Love Your Neighbor--Part 2

...This can be stated as a truism: You will love others as you love yourself. That is, your own self-perception becomes a filter through which you view everyone else. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

Welcome to Love One Another, Part 2. So today, let's pick up where we were last time. In the New Testament, there are two injunctions. As I mentioned previously, we are to love God and love our neighbor. Romans 13.8 states, let no debt remain outstanding except the outstanding debt to love one another for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. But what about self-love? We've become bogged down in modern life in being sure that we love ourselves enough and have subtly reversed the emphasis of this commandment. Many people struggle with finding a sense of purpose and worth. The modern secular profession of counseling is centered on this work, to adjust, find our place, and be content with who we are. But in a quest to be certain that we are loved and valued, we've sometimes lost become fixated in getting the love we need and lost the tenuous connection with loving others. It has become commonplace now to say, if you do not love yourself, you will not love others very well either. And we do in fact know that this can be so. There are many people who walk around in this world with a terrible view of themselves. They have, for whatever reason, been unable to get a sense of themselves that isn't poisoned by criticism, abuse, negative feelings, or impossible expectations. So for many years, our society has focused attention, resources, and energy on overcoming this by inviting people to love themselves. And this is often stated as the need for self-esteem. Sometimes the violence, discord, and evil in the world is connected to the destructive and damaged negative self-understanding that many people carry around. If only we can convince them of their essential worthiness, we think they will be different. If only the language can be changed, they might become a different person. And this language has so infused our society that we rarely question its truth. But a helpful difference was captured most effectively by the late John Claypool when he said that this is really stated as a truism. You will love others as you love yourself. That is, your self-perception becomes a filter with which you view others. If you have genuine love for yourself, mature love, you will be more loving to others. If you are filled with self-loathing and shame, you will tend to find others disgusting and repulsive. If you are insecure, you will see everyone around you as a threat. In this interpretation, the emphasis is on being sure that we love ourselves properly so that we will be able to love others in the right way. The Bible and the Apostle Paul in Romans 13.8 turn it in that opposite direction. Self-love is assumed. We will love ourselves. And this is a given in human experience. It's part of our survival as a species. I once went to an ICU unit where a baby of just a few weeks old was fighting for its life. I looked at her, tiny and fragile, and was overwhelmed to see the tubes and needles that almost covered her body. And I felt a sadness that this child had entered the world and so quickly had to learn the lessons of pain and struggle and suffering. I made a comment to the attending nurse about all the needles and tubes, and I was sorry to see a child suffer so. Her answer surprised me. These babies are born with a powerful will to live. They are incredibly tough. That's true. The instinct for survival, self-preservation, and self-enhancement are part of what keeps us here in life. And that is not in and of itself evil. To care for your own needs is normal. We have to look out for ourselves as a matter of stewardship and responsibility. Sociopathic disorders are are found in people who lack human attachment in early childhood. And they have only a sense of meeting their own needs without it being properly balanced to others. So what do we make of this commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves? It seems to go against every evolutionary grain that is in us. Paul remembers writing to a congregation that is like so many of his churches. People struggling to be a people where there was no people. It's composed of Jews and Gentiles, and for all of the Jewish members, the entry of Gentiles without the law created problems and tensions. How could they love these people whom they once considered barbarians without their observance of the law? It was, I'm sure, a complex matter. They practiced their faith in different ways. The Jewish Christians still meticulously remembered the Shema, observing the great feasts and carefully avoiding certain foods. The Gentile Christians, meanwhile, blundered in with very little regard for any of these matters. And it was upsetting in the community. So Paul, in a long section of moral exhortation, gives a clear exposition of how we can live together in the Christian life. The key, he says, is love. He who loves the other This echoes Jesus, has fulfilled the entire law. This is an astounding statement. We need it though, do we not? Is not our planet today struggling with this same problem? How can we coexist? How can we possibly love people so different from us? How can we forgive them when they've hurt us? Our primitive will to survive says you can't. Unless this powerful self-will is ultimately turned toward love for others, however, we will shrivel up and die, both individually and as a society. Love in relationship and community is what we were created to know together. The sad story of the human race is a story of the refusal of love. We have spurned God's love and chosen to cling to ourselves as our only hope in life. In some ways this makes sense when we trust others and find that they do not always return love. And yet to choose the self as the center of life is ultimately to die, for we were also made for love and relationship with others. We were made to extend ourselves in faith to love God and their fine life. We were made to connect ourselves in relationship with others whom God has created and and form marriages, families, communities, and creative associations. Perhaps the answer lies, said psychologist James Beck once, in understanding as yourself to refer to the proper balance in our lives and not to spend them loving ourselves to the exclusion of others. We are, he says, to have a proper self-regard. This means we are to have as clear and honest assessment of ourselves as possible. Not all of this knowledge is pleasant, of course. To see ourselves clearly means also to see ourselves in perspective. We are not the center of the universe. We can see ourselves to some extent as others might see us. This is a function of a mature person to be able to rise above themselves and think about themselves in a detached and honest way. Paul seeks to turn us away from self-absorption and toward positive love. This is a genuine contribution to Christianity and our understanding of love. Most of us are familiar enough with the three words that the Greek language of Paul's day used for love. Agape, eros, and phileo. Eros, from which we get our word erotic, and we usually think of it as sexual and romantic love. That is true enough, but there's more to it than that. Eros means a love that is attracted to its object because in that other it finds what is missing in itself. It is the longing for wholeness and completion that is found outside itself. Who can forget the ache of young love? As teenagers, someone told me long ago, it's only puppy love, but it's real to the puppy. Your first heartache is a doozy. Often in that first encounter with loving someone else, however, are all the longings for that which is missing in us. Children in unhappy homes sometimes seek love relationships, what is missing in themselves. The New Testament uses the word agape almost exclusively. This is love that gives to the other without worry about what it gets in return. No wonder the world doesn't accept our gospel. Such a love seems too good to be true. The love we are to have to our neighbors, says Paul, is agape. It is not love if we love them only for what they give to us. Biblical love is not based on their qualities, what they add to our lives. What we share in common with them or how they help us, it is love given to them sheerly because they are our neighbor and we are commanded to love them. Therefore, says Paul, if we love them this way, we will keep the commandments toward them. When we love another, we willingly, voluntarily surrender our rights and all of our demands toward them in order to love them. So who are we to love this way? Jesus drew on Leviticus 19 and brought it into dramatic emphasis here. our neighbor. Ancient Israel struggled to understand what this meant. They concluded that it meant their fellow Israelites and the aliens or strangers who lived among them. Jesus pushed it further. Neighbor refers to anyone whom God brings into your life who is in need of your love. We are to love them with the same inordinate concern for their survival, preservation, and enhancement that comes so naturally to ourselves. We're to worry about their economic well-being. We're concerned that their lives matter. When we love our neighbor this way, forgetting ourselves in love for another, we connect with the powerful love that is at the heart of all things. It is life-giving. It is also impossible unless God helps us to love. And yet we know from those moments in life where we see it clearly. that this is what we were made for. So why don't we love each other this way if that's what we were made for? We'll take that up next time.