourselves as worthless. The emotions come back even worse and we need our escape even more strongly. The woman I spoke of above did not feel better about herself, her life, her circumstance after being with those men, she felt worse. But because of the cycle, that only led her to another man, then she felt worse, then another man, then felt worse…
We can break this cycle. We don’t have to behave inappropriately toward ourselves. Instead, we can remember God loves us and therefore love ourselves as He does. We can recognize that the “dirty Old men” don’t love us and we don’t have to give ourselves over to them. Instead, we can put ourselves in God’s hands. We can remember His Son on the cross. We can remember how much He loved us despite all our sins (Romans 5:6-8). We don’t have to view our most recent sins as reasons to run into more sin. Instead, we can view them as reasons to run into God’s loving arms. We can let His love fill us and hold us as we work through the reality of our situation and our feeling.
What are some appropriate behaviors when these feelings come crashing on us and we want to turn to our sins for comfort?
1. Pray
Take your feelings to God. Even if your feelings about God. A touchstone passage about this is Psalm 88. God is able to handle your emotions. Cry in His arms. Yell at Him. Rejoice with Him. Whatever is going on, just tell it to Him. Sin doesn’t have to be your rock. God can be.
2. Reaffirm God’s love for you with Scripture
Plan for this right now. Find Bible passages that express God’s love for you. I used Romans 5:6-8 above. Find some others. Learn where the accounts of Christ’s crucifixion are and read those. Remember that this is His sacrifice for you. Remember John 3:16. I don’t normally advocate messing with the text, but in this instance, I encourage you to quote it this way: “For God so loved the world, with me in it, that He gave His only begotten Son…” Or just, “For God so loved me…” Remind yourself that God did all this even when He knew what you would do and how you feel at this very moment.
3. Reaffirm God’s love for you in your life
One of the greatest tools I’ve learned about in helping me overcome fears and depressions is a gratitude list. We sing a song that encourages us to count our many blessings; actually do that. Why not do this right now? Pull out a sheet of paper and make a list of things you are thankful for. Start small. Come up with a list of 5 things. I bet pretty quickly that list will expand to 10, then 20, then 50. Remember James 1:17. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above…” These blessings are from God because He loves you. Acknowledge Him in all your ways and all your gratitude. Recognizing these blessings are great reminders that God is not picking on you. He loves you. If He loved you like this, you can love yourself right now. You don’t have to turn to your sin.
4. Find a friend who will love you healthfully
Perhaps the easiest way to experience God’s love is to experience it in relationship with one of God’s children. I once read that we will likely never accept ourselves until we experience the loving acceptance of who we are from someone else. Find that someone. Find someone you can share everything with who will still love you without shaming you or taking advantage of you. I know this seems a tall order, but there are people like this out there. There are friends who stick closer than a brother (Proverbs 18:24). Some caveats on this. If your friend spends more time lecturing you about how you shouldn’t feel that way, find a different confidante. If your friend wants to take this intimacy to a physical level, find a different confidante (obviously, I’m not talking about hugging and shoulder crying). If your friend shares your secrets, find a different confidante. Find someone who will respect healthy boundaries, who will realize you are opening up because you want to do right, who humbling recognizes their own sinfulness and lack of ability to sit in judgment over you.
5. Sit in your feelings
This is hard. But instead of trying to escape your feelings, sit in them. It isn’t wrong to hurt, be sad, be angry, feel guilt and shame. These are all part of our lives. Instead of thinking you need to mask them, let them be. I know you probably can’t imagine this, but the feelings will pass if you let them run their course. We think that is not the case because they have lingered for so long. The issue is when we repress our feelings or try to escape our feelings, they actually just sit back and wait for an opportune time to come back. However, when we sit in them and figure out how to express them appropriately, they dissipate. Let me offer you a warning if you have continually and repeatedly turned to sins to numb these feelings. When you first try to sit in them they will seem infinitely worse than they ever have before. You’ve been numbing those pains like a surgery patient with a morphine pump. Take the pump away and the pain is amplified. Trust me, this will go away.
6. Identify the feeling and formulate a response
If you have repeatedly turned to sins to escape these feelings, you may not even be aware that you are feeling or what your feeling is. But one of the most appropriate things you can do is identify what is really going on in your heart. The eight core feelings are: gladness, sadness, hurt, anger, fear, shame, guilt, loneliness. Can you pinpoint one of those? Then ask yourself why you are feeling that way? Go beyond just, “So and so said such and such to me.” Ask yourself why their saying that is causing the emotion. For instance, you might say, “My boss didn’t approve my budget proposal for the coming year. He cut out several key parts saying they were frivolous and I should have known better.” But why is that causing you to feel hurt and sadness (if those are your feelings)? You might figure out, “This makes me feel hurt and sad because I believe I have to please everyone all the time to be a worthwhile person.” Now you’ve pinpointed something. You have a faulty belief. You don’t have to please everyone all the time to be a worthwhile person. God loves you just the way you are. God thought you were so worthwhile even though He knew you wouldn’t please your boss with this budget proposal that He sent Jesus to die for you anyway. You don’t need your boss’s approval to be worthwhile. Your appropriate response is to retool your belief about yourself and your relationships.
