Love Is a Reflection

Fill in the blank: Love is________.

Love is a reflection.

What I have been learning is how you think and what you believe about God and yourself are directly connected to your ability to love. Our love is a reflection of two things:

Our perception of God and His love for is.
Our perception of ourselves.

Let me take a stab at unpacking what I mean.

Our love is a reflection of our perception of God and of His love for us. How you think and what you believe about
God, and how you see His relationship with you and your relationship with Him, are directly connected to how we love God and one another. You do believe you need to earn God’s love? That will be reflected in your relationship towards Him and in expectations you have with accepting and giving love with others. Do you believe God gets mad at you when you fail and sets about making your life miserable to get you back? That is going to flavor your love. Do you believe that God has forgiven you completely and loves you for who you are In Christ and what He did, not for what you do? That is going to have a profound effect on how you love, why you love, and the quality of your love.

In a way, this ties back to yesterday’s post, Love is Knowing. It is so important to have accurate knowledge about God—who He is, why He loves us, who Jesus is and what He did for us. If we misunderstand who He is, we will misunderstand His love for us, and that will be reflected in our love for Him and for others.

Our love is also a reflection of our perception of ourselves. The second part of the Great Commandment is love your neighbor as you love yourself (Matthew 22:39). There is a lot of criticism from evangelical circles today saying we are too concerned with ourselves. “We need to stop helping ourselves, satisfying ourselves, and start loving and helping others,” they say. There is one problem with this thinking: if you don’t love yourself, if you are not concerned about your own happiness, if you don’t have a good healthy self-image, you cannot love others the way Jesus commands you to. When a person has trouble loving other people, there is almost always an equally bad or worse problem with that person loving him or herself. Do we think we are worthy of love? Do we think we are capable of love? The reality is that we will love others poorly if we do not love ourselves the way we are supposed to.

The issue is not to stop loving ourselves—the command makes it clear that we need to love ourselves if we are to love others—but to have a proper self-image so that we love ourselves in a healthy way. We can (and sometimes do) look at ourselves too positively. But it is just as dangerous to look at ourselves too negatively. The Church has done a fine job reminding us not to think too highly of ourselves. What we want to do is remind us not to think too negatively about ourselves.

Yes, remember that you are a sinner, but be focused on becoming the man or woman God wants you to be. Yes, remember the horrible price your sin and rebellion against God cost Him, but focus on the fact that God thought you were worth the price. You deserve hell, but focus on the fact that you are going to heaven. Paul says we should think on whatever is true, honorable, pure, lovely, and admirable (Philippians 4:8). It is my contention that constantly dwelling on our shortcomings does not meet the standards Paul has set here for our thoughts.

One of my heroes is a man named David Ring. He was born on October 28, 1953. He was born dead. The time taken in restarting his heart and getting him breathing, kept his brain from getting oxygen and he ended up with cerebral palsy. Several years later his father died. Before he was a teenager his mother died. He couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t walk right. He was made fun of at school. He wanted to die. And he hated God for making him this way and for taking his parents.

The turning point in his life happened when his sister, who had been caring for him after their mother died, forced him to go to church one Sunday. God found him at that church service. And with his love for Christ came a new love for himself based on God’s love for him in Christ. What a powerful thought! How different would our self-love be if we loved ourselves that way God loves us.

There is a world of difference between saying “I am self-centered” and saying “I love my self.” The Bible makes is very clear that one of the results of sin is a self-centered and self-serving nature. But being self-centered and love of self are not the same. The more we love ourselves rightly, the better we will be at loving other people. By working on a Christ-like love for ourselves, we will by default improve our ability love to other people.

Love is a reflection. It is a reflection of our perception of God and of ourselves.