53. "As Yourself" | Is It Selfish to LoveYourself? (What God Actually Meant)

Some days, showing up for the people I love feels like water moving downhill. Other days it feels like wringing out a towel that's already dry. From the outside, those two days look identical. From the inside, they are completely different.

This is the final episode in the "What God Doesn't Count" arc, and it's about the difference. We go to Mark 12:31, "love your neighbor as yourself," a verse most of us have heard so many times it's turned to wallpaper. But that command is actually two, welded together, and most of us have spent our lives obeying the first half while skipping the second. "As yourself" isn't a separate instruction to go work on your self-esteem. It's an assumption: that you're already standing in a settled place of being loved, and the love for your neighbor is supposed to overflow from there.

We also confront the honest question head-on: doesn't esteeming yourself just become selfish? With Desmond Tutu's Ubuntu theology, "a person is a person through other persons," and the proper self-assurance that comes from belonging to God rather than competing with everyone around you, we draw a hard line between the world's brittle, performance-based self-esteem and the settled kind that was never yours to earn in the first place. Then Ephesians 3:17-19, Paul's prayer to be so rooted in love that you're filled with the fullness of God, filled enough to overflow instead of strain.

Four episodes, one arc, and it ends where it should: you already know how to give. This one's about learning to be filled.

Scripture: Mark 12:28-31, Ephesians 3:17-19, 1 John 4:19.

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Transcript

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Okay, where do I start with this one? Okay, alright. So there are days that I can feel a difference in my own chest. And I'm trying to find a way to describe this to you before I go anywhere else in this episode. So some days I I show up for somebody. My family, uh, maybe this show, a person who needs me, and it feels like water moving downhill, right? Easy, like slow. Like you are are walking down a hill, you're exuding less energy, you get into a vibe, you know, it's great. Like I've got, it's like, you know, like you have more than enough energy, and you're just letting some of it spill over onto whoever is in front or on the side of you, right? Other days I show up for the exact the exact same person doing the exact same thing, and it feels like wringing out a towel that's already dry. It's like straining, uh performing generosity that I don't actually have. And and here's the part that I think used to confuse me. Maybe that's not the right word, but that's the word that I have right now. From the outside, those two days look identical, right? Um, the same action, the same words. Nobody watching could really tell the difference, but I can. Because on the dry days, I'm not loving from anything. It's like I'm loving to prove something, to fill a hole, or you know, to earn a version of myself that I don't really, you know, still fully believe is real. Maybe I'm trying to, you know, maybe I was trying to impress a boss or trying to put myself in better standing with uh a pastor that I was looking to learn from. I I I don't know. And I still have both kinds of days, and I need you to understand that before we go any further, because this episode is not about me telling you that I figured it out, because none of these episodes are about that, because I haven't figured everything out. No, I haven't. But it's me telling you that I finally found the verse that explains why the two days feel so different, or I think that I finally found it. So I'm Justin Belt. Uh, this is Faithformed, the podcast for people who don't have it all together, uh, people who are trying to build a faith that sustains us, that survives and thrives in the middle, right? Um, and we this is the last episode in our arc on faith and disqualification and receiving what God has already said about us. And I never gave it an actual name, but we've spent the past three episodes going down uh into the ledger that we keep against ourselves, down into the lie that God likes everyone else more than he likes us. And last week we went down into the reason we can't even receive what's offered to us. Today we're gonna go somewhere different. Today, things are gonna take kind of an upward shift because it turns out that all that inside work was never just about you, it was about everyone that you're ever going to love for the rest of your life. And if you all have enjoyed this series, if you've enjoyed any of these episodes ever in the history of Faith Formed, do us a favor, leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It helps with discoverability, it adds some social proof, and it would mean a lot to me. Thank you very much. So I want to take you to a verse that most of you have heard so many times that it has kind of been turned into like a phone wallpaper. So you've heard it in Sunday school. Do any churches still do Sunday school? I don't know. Uh, you've seen it on a poster, uh, you've seen it cross-stitched on a relative's hallway. Uh, and that that is love your neighbor as yourself. Mark chapter 12. Okay, let's set the scene. A scribe comes to Jesus and asks him what the greatest commandment is. And Jesus gives him two back to back. Mark 12, verse 30. