Loving our true self

We often hear that it is important to love yourself – that to love others we first must love ourselves. But what does that mean?

Most world religions teach that we should “do to others whatever you would like them to do to you” (Matthew 7:12, New Living Translation). Christian churches call this the Golden Rule that Christ Jesus taught. He also taught, “Love your neighbor as yourself” and said this was the second of two great commandments. The first, and greatest, is, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind” (Matthew 22:37-39, NLT).

In the context of these biblical commandments, loving ourselves means much more than just feeling good about who we are – and it doesn’t mean we’re being selfish. It’s a divine demand to understand and love our true selfhood as we grow in our understanding of and love for God. The Bible’s book of First John states, “God is love” (4:16) and the Christian Science textbook expands on this: “‘God is Love.’ More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go” (Mary Baker Eddy, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 6).

To love ourselves is to know our true individuality as the expression of God, infinite Spirit – to know our true, spiritual nature.

When we love ourselves in this way, we naturally feel close to God. We find ourselves more receptive to the care and love God has for us. There are three aspects to these two great commandments: love for God, love for our neighbor, and love for ourselves. Together, they are like a three-legged stool. Our love stands secure when it is grounded on all three legs. As we love God more, “we love him, because he first loved us” (I John 4:19), and we find we can naturally love both others and ourselves more.

As our love for God is increasingly expressed in love for others, we lose any sense that such love could be burdensome or selective because it is rooted in God, infinite Love. We may not like everyone we meet, but we can love them by seeing them as God sees them. And the same goes for loving ourselves. For example, we may not like that we get impatient too often, but as we are receptive to God’s love for us, a human sense of our identity as an impatient mortal yields to the divine, perfect (and patient) creation of God that we each truly are.

This takes loving to a higher level than finite, personal love. It also keeps us from thinking we will love ourselves more “when”: when we lose weight, when we find a different job, when we find someone to marry, etc.

The better we understand God, the better we see our true self – not in terms of human personality traits, but as the offspring of God. We can never be separate from God, good, and can realize our completeness as a divine idea of the infinite divine Mind, God.

Science and Health states, referring to the true identity of each of us, “Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; ...” (p. 475). As we know God better, we see our identity more in terms of spiritual, God-derived qualities such as unselfishness, joy, confidence, and equanimity.

Our human history of faults and unlovely traits may seem a temporary roadblock to loving ourselves, but it can’t keep us from experiencing love. Christian Science explains mortal characteristics such as fear, doubt, self-condemnation, and human will as counterfeits of our spiritual identity as Love’s image. Because God cannot create something unlike divinity, these kinds of traits begin to lose their hold on us as we correct them, and this results in healing.

After I’d been praying along these lines for some time, a health problem I’d been struggling with for a few years suddenly yielded. I also lost quite a bit of excess weight that was related to the problem, without specifically changing the way I ate or my level of activity. What shifted was the depth of knowing that as we love ourselves, we know we are the ever-shining idea of infinite Love, reflecting unselfishness, goodness, and innocence. Knowing this helps us have greater love and compassion for others that overflows to the world.

Because God loves all of us limitlessly and permanently, we always have a basis from which to love. And this blesses not only those in our experience and beyond but us, too.

Adapted from an editorial published in the Oct. 28, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.