Years of mistreatment and abuse from the very people who should have protected you may have done it. Countless arrows of harsh criticisms fired at you may have played its part. And wrong religious beliefs in a harsh and vengeful God who could never be pleased may have made the final straw that finally crippled you and prevented you from loving yourself enough.
Love your neighbours as you love yourself. God spoke with the presumption that you already know how to love yourself. But how about for people who do not even know how to love themselves? Did God ever tell them not to learn to love themselves? What happens when you don’t love yourself enough?
When you don’t love yourself enough:
- you allow people to mistreat you and to continue to mistreat you
- you try to please other people feeling it’s your obligation, not because you want to
- you feel guilty when good things come your way
- you feel that God doesn’t want you to be happy and He cannot forgive your imperfections
- you feel suspicious when people treat you well or become extra-generous
- you feel that it’s your fault when things go wrong
- you pity yourself easily when someone criticizes you
- you don’t feel comfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror
At first glance, it might seem that this lack of love for isn’t so harmful in our relationship with others. But how could we even have a basis for loving other people when we can’t even love ourselves? By which standards are we going to treat them when we can’t even treat ourselves well? When we don’t love ourselves enough, we also lose the capacity to love other people.
Following are some more of the consequences of not loving ourselves enough:
- we allow others to think that it is tolerable to abuse other people
- we find it hard to receive love
- we become prone to depression and hopelessness
- we sabotage our own success because we believe we don’t deserve it.
- subconsciously, we even reject God’s blessings thinking God could never really be concerned with our happiness.
It isn’t a sin to love yourself. God loves you, and if it’s an evil thing to love someone such as you are, why is it that God continues to love you still?
What’s wrong is when we love ourselves above our neighbours, not caring if we hurt others just so we could get what we want. We also go wrong when we love ourselves or our neighbours above God, for only God could make us fully happy, and it is from Him where all love comes from. God is Love Himself.
Do you love yourself enough?
The thing about hope is that it’s a positive force that shines the most when it’s dark. When everything’s going well, we hardly notice it’s there. But when things go against us, when our dreams fade and when we see no immediate reprieve from our troubles, that’s when hope does its best work for us.
"Where Hope Can Be Found"