by

Pastor B.J. Knefley

Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36-40). All of this sounds good, but what if you cannot love yourself?

I’ve lived long enough to know that sometimes it’s hard to love ourselves. We tend to be our own critics, seeing every wrong and mistake we’ve ever made, and we often don’t forget them. Our past becomes what holds us back from moving forward. We wonder if people would love us if they truly knew us as well as we know ourselves. Instead of love, we are critical and even self-loathing. Shame and guilt shadow our lives as we struggle to let go of things we have done. In the quiet moments of life, do we ever let go and truly love ourselves? Is that why it is so hard to love our neighbor? Is the problem of loving ourselves stifled by our inability to forgive ourselves?

Someone once said that they found forgiving and forgetting to be the hardest things they’ve ever had to do. Yet we’ve never been told to forget; in fact, it may be impossible to forget something. The only one who forgets is God. However, forgiveness is something we’ve all been instructed to pursue numerous times throughout Scripture. Sadly, when we don’t forgive, we become prisoners of those things we refuse to let go of. The irony is that no one knows what keeps us imprisoned except ourselves. Fear and shame become the most significant obstacles to our ability to move forward.

When Jesus said that he came to set the captives free, who do you think he was talking about? Who are the captives? Are they you and I? And what do we need to be free from but our shame, fears, and guilt? The things that haunt us in the recesses of our minds, like a cancer, strip away our joy and purpose. If we’re struggling to love ourselves, perhaps the problem lies in our inability to accept what God has said about us and in believing the lies that Satan has told. Think about it.