“Love your neighbor.”  This is one of the commandments that Jesus expressly told his followers.  He placed this command with equal importance as loving God with all we have in us.  That tells me that Jesus takes this very seriously.  Before you turn me off, this is not a time for me to condemn “mean” people, but rather to look more closely at the words of Jesus to help us achieve this commandment.

Let’s look at the actual scripture to better understand.  “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.  And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31).  

To many of you, this is a very familiar scripture.  We first learned this in Sunday School so we would start to look at the feelings of others more than ourselves.  If you weren’t raised in church, the world also saw the importance of this commandment.  Remember the “Golden Rule”?   This does work in helping to create empathy and a peaceful world.  It’s God’s law, of course it works!

Ok. Why are there so many people being hurt and having to deal with gossip, backbiting, and truly acts of hatred?  The answer lies in the latter part of the verse 31 above; “…as yourself.”  How can you love your neighbor correctly and truly if you really don’t love yourself?  OUCH!  I believe that the words of God are completely inspired and spoken on purpose, for a purpose.  God did not just throw that in because it sounded self-righteous.  What do you see when you look at yourself?  Not only the physical, but what do you see on the inside?  If you struggle with loving yourself, our human nature draws us to look outside of ourselves to justify our feelings.  Many will look at others and either belittle them in their minds, or continue to confirm their self-defeating talk of how bad off they really are.  Sometimes we make ourselves feel better by looking at others in the church and finding things that are worse than what we feel like are our faults.  This leads to the gossip and backbiting.  On the other side, we may look at some and feel that they have it all together and we will never be as “good” as them. 

Jesus told us that there is only one that is “good”.  Any of these actions are comparison.  In Galatians chapter 6 we are advised not to compare ourselves with others.  When we compare ourselves with others we take our focus off of Jesus and on to man.  Man is not God.  Doing this causes us to turn man into a god.  The Devil loves when we do this.  It makes us ineffective and useless in the plan of God!  We must stop looking at each other in this light of comparison!  God understands you better than you do.  He knew that Satan’s role in our lives is to be our “accuser”.  Many of us are focusing too much on how short we fall in our relationship with God.  This leads to feeling inadequate and sometimes worthless.  Let me help you with these feelings…YOU ARE INADEQUATE!  If we were adequate, we wouldn’t need Jesus!  Jesus loves us in our inadequacy.  Remember, “while we were yet sinners…”  It was during this time that Jesus died for us.  This is an awesome fact!  We are loved by Jesus even if we struggle loving ourselves.   

Have you ever questioned “how could God really, truly love me?”  This is a question that we may never be able to completely understand in our human minds.  First we have to accept the fact that God is love.  Where we love as an action, God is love.  This love is an act of being, like I am female and human and nothing I can do will make me not these things.  I don’t have to decide to be human when I get up in the morning (although there are some in my family who believe I should).  I just am.  That is how our God is love. I challenge you to look at yourself through the eyes of Jesus.  This is a very liberating way to see yourself.  He finds you full of worth and purpose.  He knows every part of you and still loves you!  He made you to be His because he wants you.  Jesus died for us so we could have a relationship with the Father just like Adam did.  Being saved from Hell is a byproduct of this.  Jesus accepts you the way you are and doesn’t compare you with the people around you.  Each person’s relationship with Jesus is personal, just as if you are the only one in His life.  He can do that because He is God.When we see ourselves as the valued person that God does, it will cause us to see our neighbor differently.  We will have the love that Jesus told us to have.  We don’t have pity for people, but love.  Jesus pitied the religious because they thought they had it under control and right, but He loved the people who recognized that His love was what they needed.  Love yourself because God loves you more than we can ever say, then we can truly “love our neighbor”.

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