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And then verse 31. The second is this you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. Now, here's what I need you to catch because we skim right past it every time. That second commandment is not one instruction, it's two that have been welded together, and we've spent most of our whole lives obeying half of it while completely glossing over the other half. Love your neighbor. We preach that part. Love your neighbor, love your neighbor, love your neighbor. Your neighbor don't look like you, love your neighbor. Your neighbor, you know what I'm saying? Put stuff in your trash can that's not yours, love your neighbor. Your neighbor gets on your everlasting lasnar, love your neighbor. Because, see, that's the half that shows up in every sermon, in every serving opportunity, in every call to generosity, and it should. Don't get me wrong. It's true and it's good and it's God, and it's not optional. But here's the part that we skip two words, as yourself. That's the half that we skip. And I don't think that that phrase was just added on as decoration or as a rhetorical flourish. I think that those two words are doing a real theological work. And here's what I have come to believe that it's doing. It's not a second command telling you to go love yourself as a separate project, the way that we sometimes preach it, as if the verse means love your neighbor and also remember to have good self-esteem. Right? That's not it. I think when we do that, we are flattening it into something that is much smaller than what Jesus intended when he said it. See, as yourself is an assumption that Jesus is making about where you're already supposed to be standing. As yourself assumes a settled place, a place where you already know that you were loved, where you've already received it and you've already let it land inside of you. It's anchored. And from that settled place, that as-yourself place, the command says, now let it move outward toward the person next to you. Follow me. The love for your neighbor was never supposed to be manufactured from something. It was always supposed to be an overflow of a love that you'd already accepted for yourself. If you never accepted that love, then you don't have an overflow. Oh. Hmm? Let me say that again. If you've never accepted the love of God for yourself, then you don't have an overflow. What you have is an empty container that you're trying to pour from over and over, and you're calling it obedience. That, my friends, is the towel with nothing left to wring out of it that we continue squeezing morning after morning, Sunday after Sunday. Those are my dry days. I was trying to love my neighbor without ever finishing the first half of the sentence. But now, now okay, alright. Now I know I know what some of you who are listening to this are thinking. Because I've thought it myself, alright? I've considered this and I want to meet it directly. Doesn't all this talk about esteeming yourself just turning to self-focused? I mean, doesn't it? Isn't all is this whole Christian life supposed to be about dying to self, but Justin, you're telling us that there's a part that we have to play that the as yourself, that that's a part that we have to consider? I I am. I don't want to build a theology of love your neighbor as yourself into something that quietly becomes love yourself full stop and call the neighbor part optional. I don't want to build a theology of love yourself full stop and call that the gospel because that would be heresy. That would betray everything that Jesus said. So I want to draw a line right here as sharply as I can, because I think the difference matters. See, there is a version of self-esteem the world sells you, and it's built entirely on performance and comparison. Esteem yourself because you achieved something. Esteem yourself because you're better than that other person. Esteem yourself because you worked for it and earned it. See, do I go off into the weeds or not? See, okay. That is a part of where racism and prejudice in Christian circles comes from. It comes from a version of self-love and self-esteem that that we use to lift ourselves to a place where we shouldn't be. Esteem your white skin because it's not black skin. Slave Bibles did that. Or or esteem your American heritage because it's better than an African heritage or uh an Asian heritage or a Southeast Asian heritage. Am I getting in trouble right now? I I've got to be honest. I've got to be honest. That is the version of self-esteem that leads us into idolatry, that leads us into Christian nationalism, that leads us into forms of gospel little g that have nothing to do with the gospel big G that Jesus brought us, that Jesus used to set the foundation for how we should treat one another. That version of self-esteem is exhausting to maintain. One, because it's false and it's performative. But two, it has to be constantly re-earned and it collapses the instant your performance dips or somebody better comes along. That version, the false version that places you at the center of it all is dangerous. Because actually it's just pride with better marketing. And it does turn into selfishness because it makes you the source and the center and the nexus point of your own worth. I know everybody who hears this is not going to agree with me. And that's fine. You can pray about it. Please go see God. Never let me be your your final word, you know, never let me be your final word. Take what I say, you study it out. Okay? You you you get scriptural with it. You sit down with the Holy Spirit and let Him speak to you. I can only tell you what I believe has been revealed to me. And as a black