Or you may discover that you are angry because you saw your boss’s tone of voice and word choice as condescending, disrespectful, even hateful. How can you respond to that? Maybe you can recognize that this tone is your boss’s problem and not yours. Hateful people are so because of their own inner pain. They are trying to compensate for some weakness they see in themselves. Perhaps a good response for you is to feel compassion and sympathy for your boss’s pain and pray for him to find comfort in God for that pain. Or you may decide you need to express to your boss how that tone impacts you and establish a boundary. “Mr. Boss, I am very happy for the opportunity I have to work with you and for this company, but something has been bothering me and I think it will negatively impact my performance and production for you if I don’t talk to you about it. When would be a good time for us to talk about that?…When you critique me and use words like ‘frivolous’ and claim ‘I should have known better,’ that seems to be a condescending judgment against my motives. I want what is best for our company. This makes me fear for my job and question whether or not you approve of me working here…” Or that last sentence may have been about boundaries, “When you speak to me in that tone it seems to me that you are treating me more like a servant than an employee as if you are questioning my very worth as a worker in this company. I definitely want to hear what will help me be a better employee for you, but I’d like to have a boundary that says we both speak to each other with respect, even when we disagree with each other.”
Okay, this section is getting long and we could go on and on with numerous variables. But I hope you see the point. When you press pause, examine what you are feeling and why, then formulate an appropriate response, you’ll be amazed to see that you didn’t need the sin to deal with this at all.
The point is you do have healthy options. You don’t have to behave rudely to yourself (and you don’t have to put up with rude behavior from others). You don’t have to be inappropriate with yourself (and you don’t have to put up with inappropriate behavior from others). You don’t have to turn to your sin. Turn to God. Turn to His love. Let His love fill you. Love yourself as He loves you. Then you will be free to love others.
God loves you today. Love yourself today.
(Remember to come back next Monday and we’ll learn that love does not insist on its own way.)
(If you’ve stumbled across thist post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)
Perhaps this shocks you. Generally when we think of those who love themselves, we think of boasting and arrogance. However, this demonstrates that loving ourselves as God loves us and the way we are to love others is not about being self-infatuated, self-centered, or selfish. Healthy love for ourselves doesn’t boast and isn’t arrogant.
When we see the Pharisee in Luke 18:11-12, we say, “That man’s problem is he loves himself too much.”
God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.
Despite how self-promoting that was, that is not a healthy love for self. Rather, it is a shallow approach to self. This man didn’t have a healthy love for himself because of any innate value as a creation and child of God. In fact, he did himself a disservice while not even realizing it. He only saw himself as worth anything based on how he compared to others. In this case, he saw himself as better than others, which is certainly a sinful attitude. However, it establishes a terrible groundrule by which to judge self. What would happen when he came across someone to whom he didn’t compare?
Loving ourselves in a healthy way is recognizing the innate value we have as a creation of God who is fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). Loving ourselves in a healthy way is recognizing the innate value we have because God loves us no matter who we are or what we’ve done (I John 4:19). Loving ourselves in a helathy way is recognizing the innate value we have because we are in the same boat as everyone else around us (Romans 3:23).
When we begin to pervert our healthy love into self-infatuation through boasting and arrogance as if our innate value originates from us and what we do rather than from God and what He has done in us, then we have ceased to love ourselves properly and will not be able to love others properly.
Boast in God, not self. You are worth far more than the shallow comparisons with other people whether those comparisons lead you to envy, as we discussed last week, or to boasting and arrogance. Don’t sacrifice the truly healthy love God has granted you for that shallow pretense of real love.
Don’t boast or be arrogant, instead love yourself as God has loved you.
ELC
(Remember to come back next Monday as we learn that we can love ourselves instead of being rude.)
It’s good to be back on the web. The break was needed, but seems like it went a little too long for my taste. Thanks for your patience with me.
When I started the break, our Monday posts on God’s Way for Our Lives was starting a series on learning to love ourselves properly. I’m glad to get back to that. However, before we take up our look at the definition of Love in I Corinthians 13, I just want to share a victory with you. It shows this blogging thing is helping me out just like I wanted it to.
Before I started looking at this biblical concept that we are allowed to love ourselves, I would have beat myself to death trying to maintain this blog even through all the turmoil of making the move. That might have meant putting some family issues to the side. It would surely have meant missing out on some time with my children and wife, which was so needed as I was leading them through this transition. It probably would have meant sleepless nights and grumpy Dad. Or, I might have grudgingly caved on the blogs but hated myself for not having the stamina to keep it up. I would have trashed myself, probably even on this blog in order to try to make me feel better about what I would have seen as a colossal failure.
However, I’ve learned that love is patient and love is kind. I’m allowed to be patient with myself. Just because I can’t do everything I want to be able to do, doesn’t mean I need to belittle myself, talk down to myself, despise myself. I’m also allowed to be kind to myself. The fact is, in a transition like a move, something is going to have to give. It is not normal life. It’s okay to let things go for the sake of my sanity. I don’t have to beat myself up for going through a special season.
I’m so thankful for the liberty from stress this recognition that I’m allowed to love myself by being patient with myself and kind to me is bringing. I’m so thankful that I’m able to jump back into this blog without all the feelings of shame for having to break for multiple months. I’m so glad I have God’s word to guide me and help me have peace and serenity through God’s love, knowing that God loves me whether I blog or not. I’m allowed to love me too.
This is a huge victory for me. It means God’s word really is impacting my outlook on life and His peace is guarding my heart and mind. Thank you, God, for that protection. Please, keep it up.
I hope you can keep joining me on our Monday posts to learn more about properly loving ourselves so we can love others properly as well.
Remember, God’s way works.
