& Choosing Christ’s Love Instead

During my early 20’s, I may have even been 19, I was obsessed with building an internal empire. Hours were spent in introspection, honing in on my writing skills, speculating my next move, establishing confidence in myself. And it worked. For the most part, I felt great about myself. I was intelligent, cute, fashionable, had great social skills, and was fairly successful at what I put my mind to. I was beginning to build my life around self-love; this idea of being my own best thing. 

And I was…until I’d meet a guy. Then he’d become my best thing. Then when things would go awry, I was at square 1 again. Working on myself. 

10 years later, I can still fall into the same trap of relying too heavily on my relationship with myself.  Because of God’s grace, I’ve learned that intellect, wisdom, skills, looks, and success count for nothing without a genuine relationship with God. 

However, there are still days when I rely on self-love instead of God’s love. What I mean by self-love is what I think and feel about myself, as well as how I treat myself. 

Today, our society is big on self-love. There is a huge movement around learning to love yourself, learning how to instill strong boundaries, and how to heal past wounds that have kept us from loving ourselves. Now, all of these things are great but too much of anything can turn into a bad thing. 

I’ll use myself as an example. When I am absorbed in self-love, meaning, when I am hyper-focused on consistently affirming myself and my abilities, I often miss the big picture. For example, when I focus too much on how to instill strong boundaries, I sometimes miss other people’s perspectives and miss out on an opportunity to show understanding and grace. I even miss out on opportunities to grow in selflessness.

 I’ll get even more specific. I am a HUGE supporter of work-life balance because I had poor boundaries with my career when I first started. As a result, I am able to balance work and life fairly well, but when I focus too much on that boundary, I miss out on ways God is trying to teach me to give more effort and time to my work. When I’m overly focused on me, I become less focused on Him and what He may be trying to do. 

Self-love teaches us to know our worth and how to rely on our innate abilities, which is good, but it’s only part of the truth. Quite frankly, my own strength is limited. How about yours? Aren’t there some days where you know that you aren’t strong enough, wise enough, lovely enough? Even for yourself? What if that wasn’t a bad thing, but the exact disposition that God wanted you to have? What if our weaknesses and our inability to sufficiently love ourselves helps us to see our need for Christ’s love? 

The issue with self-love, when it is started within the self and not grounded in Christ, is that we (ourselves) don’t have life-sustaining power. It is prideful of us to think that we do. Since we do not have life-sustaining power, self-love has a limit, an end, and will ultimately leave us unfulfilled. 

But doesn’t self-love help us improve our self-esteem? 

It does and it has a lot of benefits that are overall very beneficial to our lives. However, when self-love does not truly connect us to God’s Love or Christ’s love it becomes dangerous. 

This is where the world goes wrong because we have not created ourselves. 

We have been created by the Ultimate Creator God and we need his love, desperately. His love is the only love that never fails, never runs out, never leaves us empty. 

One of my favorite scriptures that confirms this is in John 4. 

In this scripture, Jesus tells a woman who has come to a well for water that she is missing out on real, true life. 

He says, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.” 

Christ-Love teaches us to know the one Who is Worthy and Who imparts worth to us. He is the true source of glory, love, and life. He is the one who is able to give living water, true sustenance and true fulfillment. And what’s more is that these are the things that God wants to give to us. 

Jesus then goes onto say, “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.” 

Self-love inevitably leaves us thirsty again because it is built on the self, a fallible human. But when self-love is prompted by God’s true love, knowing him and having his life within you, He promises that we will never be thirsty again. He promises that the water, the life he gives becomes an everlasting spring within us. His life sustains, fulfills, and overflows. 

Self-love can fail you. God’s love, God’s life, will never fail you.