We live in a world where it’s often promoted by those of faith that you should always put God first. Therefore the idea to love yourself before you love God is surely going to cause a few eyebrows to raise. Well, there’s nothing wrong with raising those eyebrows as long as you do not close your ears to the facts. And fact number one remains that loving God is meaningless if you do not love yourself.
Think about it. When you are in a relationship the same principle applies that you should not be with anyone else before you learn how to love yourself. This is because it’s believed that it’s the only way you’re ever going to be able to truly put someone first. Yet, somehow when it’s related to God the rules change. It’s suddenly seen by default that God should always be put first and that you should love HIM no matter what. Well, assumingly, because he’s God. But there’s a problem with the latter.
Prioritizing Love
Many people would already be on the defensive that “putting God first” may have been used out of context. But God wants you to love him but not out of force. As a matter of fact, if you love out of force then it may unanimously be agreed upon that this is not love at all. How can you love someone and not love yourself? It’s just impossible. You may think that you love that person but true love comes from within your mind, from within your heart and from within your soul.
Is Love worth the sacrifice?
If you nourish a plant daily it produces healthy fruit. And if you don’t, the plant withers away and dies. When you take care of yourself first, by loving yourself, you are then able to show love to someone else on a different level. Where loving someone is often misconstrued is when people constantly see someone sacrificing and compromising to the benefit of someone else. What they don’t see, however, is that logically this sacrifice can only happen for a limited time.
Indeed, love involves sacrifice. But when too much of someone’s essence (whatever makes them feel alive) is sacrificed at once, they can feel hatred or remorse. It is never a good idea to guilt trip anyone into “loving you”. When you love yourself for who you are, you can then begin loving something or someone else; you will simply understand that you would be doing so for a purpose that’s greater than yourself. And you would willingly choose to love at much less risk of backsliding into a more artificial version of the trait.
The hard truth
It’s very possible that much of what is said here will still fly over many people’s heads. They will continue to seek to love God first because it’s what they’ve believed for so long. However, we live in a time where it is often preached that people need to read their Bibles. And they are told that they need to continue to put God first. And as expected, the negative consequences mentioned in the Bible relative to the last days continue to come to past.
More and more people continue to be selfish and become lovers of themselves. But selfishness and love do not go hand in hand. Such people do not love as much as they think they do because they have been lied to and continue to lie to themselves.
The truth is, as controversial as this may sound, if you don’t love yourself then you cannot truly love God. God can help you find love, but he cannot—or will not—force you to stay in love. Only your consistent efforts to love someone can sustain the feeling and that most effortlessly occurs when you learn how to love yourself first.
The truest kind of Love
Perhaps where the greatest struggle occurs is in people understanding how to properly love themselves. Truthfully, loving yourself is only possible when you embrace all of your strengths and weaknesses and learn how to positively live with them. It’s only at that point you can then fully appreciate the value that loving someone—especially God—can bring into your life.
You simply tend to love who you are, all that you can do and then you respect the whole much more you can be. This is done by acknowledging that you are just one entity. You grasp there are forces outside of yourself that can possibly amplify your strengths and eradicate your weaknesses. And this all happens simply because you comprehend true love.
Love is about gratitude; love is about caring, sharing, compromising and understanding what is required to sustain a healthy and productive relationship. Many claim that they’re in love with themselves or even with God; but only few would grasp that if they were really in love they would never have to say it. They would live only as though nothing else matters. They would be concerned about bettering their lives and the lives of others because that’s true love. Start by loving yourself, then go onto love others … because God would want nothing less.
