The media is full of material about how to better ourselves, love ourselves, raise our self esteem etc. TV and magazines are replete with articles about how to get more fit/improve our career/turn our homes into a "House and Garden" set/raise the perfect children. Yet in our Christian world we preach a primary focus on God's will for our lives and the crucial message if dying to self with the application of the golden rule: "The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”(Mark 12:31). This seems pretty simple - mankind is essentially self- focused and the golden rule issues a strong corrective (repeated eight times in scripture) to that self centeredness.
However, sometimes people I see in my counselling room, and myself at times, seem so crippled by their "condition" - be that anxiety, depression or self doubt - that they seem unable to move forward in a direction where they are effectively loving others.
What can we learn from Mark 12:31 that helps us to understand that and the necessary remedy? Referring to the use of the Greek particle in this verse, Daniel Wallace argues that by the use of this comparative structure, love of self is an assumed starting place but cautions against the human tendency towards excessive self love, seen especially in the West.
Additionally, many Christian clients further struggle because they know and believe the Gospel message, with all that it entails in terms of their righteousness as a gift from God, His love for them in sending Jesus to die, but this knowledge does not seem to break through their cloud of despair or fear, and so their misery is compounded by their inability to "claim" the promises of God.
How can we understand this paradox? For it is not only in those who have clinical mental health issues, the matter of being limited in our ability to minister to others by our own lack of self worth. What is preventing a Christian person from being in the assumed place of Ephesians 5:29 "For no one has ever hated his own body but he feeds it and takes care of it"?
What clients often discover is, despite their faith, the existence of an internal critical "voice" which either attacks a person directly or has an undermining tone. How many of us will actually berate ourselves harshly when they do something wrong? My own internal critic "voice" will say to me things like "you are so stupid when you do things like that". This internal "voice" is certainly not loving to self, and often is limiting and undermining.
By working on the way that we relate to ourselves, being more understanding, accepting and loving in the way we deal with ourselves, we can be in a better position to follow the golden rule - and truly love our neighbour as we love ourselves.
