Loving Yourself

The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it? Jer 17:9

I spent much of yesterday conversing with followers a certain evangelist on Facebook. I was drawn into it by a friend who re-posted the evangelist's post where he fairly gushed about loving himself. I was more than slightly nauseated.

My heart goes out to those people whose ears are being tickled by anti-Biblical doctrine that is nothing but new age psychobabble. They are in for a very rude awakening, and I doubt that most will have the ‘deep-soil’ foundation to ride out the storm.

Loving one’s self is a quick trip up Feelgood Mountain for romantic Christians. You are like Peter, James and John, who were chosen by Jesus to go up the Mount of Transfiguration with Him. There they saw wonderful things such that Peter wanted to remain there and build temples. But what did Jesus do? He immediately led them down into the demon-filled valley of death.

What waited for them there was the torture and death of everything they believed in. To make matters worse, Peter denied Jesus 3 times, cursed Him and retreated to his fishing boat abandoning Christ and all he believed.

The walled City of Hong Kong - easily the worst slum in the world
before it was torn down

Some people believe that they can live on the mountain all the rest of their lives, but they cannot. Their faith will be tried and tested and stretched beyond belief. It will be painful and if you persevere, you will know God better than you do now.

Jesus retrieved Peter from his boat and commissioned him to go forth and preach the Gospel. Peter finally understood Who Jesus really was and what He expected of him. Until we are made broken bread and poured out wine, we will never be ready to be sent out. We may have the Holy Spirit and we may go out, but we will not be ready.

We will be like Jackie Pullinger, who, with great enthusiasm, went to the old walled city of Hong Kong – the worst slum in the world, and preached the gospel. For years she had not one convert. It was only after she realized that she had to stop preaching Jesus and start being Jesus that she began to change lives.

She had very little to her name but she sacrificed all of it, even her own bed at times. Very soon she began leading people to Christ and delivering them from drug dependencies. Before long she began the enormously successful St Stephen Society which set thousands of drug addicts free through prayer in southeast Asia and turned them to Christ.

She accomplished more than she could have imagined but only after she gave up everything she had including her self-image. There was no room for self-love there, if there had been, she would have wasted her entire life in that hell-hole.