Love and Be Loved

“Love your neighbor as yourself” – Matthew 22:39

About a year and a half ago, I took leave from the team that writes these daily devotionals you receive – my weekly contribution which I affectionately called “Wednesday’s Words” (one guess at the day of the week I wrote for). I was going through a crisis of sorts at the time. I was bitter about many things, not to mention just plain burnt out. My last message before I went on break was based on Matthew 22:39: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I explained that I wasn’t feeling very loved, and so if I was truly going to love my neighbor as myself, I needed to take time to learn what it means to love myself.

As I return to the lineup of daily devotional writers, my first act is to confess that I had it all wrong. Loving your neighbor has nothing to do with loving yourself. Actually, it has everything to do with dying to yourself. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a statement of ends, not means. The end that Jesus intends by the statement is that both we and our neighbor are loved. The means of achieving this, however, is not to be gorged on self-love. The way to achieve Jesus’ statement in Matthew 22:39 is to get ourselves out of the way. The most precious love there is, you see, is God’s love, and that is a sacrificial kind of love. When we empty ourselves of selfish desires, we become uncluttered conduits through which God’s love can flow freely into our neighbors. Cf. John 7:38 (“streams of living water will flow from within him.”) And in the process of being filled with God’s love, we are loved as well. In the end, God’s love touches us and our neighbor in equal measure.

So the break was useful, but not exactly the way I thought it would be. I learned I could stop loving myself and yet love and be loved.