Question:  Dear Greg,

            I have a question that I would hope can be answered fairly soon.  I am attempting to help an individual out of the pit of despair.  As a beginning place I suggested from many prolonged conversations with her that she needed to love herself (she is a Christian).  She has asked me how she should go about doing that.  I have suggested several avenues of possibilities but she has sunk so low with an extreme overload of work and responsibility that I would appreciate your help in this.  How do you learn to love yourself?  Would you address this question for me please?

            Thank you very much,

            Leith

Answer:  Dear Leith,

            From a biblical perspective, such a problem may go back to one’s relationship with God—i.e. a failure to understand that God loves us.  Biblically, our “love” of ourselves—or perhaps better put, our acceptance of who and what we are, and who and what we are not, needs to derive from our relationship with God.  Our position and standing with God is, in fact, based upon his love and acceptance of us, as we are.  That’s the profound message of the oft quoted but perhaps not as oft-pondered passage in John 3:16.

            From the other polarity, once again speaking solely from the biblical perspective, self-hatred and self-loathing thrive in an atmosphere where God is not present and where God is misunderstood/misinterpreted.  So, much if not all self-hatred and failure to accept ourselves comes from the fact that many people have no idea of the relationship God offers us, and how he really feels about us.  So it would seem that the emphasis for your friend might need to be on who and what God is.

            Much of religion (including, unfortunately many Christians) have turned the grace of God into religious legalism.  Religious legalism introduces us to a god (for it is not the one true God) who is harsh, unyielding, demanding and never pleased.  We are taught to tiptoe in God’s presence--much as a young child might fear to wake a sleeping parent who might become angry and upset that they were robbed of their sleep.  We are taught that our main purpose in life is to please God, find a way to please him through religious activities and rituals and to keep his appeased.  We come to believe that we never want to catch God on a bad day, for surely he will have no patience for the likes of us.  Thus, when we really are desperate, when we have really screwed up, we feel that the last place we can go is to God.  We don’t want to wake him up.

            All of this is absolutely the biggest misrepresentation and fabrication of all time.  God is nothing at all like that, but we suffer with the religiously imposed stereotype.  We find it nearly impossible to think that God will love us when we think of the stupid things we have done.  If we ever can bring ourselves to think that he might finally have accepted us—perhaps because we have been able to string together a couple of good months or years of obedience to him, we fall-- (as we all eventually do, for such is the plight of sinful human nature) and we once again, from the pits of humanity, cannot bring ourselves to imagine that God would ever love us again.

            But God does not love us today and not love us tomorrow.  God loves us always, as we are, because of who he is not because of who we are or what we do.  God is not like we are—fickle and erratic.  Unlike us, all of God’s “days” are good days.  This is what I suggest your friend needs to know.  She needs to know that God loves her just as much right now as he did 10 years ago and just as much as he will 10 years from now.  We cannot affect God’s love for us with our activities.  We cannot manipulate him into loving us more.  We cannot cause him to love us less.  God’s love is constant, eternal-- above our manipulations and behaviors and sovereign to our actions.

            Of course, we do find ourselves in desperate situations.  God does not love the fact that we are suffering and miserable, but his absolute commitment to us and love for us remains constant for us during such times.  It is during those times when we are, as I mentioned above, tempted to think that he surely will leave us now.  That’s the very thing we must not do, for in doing so we are convincing ourselves that we are beyond help.  When we have really screwed up our lives God is there just as much as when we are in church, healthy, happy, all dressed up and smiling.  The great thing is that God loves us so much that he will not leave us in the place where he finds us, the pit into which we have fallen, but we must reach out to take his hand.

            That, I would think, is something for you to offer to your friend--the outstretched and loving hand of God.

            In Christ,

            Greg Albrecht