man in America, how I have seen this play out more times than not. But see, this verse is not this that's this verse is not asking you to make yourself the center. Jesus is the center. God is not asking you to esteem yourself because of anything you've done or anything that you are a part of, or your color, or your race, or your creed, or your ethnicity, or your basketball skills, or your preaching skills, or your teaching skills. None of that. None of that esteems you. God is asking you to esteem yourself because he esteems you, because he made you, because you are in the language of Genesis. We've talked about this. Made in his image, his creation, and he doesn't make junk and call it junk. See, the esteem is not something that you generate about yourself. It's something you agree with that he's already declared before you ever did a single thing. Y'all think about this. Last week, we talked about how, I think it was last week, how God affirmed Jesus before Jesus healed anybody, before he did a single miracle, before he declared a single thing outwardly, God affirmed him. God esteemed him as his son, in whom he was well pleased. That same kind of esteem. Pre-works that Jesus got is the same kind of esteem that God has for you because he's your father and because he loves you. That that before Jesus preached a sermon, God said, This is my beloved son. And that approval didn't originate in Jesus. It originated in the Father, and Jesus simply lived from that approval. Esteeming yourself rightly understood is not inventing a high opinion of yourself. It is agreeing with what God has already said about you, what God has already affirmed was true in you before you ever did anything to deserve it or to earn it. And you may say, Well, I don't know who that is. That's what the word is for. If you don't know who you are, if you don't know who God has said that you are, because that is the definition that you have to start and end with, then you've got to go into your word and find it. Because no amount of me, you know, teaching it to you, no amount of you listening to every you know preacher on YouTube, no amount of being a digital disciple is ever going to replace you hearing God speak to you from his word directly from his heart into your heart about who you are to him. And it's only once you agree with him about who he's created you to be, about who you are to him, and you agree with that, that your identity begins to sync up with the identity that God has already had about you. Because here's why that version of yourself can never can never hear me. The version of you that God has ordained and defined will never turn into selfishness the way the world's version does. If my worth is something that I built, then protecting it and inflating it becomes my job. And other people either become threats to it or tools for getting more of it. But if my worth was never mine to build and to sustain in the first place, if it is simply a settled gift that I receive, then I don't need to protect it from anybody. I don't need to extract anything from you to add to it. I'm free to actually look at you and love you whether we agree or not, whether we look like one another or not, whether we always get along or not, because I'm not secretly competing with you for a resource I have to manufacture myself. No, I can just love you because I'm loved. I can just accept you because I'm accepted. Now I want to bring in a voice here, because I'm big on bringing in third-party voices, who understood something about this that I think most of Western Christianity has quietly lost. I'm not even gonna say quietly. We we've we've in many ways we have lost the plot completely when it comes to this. But I think this voice really matters because his whole tradition never separated the two halves of that commandment that we talked about earlier, the way we tend to. Desmond Tutu, Archbishop, Nobel Laureate, the man who led South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission after the horrors of apartheid. Bishop Tutu drew on an old African concept called unbutuntu. And the phrase he made famous around the world is this I am because we are. Or said another way, a person is a person through other persons. I love that so much. But listen to how he described what it actually looks like to live this out. Like it's nice to know it, but how do we live this out? He said, a person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, because they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong to a greater whole. Can I read that again? He said a person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good. Why? Because they have a proper self-assurance that knowing that they belong to a greater whole. A proper self-assurance, not the world's brittle performance-based self-esteem, but a settled assurance that lets you genuinely be glad when somebody else does well instead of being secretly threatened by it. Bishop Tutu also said uh he said something that that names the failure mode that we're trying to avoid. He said, Nothing causes more disarray and division than the practical belief that I am better than others, and that this belief is a betrayal of the truth that we are all made in the image of our Creator, all of us equally. So Ubuntu never lets self-esteem curdle into pride because your worth was never in competition with anyone else's. Everyone carries the same image, everyone was made from the same good. And you may be asking, Jay, what does this have to do with anything that we're talking about? Okay. See, his whole framework