As Yourself, Part A

What Is Love? | Day 3, Part A

 

"And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’" Matthew 22:39 (NIV)

 

Good morning. Some of the most important questions in Scripture hide inside its shortest phrases. Five words sit at the close of yesterday’s commandment, and they have been pulling people in different directions ever since: love your neighbor as yourself. Who is this neighbor? And what does loving them as ourselves actually require of us? This series cannot move forward without stopping here first.

 

What “As Yourself” Actually Means

The culture has picked up that phrase and carried it somewhere Jesus never intended. The argument sounds reasonable enough: you cannot pour from an empty cup, so you must fill yourself first. Learn to love yourself. Build your sense of worth from within. Once that inner reservoir is full, you will have something real to offer the people around you. It sounds compassionate. It even sounds logical. But it misreads what Jesus is saying entirely.

 

Jesus is not issuing a self-love command in that phrase. He is making an honest observation about how human beings already function. Most of us already orient ourselves toward our own comfort, our own survival, our own wellbeing. That instinct does not need to be taught or given permission. It is already operating in every one of us as a natural feature of being human. The word “as” is a measurement, not a prescription. Jesus is saying: redirect that same natural energy outward toward the person in front of you. The commandment is about the neighbor. The self is the starting point, not the destination.

 

But there is another dimension to this phrase that deserves equal attention, and it is one the culture rarely considers. What about the person who genuinely is not caring for themselves? Not out of pride but out of neglect, out of being worn down, out of losing their footing spiritually? There is an old expression about getting your house in order before you can help anyone else. The danger in that idea is assuming it means self-effort first, that we must achieve some level of personal stability through our own discipline and willpower before we are of any use to the neighbor. That reading puts us right back at the center, doing the work in our own strength, which is exactly the error the culture commits from the other direction.

 

What Jesus is pointing toward is something entirely different, and the answer is sitting right in the commandment immediately before this one. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37, NIV). That commandment, the first and greatest, is itself the care of the self, spiritually speaking. When we are rooted in God, fed by his Word, strengthened through worship and the sacraments, and sustained by his Spirit, our spiritual house is being ordered not by our own effort but by his grace. We are not filling ourselves up so that we can then pour outward from our own supply. We are receiving from a source that does not run dry, and what we receive flows naturally outward toward the neighbor.

 

The Love That Flows Through, Not From

This is where the load-bearing truth we carried into yesterday’s devotion returns. The love behind this commandment is agape, the same unconditional, self-giving love we traced back to its source on Day 1 and examined again yesterday in our study of the commandment. Agape is not something we manufacture from our own resources. Paul makes this plain in Romans 5:5: “And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”. We do not generate agape. We receive it. The Holy Spirit, given to us by grace, is the one who pours the love of God into our hearts and makes the commandment possible to keep.

 

That distinction changes everything about how we read “as yourself.” We are not being called to love the neighbor out of a self-generated reserve of inner warmth that we have carefully cultivated. We are being called to love the neighbor from the agape that God himself has already poured into us through his Spirit. The care of the self that this commandment assumes is not a self-help program. It is the ongoing, daily receiving of the love of God through his Word, through worship, through fellowship, and through the sacraments. From that place, and only from that place, does genuine love for the neighbor become possible.

 

And the love that flows toward the neighbor carries with it the most important thing we could ever offer another person. It is not merely goodwill or practical assistance, though those are real expressions of love. At its deepest, the love we bring to the neighbor from this source carries the hope that they too will come to know Jesus Christ as their Savior. That is where agape is always pointed. God loved the world so that whoever believes in him will not perish. The love poured into us by his Spirit moves outward with the same direction and the same hope. John captures it simply and completely: “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19, NIV). Not because we have filled ourselves from within. Because he loved us first, and that love is now moving through us toward every neighbor he places in our path.

 

This is what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. It is not a self-improvement program with the neighbor as the beneficiary once we have completed it. It is the overflow of a life rooted in the love of God, received through his Spirit, and carried outward in the hope that the neighbor will encounter the same Jesus who first loved us.

 

Prayer

Father, thank you for the clarity of this commandment and for the grace that makes it possible to keep. I confess that I have read “as yourself” through the lens the culture handed me, as though love were something I had to manufacture from my own resources and then offer to others out of whatever I had left over. Forgive me for missing the source entirely. Thank you that you did not leave me to fill myself up on my own.

 

Lord Jesus, thank you that your Spirit has already poured your love into my heart. Let that love move outward today toward every neighbor you place in front of me. And let it carry with it the truth that matters most: that you are the Savior who loved us first, who loves us still, and who is reaching through ordinary people in ordinary moments to bring others home. I pray this in your name. Amen.

 

There is a freedom in knowing that the love this commandment calls you to is not something you have to generate on your own. It is already flowing from a source that cannot be exhausted. Tomorrow we will stay right here in this same phrase and look at what happens when knowing God’s love quietly becomes thinking too highly of ourselves because of it. It is a shorter step in that direction than we might expect, and it matters more than we realize.

 

To God be the glory

 

Pray, praise, and give thanks, for God is good and His mercy endures forever.

 

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