What? Love yourself? Wait! That doesn’t seem right… But in the scripture, we read in the last post it stated, “…Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.”

So, before we can begin to love our neighbor, we must be able to love ourselves. I’m sure you are thinking, “How is this not selfish?”

“Self-love is not selfish; you cannot truly love another until you know how to love yourself.” – Anonymous

We’re talking about loving yourself as God loves you. Unfortunately, many people struggle with “loving” themselves for various reasons; it could be that they don’t like their physical appearance, they were mistreated, or something negative was said about them.

We will discuss several areas that we can work on “loving ourselves” in future posts but first, let’s start at the beginning of our lives.  We need to understand that each of us is uniquely created for a specific purpose, no matter what our birth circumstances were.

In Psalms 139:13-16 TLB, it describes how we were fearfully and wonderfully made: “You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit them together in my mother’s womb.  Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! It is amazing to think about. Your workmanship is marvelous—and how well I know it.  You were there while I was being formed in utter seclusion! You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book!”

Sometimes we need to stop and reflect upon how God formed us on both the inside and out. It is astonishing! He knew exactly our features, personality, character, and what we’d do in our life before we were born. Incredible!

I absolutely adore what Oscar Wilde said:

Be yourself.  Everybody else is already taken.

So why not spend your energy learning to love yourself, no matter what may have negatively impacted you?

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Jung

If you do not love yourself, my prayer for you is that you choose to receive God’s unconditional love and begin to love yourself.

Thank you for your time. Be Blessed… LR Maddox
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