refuses to separate love of self from love of neighbor the way that we sometimes do. In Ubuntu, they're not two commands you balance against each other, but they're rather one movement. My humanity is bound up with your humanity. When I dehumanize myself, I dehumanize you. When I dehumanize you, I dehumanize myself. When I finally believe I'm made in God's image and treated with dignity, I become able to actually see that same Imago Dei in you. Instead of using you, competing with you, or resenting you, I'm able to love you. Because I know that I myself am loved. And that's not two halves of a verse intention, that's what the entire verse together looks out, looks like lived out on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday. So if esteeming yourself rightly isn't selfish, and if it's actually the only stable ground of love for others that can be built upon, what does it take to get there? Because I promised you at the start of this episode that I wasn't gonna hand you a switch to flip, because I don't have that switch. This is something rather that you grow into. Um, and Paul actually prays for exactly this growth in one of the most beautiful passages. Ah, so beautiful, so beautiful. Ephesians chapter 3. Paul is praying for the believers in Ephesus and listen to what he asks God to do in them. Ephesians 3, verse 17. Paul prays. That God may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love. Rooted and grounded. That's not a one-time event, y'all. That is the slow work of a root system being built at those roots going down. The same image we spent a whole episode on back in the wilderness ark, where we talked about the tree that grows down into the desert with roots so deep to find water. That's what this, that's what this, that's what Paul is praying for right now. That those roots would go down before anything can grow up out of you towards someone else. And then in verse 18, he said, May you have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth. Y'all, Paul is praying that they would have the capacity, the strength to actually grasp the size of what they've been given. Not just believe it exists somewhere out there in the nebulous intangibility, but to comprehend it, to feel the dimensions of it. And then verse 19, to know the love of Christ, amen, which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Filled, not informed, not lectured, not preached at, but filled. That's the word for what happens when receiving finally goes deep enough. And here's what I want you to see from this, because I think this is the hinge point of the entire episode. You can't overflow from a container that was never filled. And you know this, I know this, but we do it every single day. Paul isn't praying that the Ephesians would try harder to love their neighbors. And some of us are doing that. We're trying harder to love our neighbors. No, Paul is praying that they'd be so rooted, so full, so at capacity with the love of Christ that loving other people would stop being effort and would start being overflow. That's the end of racism in my mind. That's the end of prejudice in my mind. That is what frees us to love one another in the way that God loves us. When we are so full of the love of Christ, when we have accepted it and we are living in that fullness, then the overflow of that love would prevent us from looking at anybody differently except for how God sees them. The command to love your neighbor as yourself was never asking you to generate love from nothing. It was assuming that you would first be filled with all the fullness of God, and then simply let some of it spill onto the person standing next to you, regardless of what they look like, regardless of what they smell like, regardless of how they respond to that love that is overflowing from your overflow. That's the difference between my dry days and my full ones. On the dry days, I'm trying to give from a container nobody filled. On the full ones, I'm just letting something spill over that was already poured into me. Same actions, completely different source, and a completely different energy. So let's get this concrete because I think theology that doesn't touch a Monday morning isn't isn't finished forming yet. There's a kind of loving that happens in close relationships. A marriage, right? Raising kids, leading people, pastoring a church that looks like sacrifice on the outside, no matter which source it's coming from, right? You show up, you give your time, you carry what needs to be carried. We see this a lot, especially on Sunday mornings. But I've learned to feel the difference from the inside. And I bet if you're honest, you have too. There are seasons where I've served people closest to me. And if I trace the actual motive underneath the service, it wasn't love overflowing. There have been seasons where I have gotten up and led worship, and within me nothing was worshipful. And I was trying to love God and love people through worship. And even though it may have looked good on the outside, it wasn't landing for me on the inside, right? Trying to prove that I was a good husband, a good enough father, a good enough pastor, quietly hoping that serving would finally silence the voice telling me that I don't measure up. That kind of serving, that kind of giving is exhausting. It is a resentful kind of tired. Because you're not just doing the work, but you're also secretly waiting for the payoff of a validation that never quite arrives when you've done the service. And when it doesn't arrive, then some part of you gets a little bitter