There’s a lot of talk these days about needing to love yourself. That to be truly happy, you need to block out the haters in your life and simply work on self-love. I have a much less popular view that “self-love” is actually one of the worst things you can do. In the end, you will find yourself more unhappy than when you started, because at the end of the day, we are all miserable failures that are no good on our own.
Harsh? Maybe. But I believe it holds weight. Not once in the entire Bible does it talk about loving oneself. The closest thing it says to that is Jesus saying the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second like it is to love your neighbor as yourself. Perhaps you could wildly conflate this verse to mean that we are to love ourselves. Instead, however, I believe the Bible talks most about dying to ourselves and living for God. Not loving ourselves. Loving God.
I got a note from a mentor of mine as he was talking about my upcoming marriage and he said:
“Almost without exception I hear respected members of that fraternity say that “marriage is hard”…. I disagree.
What IS hard is setting aside ourselves and living lives of obedience to Christ! Shockingly, when we’re both doing that, and loving each other as Christ loved the church, marriage is the haven, the stability, the joy, the intimacy, the peace, and perhaps one of the best glimpses of the tenderness of Christ towards us.“
It really rang true for me. We are such selfish beings. All we care about is ourselves. Whether in pride or in abasement. Both of those emotions are reflections of us thinking about ourselves. If we simply got our minds off of ourselves, perhaps we could actually get things done and be happy for others.
In this light of marriage like my mentor was talking about, it makes so much sense. We’re always so focused on what makes us feel good or bad, that we put that burden on someone else when we go into marriage. Instead, what if we instead put that burden on God. We focus on loving God, and more importantly, His love for us. We are worthless of ourselves, but God has given us worth. There is nothing of ourselves that we should love, only what Chris has made us into.
If we cannot die to ourselves, how can we possibly expect to be happy in a marriage that we add yet another human into our imperfection?
To be clear, it’s not that we will ever be perfect in this life. But if we can die to ourselves, we can start to understand God’s unconditional love for us a little better than when all we think about is how we can feel better.