Love Yourself

As part of Lent we’ve invited you to enter into practices centred around “The Jesus Creed”:

‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:29-31)

In this season we are reminded that God’s love transforms us into people who are beloved to love. Each week we emphasize a different part of the Jesus Creed. In this final week: love yourself

It’s important to see the order of operations here with the Jesus Creed. Jesus spends the majority of this greatest commandment talking about loving God, then loving your neighbour, and then lastly ourselves come in. It’s more accurate to say that he commands us to “love your neighbour as yourself” –– so he doesn’t explicitly command us to love ourselves. Rather, he brings “yourself” as a helpful rubric to understand how to love your neighbour. He teaches us elsewhere: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12).

So when we speak this week about loving yourself, this doesn’t mean we stop loving God or loving our neighbour. And this is not a week to make it all about you, to engage in what Eugene Peterson calls the unholy trinity of “me, myself, and I.” Rather, if you are a disciple of Jesus, it is coming to terms with the fact that you and Christ are united, one. Paul writes: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)

How can Paul say this about himself and us? It’s because of what Jesus does during this Holy Week. This week in particular is where we wrestle with, rest, and receive the gospel:
Dying Jesus destroyed our deaths.
Rising Jesus restored our lives.

In this final week of Lent we acknowledge the best way to love ourselves is to receive God’s love by embracing the good news of Jesus given for us and the world. In this final week we see how we are ultimately transformed from dust to love—because the One who is Love came to be dust like us, so that we could become Love like him.

Invitation to Practice:

• Wrestle with the sin in your life that Christ was killed for. He was killed for your sins. Therefore ask yourself and be real with Jesus: What are you struggling with? What do you wish to confess? What do you need, with his help, to die to? What needs to be crucified on that cross with him?
• Be intentional to rest your heart, soul, mind, and strength this week. If possible, don’t rush into the Easter weekend. Guard your schedule so you can spend more time with God and your soul.
• Receive the the good news of Jesus by slowing down and reflecting on the cross and empty tomb. 
  • Read the passion narrative in the Gospels (perhaps John’s account, John 13-21) this week.
  • Join us for our Holy Week services:
    Listen to the Good Friday experience at thetapestry.ca/good-friday
    Easter Service with one of our campuses at https://www.thetapestry.ca/Live
  • Soak in God’s love shown through the crucified and risen Jesus, so that you can better go love God and love your neighbour as yourself.

Michael Yang is the campus pastor of The Tapestry Nights
Photo: Jon Tyson