Your capacity to engage effectively in love relationships will be profoundly affected by how you see yourself. God’s command to love your neighbour AS you love yourself means that your efforts to love another human being will be severely hampered if you do not genuinely love yourself. You can only truly give love if you also see yourself as worthy to receive love.
When you look in the mirror in the morning, what do you see? Do you see a valuable, lovable person? And if not, what is influencing your perspective of yourself?
There are many experiences in life that can make you doubt your value as a person; the breakdown of a relationship, a failed project, a mistake in your past or even negative experiences when you were growing up. You need to recognise these influences and put them in perspective. If you view yourself solely through the lens of a past experience, your conclusions regarding yourself are likely to be wrong. There is much more to you than what you have been through.
Here are three secrets to loving yourself.
Marinade your mind in God’s love for you
My mum is a fantastic cook and she passed that love of cooking to me. When I was young I would shadow her in the kitchen. Watching her cook chicken, beef or fish was a study in creativity. She would assemble a series of herbs, spices and condiments with which to enhance the flavour of the meat. She taught me that meat is only as tasty as the marinade it sits in, and the longer it remains in the marinade the richer the flavours become. So it is with God’s love for you. It’s one thing to have a mental knowledge of God’s love and quite another thing to live in the consciousness of that love.
To increase your consciousness of God’s love, assemble a concoction of God’s word and marinade your mind in it by daily meditation. Draw out scriptures that mean something to you and make them your daily confession. When you step into the shower in the morning, tell yourself, ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made’. When you’re driving in your car, remind yourself that God has said, ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love’. While you’re at work, recall that God says, ‘I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’. Fill your mind with God’s love for you. The longer you focus on God’s love for you, the stronger your consciousness of His love becomes. Love yourself because God loves you.
Learn how to silence the voice of your inner critic
A lot of the time it is the inner conversations we have with ourselves that feed our self-doubt. God loves you profoundly and unconditionally so if you have relentlessly negative thoughts concerning yourself recognise that those thoughts do not have their source in God. You need to be alert to the conversations going on inside your head and where they are coming from. God is in the business of convicting us of sin so we can repent and change direction. He is not in the business of condemning us so we are stuck in guilt and unable to move forward in life.
Whenever a negative thought about yourself enters your mind you can choose to entertain it, give it a home and nurture it until it takes hold of you, or you can learn to replace it with a positive thought that reminds you of who you really are. Martin Luther famously said, ‘You can’t keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building a nest in your hair’.
Give yourself another chance
God always does. Don’t count yourself out because of a mistake in your past. Recognise that the act does not define the person. You may have made a mistake but you are not a mistake. It’s not over until the curtains are drawn. You’re still here, you’re alive, and you have another chance at life. Don’t squander it on regret. Grab this opportunity with both hands and do something beautiful with it.
What are you going to do to love yourself better this week? Tell me on Facebook or Twitter.
