I’ve been having an interesting exchange of ideas on the internet lately.  It centers on the proposition of denying oneself and loving oneself. It began when I posted a blog where I said that often I do not like myself but I have to love myself.  By this, I meant that I often come face to face with the ugliness of sin in me such that I abhor myself.  But then, instead of being like Judas Iscariot who killed himself because of the horror of what he had done stared him in the face, I decided to love myself: to acknowledge my sinfulness, to repent and to accept the forgiveness of God.  This is all that I meant.  By loving myself, I still deal kindly with myself even when I am fully aware that I am a sinner.  My comment was misunderstood by a reader who commented that we were commanded in the Scriptures to deny ourselves and not to love ourselves. I took it to mean that he meant: loving oneself is contradictory to denying oneself.  I replied that to love oneself is presumed which is why it was not commanded.  I also replied that to deny oneself is the best way of denying oneself.

Denying oneself is not a command, it is a choice.  Luke 9:23 says “IF any man will come after me let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me.”  Denying oneself is a choice, a decision that every person who wishes to follow Christ has to make.  It is a threshold requirement and it is a daily requirement for all who choose to follow Christ.  It is a condition sine qua non for discipleship.

Denying oneself presumes a hierarchy of loves.  Jesus Christ taught that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul and all our mind: to love God is the first in the hierarchy of loves.  Jesus also taught that we are to love our neighbors: to love our neighbor is the second in the hierarchy of loves.  And the last is to love ourselves. I am reminded of the chorus we used to sing in Sunday School: J-O-Y means Jesus, Others and You.  This is the proper hierarchy of love:  love God above all, love others next and then love yourself.

Jesus Christ presumed that there is a hierarchy in the way humans love.  Jesus Christ said, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”  Jesus presumed that people love their close relatives and their spouses and their lives.  What he taught was that our love for these people and our love for our own life must be put in its proper place: it cannot rival our love for God.

I remember a story my mother once told me.  She said that when a woman enters the nunnery or a priest enters the priesthood all their relatives are dead to them and they are dead to their relatives.  All relationships outside of the religious life are dead to them.  I don’t know if this is true but if it is, it is not Biblical.  Husbands are exhorted to love their wives and parents are to love their children. We are to love our brethren in the faith.  We are to love our enemies even. Only, the love we have for them cannot rival our love for God. All other human loves (including my love for myself) must be secondary only to my love for God.

Denying oneself is not the destruction of oneself (one’s identity or one’s mind, emotions or will); rather, it is merely denying the self (the selfishness, the self-absorbedness, the self-promotion, the self-will, the self-gratification) first place in our daily life.  What died on the cross with Christ was our old man, our flesh, our sinful appetites and our sinful desires to promote ourselves and to give ourselves first place.  It is not our identity (our soul, our mind, our emotions or our will) that we have to deny.  Denying oneself is the submission of the self to God. Denying oneself is hating the fleshly desires that conflict with the spiritual desires.  It does not in any way mean to hate one’s soul or identity. David lamented in the Psalms: “No man careth for my soul.” To care for one’s soul is natural to a man. What is not natural to man is to love God more than oneself.  This is what it means to deny oneself: to love God more than we love ourselves.  John the Baptist recognized this when he said, “He must increase and I must decrease.”  This meant that when the choice he has to make is between giving Christ the glory or giving himself glory, then he will choose to do what glorifies Christ.  This is true denial of the self.

Apostle Paul also taught this.  In Philippians 3, he recounted all those things in his life that he was proud of: he was an Israelite from the tribe of Benjamin; he was circumcised; he was a Pharisee.  But then, he said that when the choice was between being proud of his accomplishments and gaining the knowledge of Christ, then he was willing to count all things as trash in comparison with the knowledge of Christ.  It did not mean he didn’t love himself, it just meant that he loved Jesus Christ more.  This is the true denial of the self that we are called upon to do.  Apostle Paul said, “I die daily.”  This meant that his everyday decisions put Christ ahead of any consideration of himself.  This is what denying the self is all about.  Denying oneself does not mean hating oneself—it only means denying our self first place in our lives. You can love oneself and still deny yourself.  In fact, I go so far to say that denying oneself is the best expression of love for oneself because at bottom, when we deny ourselves, only then can we truly find our true selves, the “self” that God created us to be.