You Must Love Yourself

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Before you love others, you must love yourself. I am not talking about self-centeredness or self-love, pride or selfishness. I am talking about finding out who you are in Christ and as a person, then coming to terms with that person. Knowing who you are is the first step toward wholeness, and accepting that person is the second step.

In all the troubled marriages I have counseled over the past ten years, I have found that, generally, those marriages are made up of two self-haters trying to love one another.

If you need to get married to be fulfilled or loved, you are not ready for marriage. The very thing that makes you need to get married will become the problem in the marriage.

In Matthew 22:39, Jesus told the people to love their neighbors as themselves. You cannot love your neighbor if you do not love yourself.

People “fake one another out” with false hugs and kisses in church. They appear to be so loving—when they hate themselves.

“God bless you, vivek. I love you.” I do not want any “God bless you’s” from people who do not even like themselves.

The next time someone says to you, “I love you,” try answering, “But do you love you?”

It is not important whether you say you love me. This thing is not going to work until you love you, because if you do not love you, you are going to be looking to me to make up for that. You are going to expect from me more that I can possibly give, in order to make up for what you lack in yourself.

The Word of God is so simple, and we can make it so confusing. We get so busy trying to love our neighbors that we have no time to love ourselves. Then we get disappointed in ourselves and add to self- rejection when we find we cannot love them.

Most of the time, we project the blame onto them. We gossip, judge, criticize, and all the time, we are really thinking badly of ourselves. The more they look bad to us, the better we look to ourselves. So we are building ourselves up at their expense.

You have to think you are better than other people in order to judge them. Thinking you are better is not loving yourself. Most of the time, it is covering up hate.

I love myself when I go to a meeting, and I love myself when I leave. I do not need anyone else to love me, because I am a whole person. I enjoy people liking me. I enjoy the love of my family. I enjoy companionship and not being alone. But I am never lonely, even when I am by myself.

I know it is tough being unmarried in a world designed for couples. Have you ever gone into a restaurant and seen a chair by itself at a table? Everyone assumes there will be at least two people.

But being conformed by the pressure of the world to its image will not make you happy. It is better to walk alone in an alien society than to be miserable with someone else just out of conformity to this world’s standards.

Complete people are interesting to me. People who have vision, goals, purposes, and plans for their lives attract me. A whole person knows who he is, why he is at a certain place, where he is going, and how he is going to get there.

I believe this concept should be taught in all Christian schools, Churches and family so children can grow up with the right ideas about themselves. My ministry, Save A Life Today, is helping develop a curriculum for the people in our region.

Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God with your whole heart, and the second is to love your neighbor to the same degree you love yourself. (Luke 10:27).

That means the key is loving you, not other people. You can only love people to the extent that you accept and love yourself.

will continue ..

 

The Goal of a Christian

The goal of a child of God is to become the separate, unique, and whole person the Lord wants you to become, the vessel that will hold the Treasure, which is Jesus (2 Cor. 4:7). The goal of each of us, according to the Apostle Paul, is “to be conformed to the image” of Christ (Rom.8:29), who was the most unique, separate, and whole person who ever lived.

Whether you are aware of the goal, whether you are working toward it, or whether you are not, that still is the goal set before each of us.

We cannot rightly carry out the Great Commission (Mark 16:15-18) or be “perfected” to do the work of the ministry (Eph. 4:12) unless we have first achieved—or at least are working toward achieving—the goal of becoming a whole and unique child of God, conformed to the image of Christ.

Therefore, you should be striving to be single; however, if you have married on the way to this goal, do not stop seeking the goal. Marriage will simply show how “unsingle” you are.

Once I was in Germany at one of the largest rehabilitation centers (mental institutions) in Europe talking to the chief physician.

I said, “Do you know what is the problem of all of these people inhere?” He said, “Yes, we’ve studied that.”

