Treating ourself like someone we care about.

We’re looking at Jesus words that we can’t put anything before our relationship with Him – not even love of parents, spouses, or children.

Why?  Well, for lots of reasons.  Not the least of which is that we can only love those people best if we love Jesus first.  Otherwise, our fallen nature will enter into the relationship and do all manner of harm.

But here’s another relationship we should never place before our relationship with Christ – love of self.

We’ve touched on this before in the context of the 2^nd Great Commandment – love your neighbor as yourself.  It implicitly assumes we’re doing a good job of loving ourself – but that’s not at all a given.

Jordan Peterson quips that we should “treat ourself as if we were someone we actually cared about.”  He’s onto something there.

As we’ve noted in the past, left to our own devices we don’t do so well with “self love.”  Here are two common examples:

1. We’re easy on ourself when we should be hard. That is to say, we give in to our lower nature.  “That’s just who I am” … “God loves me anyway” … “It’s not like I’m hurting anyone” … and so on.  When we put Jesus first, He shows us how to love ourself better by calling us to greatness, and warning against giving into our base desires.
2. At the other end of the spectrum, we’re hard on ourself when we should be easy. When we make mistakes and experience a setback, how quickly that voice of self-recrimination steps in, “way to go, genius!”  When we put Jesus first, He shows us how to love ourself better by consoling us and inviting us to show ourselves the same mercy that He pours out on us. 

But here’s another way in which we love ourselves better when we place Jesus first – He shows us how to bear our burdens with hope and fortitude.

In the Gospel, Jesus gives us a three-step plan for being His disciple: (1) pick up your cross, (2) deny yourself, (3) follow Me.

Step #1 is “pick up your cross.”  Why?  Is it because Jesus is a vindictive tyrant and wants us to get a taste of the agony He experienced?  Of course not.  It’s because our cross is the best place for Him to build a relationship with us.

What do you do when you are trying to get to know someone?  You try to find common interests and experiences.  Jesus knows that the most common experience of people who are searching for meaning in life is the experience of suffering.  And so He starts there, with our crosses, to build a relationship.  “The Lord is close the broken hearted.”

In the week ahead, when we come face-to-face with our burdens, it’s an opportunity to ask Jesus, “How are You loving me in this situation?”  

As always – that’s not just a throw away line.  Christ says nothing should come before our relationship with Him.  In our wounded humanity, it is easy to put our burdens between us and Him, because it can be difficult to understand why He isn’t intervening in the way we hope for.

When burdens come, from small (“The cat did what?  Where?”) to big (“Lord, my loved one is suffering and don’t know how to help them”) – we should first look to Jesus and ask, “How are you loving me in this?” with great trust that in time we’ll receive an answer.

And when we do that, we’re doing the best we can to love ourself by putting Him first.

Blessings on your journey with Christ –

Steve and Karen Smith

Interior Life

Postscript:  Jesus Must Come First (Mt 10:37-42)

Jesus said to his apostles: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.

Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

"Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.  Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man's reward. And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple—amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward."