THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

Two Kinds of Self-Love

Before going further it would be well to look at the question of what proper self-esteem, or self-love really is. When Jesus was asked what the greatest moral commandment was, he replied by quoting two commands from the Old Testament. "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself'" (Matthew 22:37-39). Many have understood this second commandment as including a command to love ourselves. However, this is a misreading of what it actually says. We are not commanded to love our neighbour and ourselves, but as ourselves. In other words, the statement naturally assumes that we have a certain desire for our own wellbeing, and the command is to have an equal concern for the wellbeing of others. Self-love is not a virtue that Scripture commends, but one of the facts of our humanity that it recognises and tells us to use as a standard. So what should this concern for our own wellbeing entail?

To get a proper perspective it is necessary to look at the nature of human beings as God created us. In the two booklets God's Vision for His Family the Church and Who Am I? Finding My True Identity as a Human Being and as a Child of God I have explained in some detail the biblical picture of the nature of God and of people. God is a relational being, existing from eternity as three persons, Father, Son and Spirit, in loving relationship with one another. In creating us in his likeness (Genesis 1:26, 27), God also made us relational beings, intended to exist in a loving relationship with him and with one another as additional members of his family. Our true wellbeing will come from sorting out those relationships. In the second of those two booklets I have also looked in some detail at the fallenness of our human nature. In turning away from God we have become centred upon ourselves rather than upon God and others. It is this inversion of our true nature, what we were intended to be, that is the cause of all our problems, our problems with ourselves and our problems with others.

If this picture, given to us in the Bible, is an accurate one, then it stands to reason that any idea of self-love or self-esteem that does not get us turned around and cause us to be as equally concerned for others' wellbeing as for our own is not going to be in our own best interest. Neither, may I say, will it be in the interest of others. In other words, a self-love that leads to selfishness is not going to do me any good. However, a proper self-esteem that leaves me feeling comfortable with who I am and frees me to give myself in service to God and to others, is the kind of self-esteem we are looking for. This booklet is written on the assumption that the view of human beings given in the Bible is an accurate one, and therefore any view of self-esteem that does not include being turned around and getting into a loving relationship with God and others will achieve nothing of lasting value.

It is in this respect that we see the weak spot in the psychological theories of such well-known psychiatrists as Fromm, Maslow and Carl Rogers. Fromm, in his well-known book The Art of Loving, concludes, by various social and vaguely historical arguments, that the God professed by Christian theology is an illusion. He completely neglects the major body of Christian writing on love. Maslow, in his major work Motivation and Personality, discusses love between the sexes, but has no discussion of Christian love. Carl Rogers, in his best-known contribution to personality theory and psychotherapy On Becoming a Person, has no treatment of love at all! Where love is defined, it tends to be "simply as the fulfilment of the patient's emotional requirements" rather than in terms of a person subordinating "his needs and interest to those of others, to someone...outside himself" (to quote Lasch's critique in The Culture of Narcissism of the conception of love that is common among modern-day 'therapists'). Agape love (from the Greek word used of Christian love in the New Testament), on the other hand, always includes the ingredients of sacrifice and service on behalf of another.

In fact, this is the major weakness of the whole human potential movement. Peter Marin, in his article The New Narcissism, argues that the "worldview emerging among us" centres "solely on the self" and goes on to show how the new therapies spawned by this movement teach that "the individual will is all powerful and totally determines one's fate" so intensifying the "isolation of the self".

Walter Trobisch, in his book Love Yourself, sums up the two kinds of self-love like this:

One difficulty lies in the fact that the word self-love has a double meaning. It can mean self-acceptance as well as self-centredness. Along the same line Joseph Piper in his essay "Zucht und Mass" stresses, "there are two opposing ways in which a man can love himself: selflessly or selfishly. Only the first is self-preserving, while the second is self-destroying."

An example of self-love in the negative sense is illustrated by the Greek myth about Narcissus. He was a youth who, while gazing at his reflection in a well, fell in love with himself. Totally engrossed with his own image he tumbled into the water and drowned. From this myth the word narcissism is derived.

The problem is that if we do not feel comfortable with who we are, then we will spend more time focusing on ourselves, trying to find our true identity, searching for satisfaction and meaning. Self-doubt, or worse, self-hatred, invariably leads to self-centredness.

A different problem is the tendency to think too much of ourselves. A. W. Tozer, in The Pursuit of God, writes:

The labour of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honour from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest.

And, as Samuel Johnson once said, "He who overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he who undervalues others will suppress them."

Dennis Voskuil, a Reformed thinker who has written thoughtfully about Robert Schuller's positive thinking, states this in Christian terms. He says that the refreshing gospel promise is

not that we have been freed by Christ to love ourselves, but that we have been freed from self-obsession. Not that the cross frees us for the ego trip but that the cross frees us from the ego trip.

This freedom allows us to value our gifts and who we are, and at the same time to value our neighbour and their gifts with equal honesty. We can accept who we are without either vanity or self-depreciation. True self-esteem is free of self-delusion and self-congratulation. True humility is not thinking less of ourselves than what we are, but not needing to focus on ourselves at all because we are comfortable with ourselves and our focus is elsewhere.

Dale Ryan of Bethel Theological Seminary, in an article Self-Esteem: an Operational Definition and Ethical Analysis, says that true self-esteem is always accompanied by humility. He offers the following table as to how true self-esteem behaves in comparison with low self-esteem:

Another model which some may find useful is the four stages in our growth in loving God and others as ourselves suggested by St. Bernard in the twelfth century. The first stage is love of self for self, which he assumes to be natural and good, unless it runs to excess, when it should be controlled by the command to love one's neighbour. The second stage is love of God for what he gives. This is loving God for his many blessings, forgiveness, love, comfort, guidance and so on. The third stage is love of God for what he is. In this stage God is loved purely for himself, because we "know how gracious the Lord is." Here he finds "no difficulty in obeying the command to love our neighbour. The man who loves like this loves truly; and in so doing he loves the things of God. He loves purely and without self-interest." The final stage is love of one's self for God's sake, that is, loving oneself as God loves every person.

A balanced perspective is given by David Myers and Malcolm Jeeves, both Professors of Psychology, in their book Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith. They write:

To be self-affirming yet self-forgetful, positive yet realistic, grace-filled and unpretentious—that is the Christian vision of abundant life.

Having explored what we mean by a proper self-esteem, let's look at the problem of how we can find it.

Foreward

PART 1 - Clearing the ground

Results of low self-esteem

Two kinds of self-love

PART 2 - The basis of a proper self-esteem; The creation of a loving God

The focus of divine love

Worth a great deal, though unworthy

Conclusion

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