I said, “No, let me give you my definition of their problem. If you knew the problem, you could have the answer of why this place stays so full of patients. The problem is that everyone is trying to find his or her person in someone else’s body. They are not ‘single.”

Women suffer more than men for the “myth of singleness.” Society, even with the prominence of the feminist movement today, tends to look down on, to set apart, women who are not married—especially those who have never married.

The thought seems to be that if a woman has never married, it is because no one ever wanted her, which makes her a “reject,” suspicious. There must be something wrong with her.

Many women and men are so busy looking for someone to be all things to them that they do not have time to be who they are. If you are too preoccupied looking for someone to be all things to you, you have no one and nothing to give them.

Then you have a major problem in the making, because no one can give you enough time or attention to make up for the emptiness where you are supposed to be full. And if you are empty of a real self, the other person will be unhappy because you have nothing to give back.

If you will become consumed with being who you are, God will have to interrupt you to bring you a companion, just as He did Adam. Adam was so busy naming the animals, taking dominion (rulership) over the earth, and carrying out the functions he was created to perform that he did not have time to know there was not another one like him.

He was so consumed with enjoying life in the Garden of Eden, in fulfilling his purpose, that he did not look around for anyone else. God had to interrupt Adam and put him to sleep in order to make another like him to present to him.

Adam did not know he needed someone. And when you get to the point that you do not need anyone else for your life to be whole, unique, and separate, then you will be ready for God to bring you someone. You will be ready to give up your aloneness in favor of togetherness with someone else who is separate, whole, and unique.

Your marriage will only be as successful as your singleness, because you can only bring to a marriage what you are as a person alone. Marriage is honorable in itself. It is what we bring into it that causes the trouble.

No human being can meet your ego needs.
No human being can meet your soul needs.
No human being can meet your spiritual needs.

You might as well settle all that with God. You are only fit, or ready, for marriage when you are totally fulfilled in God.

will Continue ..

Lots of love,
Salt.QA.ViKi

 

God Wants You to Be Single

If you are able to catch hold of this revelation of the difference between being single and being alone, you will never again despise the state of being unmarried. Also, you will not marry or encourage others to marry, based on wrong reasons.

The Church today is suffering from confusion among young and old, divorced and widowed, and those who are unhappily married because of misunderstanding this concept. Many pastors and congregations pressure unmarried people in their churches to stop being alone, when the people have not yet achieved the state of being single! The result is more unhappy marriages and more divorces.

The primary thing you need to understand from Scripture is that when God observed that it was not good for Adam to be alone, Adam was totally whole (Eve was taken out of him), totally unique, and totally separate. He did not even know he needed someone else.

Until you get to that state, you are not ready to stop being alone.

In other words, God said, “It is not good for a man to be alone if he is single.”

That means, you do not need to marry someone until you are truly a
single person. You are better off alone, if you are not yet single—if you
are not yet unique, separate, and whole.

After God presented (gave, put on display) Eve to Adam, then Adam chose to take her and to give himself to her. At that stage, Adam was qualified to give himself away.

If you do not know who you are yet, what are you going to give to someone else?

If you do not know how much of a single person you are, how much are you going to give to someone else?

The most dangerous thing in the area of marriage is for a sick person to marry a sick person. Therefore, it is more important to be “single” than to be married. I will even make a stronger statement: It is safer to be unmarried than married, if you are not yet single.

Some people believe that when you marry, you have solved the problem of being alone. However, some of the loneliest people in the world are in marriages. Loneliness is magnified when you marry, if you are not unique, separate, and whole, or if your spouse is not.

There is no one so alone as a lonely married person, because he or she is trapped. The feeling of being trapped magnifies the loneliness. So it is much safer to be lonely unmarried, if you are going to be lonely.

Many people have thought, and still think, that getting married is the key to happiness. God has shown me that becoming whole and finding out your uniqueness is the real key to happiness. And God has that key.

Many have set marriage and “living happily ever after” as their goal in life. That is not the goal given us in the Word for a Christian’s life.