Love Yourself (Properly Framed)
On the surface, it often looks like a desired behavior: sacrificing oneself for others (John 15:13) or preferring others to oneself (Philippians 2:3-4). In the clients I have worked with most closely, it can look like remarkable selflessness, until you look at what is driving it. Dig below the surface, and a gnawing sense of valuelessness begins to appear. The “desired behavior” is not rooted in an overflow of love toward others but rather in an attempt to fill a hole within themselves. The self-neglect, the self-criticism, the inability to receive care from others, these are not the marks of a person who loves well. They are the marks of a person who has never been taught to receive.
Courage without fear is not bravery. It is foolishness. It lacks the self-knowledge that makes courage meaningful. In the same way, self-giving without self-knowledge is not generosity; it is either martyrdom or codependency. Both may look like love from the outside, but neither is sustainable and neither is fully honest. The parent who orders their life entirely around their children, to the exclusion of their own, is not necessarily giving from abundance. The volunteer who reliably signs up for church events but complains about their life the entire time is not pouring out from overflow. Patterns like these, in which lack of boundaries or self-care masquerades as love, are often signs of hidden self-absorption. The parent with no limits is frequently operating from a definition of self-worth tied entirely to how well they parent. The constant volunteer is often searching for the affirmation they have not been able to receive from themselves or from God.
Many highly respected pastors and theologians would argue that people do not need to be taught to love themselves well. As Paul says in Ephesians 5:29, “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” People are generally good at looking out for their own best interests and struggle to elevate others to the level of attention they give themselves. This observation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Research suggests that Christians with negative religious coping styles and externalized rather than internalized faith have higher correlations of eating disorders (Akrawi et al., 2015). Purity culture has been linked to elevated perfectionism and extreme self-control, while shame and guilt correlate with diminished healthy self-worth (O’Callaghan et al., 2026). Buju (2024) found that Christians broadly have a complicated relationship with healthy self-love and identified the need for wider support in understanding what that means at the individual level. The Ephesians' observation describes one kind of self-preservation. It does not account for the person who overrides their own limits in the name of love and calls it faithfulness.
A legitimate concern in any conversation about self-love is sin. Whether it manifests as pride, selfishness, or false humility, self-focus that tends toward self-elevation is not an irrational worry. This self-elevation, the posture of placing oneself above God or others and claiming worth that was never ours to claim, is a real spiritual danger and should be named as such. But it is distinct from healthy self-regard, and conflating the two comes at a cost. When Christians avoid self-love out of fear of pride, the “body of believers” does what any body does when it neglects itself: it becomes depleted, over-extended, and preoccupied with its own limitations.
The distinction that matters is between self-elevation and self-reception. While self-elevation is sinful, self-knowledge and self-reception are not. When Christians are able to receive and honor the worth that God has already declared over us, we are able to stand in who He says we are rather than in what we have done or what we possess. This is the work of imago Dei. God declares in Genesis 1:27 that we are made in His image, and that declaration completely reframes the question of self-worth. Worth is not generated by achievement; it is received as a given. To refuse that reception is not humility. It is resistance to what God has said is true. The Greatest Commandment makes this structural assumption explicit: love your neighbor as yourself. The “as” is not incidental. It is the linchpin. The commandment presupposes a baseline of honest self-regard and names it as the standard by which we love the image-bearers of God around us. A person who has not reckoned with their own worth before God will have no stable measure for loving their neighbor.
True other-love requires knowing what you actually have to give, where you are genuinely strong and where you are genuinely limited, and having the humility to rely on God to make up the difference. That requires self-knowledge. Extending grace to yourself in the places of brokenness and limitation, rather than performing as though they do not exist, is what self-compassion actually is. Just as our words should ring with integrity, with our yeses meaning yes and our noes meaning no (Matthew 5:37), our love for others should be met with the same honesty. Honest acknowledgment of our limits is more impactful than overriding them because it allows us to be cheerful givers rather than reluctant ones. It also allows us to bring our limitations openly before God and ask for His strength in what we cannot do on our own.
In practice, most people have not been taught how to take an honest personal inventory of their strengths, gifts, limitations, and patterns, let alone evaluate what they find. This amplifies avoidance. When practitioners provide a structured process of questions, reflections, and observations, people are more likely to feel safe turning their attention inward. That kind of honest inventory fosters true humility through self-compassion rather than the false humility of self-criticism. Self-criticism, it should be noted, is a form of self-condemnation, which stands in direct contrast to what Paul declares in Romans 8:1: there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Self-compassion, by contrast, creates the conditions for genuine repentance. When the focus shifts from self-punishment to a true desire for growth and sanctification, the movement toward Jesus becomes voluntary rather than coerced.
Kristin Neff’s (2023) framework for self-compassion identifies three qualities that are theologically resonant here. Self-kindness over self-judgment promotes an understanding of oneself that reflects the Father’s love while remaining clear-eyed about faults. Identifying with common humanity rather than viewing oneself in isolation leads to seeing one’s own story within God’s larger one rather than retreating into self-pity. Mindfulness rather than over-identification encourages a balanced self-awareness rather than indulgence in one’s own emotional state. Two simple questions surface the gap for many people: “Do you do the things for yourself that you would tell a friend to do? Why not?” The distance between how a person would counsel a friend and how they treat themselves is often where the work begins.
The Greatest Commandment Model™ is built around an overflow principle that runs throughout Scripture. God is the source. His love is unconditional and unending. When we receive His love and respond in kind, that love moves through us and into others. The operative word is receive. A person who has never allowed God’s love to reach their own self-understanding will give from a distorted or depleted place, regardless of effort or intention. The order of the overflow matters: when people try to pour out from an empty vessel, they have nothing to give and are caught in a cycle of striving. When they allow themselves to be filled, not only by the Holy Spirit but by gentleness, kindness, and patience extended toward themselves, love becomes less effortful and more natural. This is not selfishness. It is stewardship.
When encountering people who are stuck in these disordered patterns, the first thing to offer them is a mirror. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that we see now only a dim reflection, but that we will one day see face to face. Higgins (1987) observes that people perceive three selves: the actual, the ideal, and the ought. Many people are so consumed by the self they ought to be that they have lost contact with who they actually are. Fewer still are oriented toward the ideal self, the person who will only fully emerge in the presence of Jesus. The work of honest self-knowledge begins with the actual self. It is from that honest place, not the performed self or the condemned self, that the love already declared over us can do its transforming work. Helping people to see themselves as they actually are is not an exercise in self-focus. It is an act of truthfulness and the beginning of a more faithful partnership with God in loving the people around them.
Akrawi, D., Bartrop, R., Potter, U.. & Touyz., S. (2015). Religiosity, spirituality in relation to disordered eating and body image concerns: A systematic review. Journal of Eating Disorders 3(29). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-015-0064-0
Buju, S. (2024). Perceptions of self-love among orthodox Christians: Clinical and pastoral implications. Pastoral Psychology, 74, 304-323.
Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94(3), 319–340.
Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-compassion: Theory, method, research, and intervention. Annual Review Psychology, 74, 193-218. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047
Smith, M. H., Richards, P. S., & Maglioe, C. J. (2004). Examining the relationship between religious orientation and eating disturbances. Eating Behaviors, 5(2), 171-180.
Thomas, H., O’Callaghan, C., Best, M., Bräutigam, M., Kimber, T., Wade, T., & Sturman, N. (2026). Christian religion and spirituality in eating disorder development, experience, and recovery: An exploration of lived experience in Australia and New Zealand. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1764418. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1764418
