Loving Yourself Part 2 (Romans 8:5-11)
Gary McManus, 06/19/2022Part of the God's Love; Beyond Belief series, preached at a Sunday Morning service
Father's Day
June 19, 2022 Romans 8:5-11
Topic: loving yourself. Loving yourself is God’s will.
Love what God loves and that always includes you.
Yet, it is not an easy topic
Do whatever our Lord wants you to do--that is self love. . .
You can't love yourself better or more than God loves you
It is Father’s Day and Dads in America are bad at loving themselves. Dads are not good at taking care of themselves.
Americans, even American Christians, find it difficult to love ourselves.
American eating habits—not loving ourselves.
Jen Oliver’s advice: “Diets don’t work, love does.”
American men have health problems other than weight. Dad makes it hard to love him when Dad won’t love his own health and well-being.
Jen Oliver and. . .
https://www.livewellwithsharonmartin.com/how-to-love-yourself/
There are many ways to get serious about self-love. . Acceptance--self acceptance!
Because our Lord accepts you where you are and loves you AS you are right now.
American Christians are already improving themselves or their
circumstances. . .So, we start by making ourselves acceptable.
But that isn’t the gospel of Jesus.
The beautiful scandal of the gospel is this:
no improvement is necessary. . .no promised improvement is
necessary for God to love you and for Jesus to die for you. (Romans 5:8)
There is shock in Jesus’ story of the father with two sons. Jesus did not teach that the Prodigal son learned his lesson. The son confessed his sins but didn’t promise to do better.
The son wasn’t asking to come back as a son but a slave. Father didn’t even hear that plan.
Father accepted his son back AS A SON.
If we sympathize with the Prodigals’ brother—
that this is totally unfair. . .you have understood the Father.
(Mark 12:33)
Others that Jesus helped did not make themselves
acceptable FIRST (Luke 7:1-9, Luke 8:26-39)
American Christians want to believe: “God helps them who helps themselves.” That is not even IN the Bible.
Don’t bother trying to make yourself acceptable to Jesus first . . .just accept yourself. You can work to make yourself acceptable later, but first, you have to accept yourself. Unless you admit that you are sick, you can never be healed.
If we can’t accept who we are, where we are and what we are, Jesus will have a harder time healing us. We will be led by the flesh of our minds—saying to ourselves, “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Because you do not ask, you do not receive”?
(James 1:6, James 4:2, James 4:3)
We can ask help in accepting ourselves as we are so the Lord can help us work on anything that is unacceptable or fleshly.
--watch out for the inner critic
--watch out for Satan, Revelation 12:10
--watch out those with tender conscience
--watch out perfectionists
You HAVE to love yourself first? Maybe
We can ACT loving without being loving.
First or last, loving ourselves is not so easy.
Continue to pray to love what God loves—YOU!
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Sources:
Love 101, Peter McWilliams
The Missing Commandment: Love Yourself, Jerry and Denise Basel
Pure Pleasure, Gary Thomas
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