5:14 Self-love is the problem, not the answer.

Galatians 5:14
For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

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O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

…………St. Francis of Assisi

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Three things to consider from this essential command of Christ:

1) Because loving one’s neighbor fulfills God’s Law, this would mean that if I am not loving my neighbor, I am living out of congruence with God, no matter what else I am doing.

Ouch.

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2) This command has been psychologized in recent decades and misunderstood to mean, “You must first love yourself, then you can love others.”
But that is a distortion of one simple word: “as,” which here and in the gospel statements, means, “in the same way.”

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In other words, we already love ourselves.

We selfishly love ourselves (Eph. 5:29).

We think about ourselves much more than we think about others.

Nowhere that I can think of in the Bible are we commanded to love ourselves. That’s the self-esteem movement talking, not our Bibles.

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Contrary to what modern psychology claims, our greatest problem is not that we DON’T love ourselves, but that we DO.

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Jesus calls for something much more radical than doting over oneself. He calls us to love others with the same selfish and self-centered passion that we love ourselves.

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3) As a good friend of mine often says (and needs to say) in a church environment, “God never commands us to get our needs met.”
If we’re not careful, though, that’s a trap into which many of us can fall, attending church to suck the life out of each other, rather than giving life to each other and loving one another without restraint.

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In the verse prior to today’s, Paul commands the Galatian church, “through love serve one another.”

That is the call of the Christian, both inside and outside the church; to look out for the other guy with as much fervor as we have for ourselves.

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And that, my fellow pilgrims, is a radical thought.