‘Love God and love others as you love yourself’ …breaks down pretty tragically when you do not love yourself.
When you’re not patient, kind, or long-suffering toward you. When you don’t allow needed rest, or try hard, or value your own efforts, or are mean and critical as you look in the mirror. When you “hate” you and kick yourself for not doing this or that. When everything is about others and nothing is for you. When you don’t believe in yourself enough to risk or invest in you, or forgive yourself and so on. When you don’t apologize to yourself for the way you ate for comfort that you needed because you were taking yourself for granted. You and you may need some come to Jesus time, because… if you don’t love you then you won’t love God and you won’t love others.
The good news is that Jesus knows how to love you. So the relationship with Him allows Him the position to provide the value that you have lost for you. He can fill that empty tank up to overflow on others and God. Jesus jumpstarts the love cycle that provides for this new testament law to be made manifest through us. The cycle begins again in a healthy way when we let Christ determine our value rather than leaving that up to our history with ourselves, the labels from others, and the voice these have within us.
It might help to consider the old economic equation that ‘the market value determines the cost of an item by how much is willing to be paid,’ and Jesus paid it all for you.
With that gift from heaven in our possession, our acts of love pull on heaven’s love for us and reach through us to love both God and others as an inevitable fruit of the seeds it plants.
In fact, you know the seed hasn’t taken if the fruit hasn’t grown, go back and receive from the value Jesus placed on you until it takes.
When the fruit grows, love gets its display right there on our face and right there through our hands, and as we care, as we are patient, kind, and long-suffering we pour out the currency of heaven in the world around us and what God sees in us is revealed to us as the veil removes its shadow from our sight.
Because of Jesus we are heaven opened up and endless in wealth for others and for God, our very being disrupts earth's economies and forces the adjustments that manifest Kingdom value and evangelize the world to look more like love for thousands of generations. This is love. Love is eternal, not momentary.
God loves Jesus, He loves to experience Jesus and when we love from Jesus, God is loved by our love. It takes God to love God and God is loved by Jesus’ love. God is love. As we receive love we become one with God not bringing Him down to our level but His love carrying us up to His heavenly’s! Up and up glory to glory forever and ever.
This is what we should be saying when we say we love Jesus. We would be saying, "We love how He loved us into being able to love ourselves enough to love God and others." So be loved, Beloved.
Check out one of our latest podcast with this same title. We read from 1 Corinthians 13: