No More Self-Hate预览

Yesterday we saw how God showed such great love and care for the struggling prophet Elijah, and I mentioned that the solution to self-hate is God’s great love for us! When I hate myself and feel like a failure, I do not need to LOVE MYSELF more, but rather remember that I am already loved. Today’s passages all reaffirm God’s great love for us. Listen to me, self-haters! Have you ever TRULY come to understand that He loves you? It is not just some cliche on a bracelet somewhere!!! But what difference does the love of God make to self-haters? Think about it this way. Imagine you are dating someone you like. Ladies, you put on that pretty new dress, and your date sees you and can’t breathe for a second, telling you how gorgeous you are. And on your date, he shows genuine interest in what is most important to you. And vice versa, guys, when a girl tells you how handsome you are, when she tells you she loves things that you love, and you find out SHE MEANS IT! Doesn’t knowing you are loved like that somehow make you see yourself just a little bit differently? Don’t you twirl in the mirror for a second, ladies or men, don’t you nod at yourselves, just for a moment? Why is that? Because someone’s genuine love for us dispels some of the hateful lies we tend to believe about ourselves. And that’s just a picture of human love. God’s love for you is even greater. God’s love for you makes the greatest difference! A few weeks ago at church, these lyrics in the worship song “Jireh” stood out on this point of God’s love for us: “I’m already loved, I’m already chosen, I know who I am I know what You’ve spoken, I’m already loved, More than I could imagine And that is enough If He dresses the lilies with beauty and splendor How much more will He clothe you? If He watched over every sparrow How much more does He love you?” That kind of love changes everything! Romans 8:37 says, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Christ loves us, so we are more than conquerors, even over our self-loathing. Believer, it is true. Christ’s love for you changes everything. See, self-love, taken to extremes, can morph into pride, selfishness, and entitlement. But God’s love for us reminds us that we are working from a position of being chosen and being forgiven and frees us to serve others. We aren’t working to earn God’s favor. We already have it.