at the very people that you're serving. Like, how dare you receive my service and not validate my service? And then there are seasons, and I wish that I could manufacture them on command, but I can't. Where the same service comes from somewhere else entirely. Where I'm not trying to prove myself to anyone. Because God said it before I did anything. Not tired in a way that makes me resentful and makes me feel hollow. The giving, it doesn't cost me a sense of self-worth. I'm not waiting for someone to validate me because my worth was never riding on any of that from the first place. So here's the practice. As much as I can offer you a practice, when you notice yourself in that resentful kind of tired, the kind with the edge on it, where if somebody says something to you, things are gonna go sideways quick. It could be the sanctuary, it can be the parking lot, it can be the classroom, wherever it is. When you notice that happening within you, and this is where you have to be aware, right? Holy Spirit, help us to become more aware. Help us to become more aware, God. When you notice that resentful tire, that edge coming into it, stop and ask the question underneath it. Am I loving this person right now, or am I trying to prove something to myself through them? Now that question alone won't fix it, but I think it'll show you which container you're pouring from. The full one or the empty one. And sometimes just seeing it clearly is the first step toward going back to the root, back to being filled, back to receiving the love before you try to pour out again. So here's your charge, and it's the last one of this whole arc. So I want to carry all of the last three plus this episode within it. Stop trying to love your neighbor from a container nobody ever filled. Go back to the beginning of the sentence you've been skipping as yourself. Two words. Let yourself be esteemed the way God esteems you, not because you earned it, not because you performed well enough, but because he made you and declared you good before you did a single thing. Refuse the world's brittle self-esteem that has to be constantly defended and re-earned, and receive instead the settled kind of love that comes from knowing you belong to him, and nothing can add to or subtract from that. Let your roots go down into that love until you're not just informed of it, but filled with it the way Paul prayed. Filled with all the fullness of God, and then stop straining to manufacture love for people around you and just let it overflow. Let it go, let it spill. You already know how to give until you're empty. But now I challenge you to learn how to receive until you overflow. Scripture says this we love because He first loved us. There is no other way. There is no other way. Never. So let's pray. Father, we have spent weeks now naming the ledgers we keep, the comparisons that we can't escape, the help we won't receive, and now we come to the last thing, and maybe the hardest thing. Believing that esteeming ourselves the way you esteem us is not selfishness. It's simply agreement with what you already said. So for the one who's been pouring from an empty container for years, who is resentful and tired and hollow, would you show them that the route they skipped? Would you let them finally receive before you ask them to give one more thing? For the one afraid that loving themselves rightly will make them proud or selfish, would you would you show them the difference between the esteem the world sells and the esteem that comes from belonging to you? Because as we've talked about today, one competes, but the other frees us. For the one who has forgotten that their humanity is bound up with everyone around them, that they were never meant to flourish alone. Remind them that a person is a person through other persons. And that when they finally receive your love for themselves, they become able to see it in the person standing next to them too. Root us and ground us in love. A love, God, that is deep enough and long enough that we stop trying to generate love for our neighbor out of nothing. And simply let what you've poured into us spill over onto everyone else that we meet. Fill us with all of your fullness. Fill us until the hate in our hearts is expelled, and there is nothing left within these fleshly vessels than love from you that we receive that is just overflowing into everyone that we meet. God, we love you because you first loved us. Teach us to actually believe that all the way down. In Jesus' name. Amen. And that's the end of this unnamed arc. Four episodes. And y'all, as I give these to you, please know I'm giving these to myself. If any part of these episodes met you and or gave you language, do one of the same things that I ask every single episode. Send it to somebody else. Because if you need it, if I need it, then somebody else needs it. And if this show has done something real in you these past few weeks, let me know. Leave us a rating and a review. Let us know what this podcast, what this episode has meant for you and what it's done in you. One more thing, and I'll let you go. If any part of this arc, uh the ledger, the comparison, uh the inability to receive, has been more than a season for you. If it's been a pattern stretching back further than you can trace, I wrote a book called The Purpose and the Pause that goes even deeper into some of this. The link is in the show notes or the episode description. You already know how to give. Now go let yourself be filled. I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Faithform. Be blessed.