On Monday, October 22, I wrote a blog article about “loving myself.” I shared it on the wall of some groups to which I belong.  I received a comment which responded to the article.  The response was a reproof of sorts, I think.  The person simply quoted to me Luke 9:23.  The quotation was in capital letters which is the equivalent of a shout in internet usage.  The response was: “DENY YOURSELF.”

I totally agree.  I believe that we are to deny ourselves.  And that is not all: we not only have to deny ourselves, we also have to pick up our cross daily and follow Christ,  but I think the reader misunderstood me.  Loving oneself is not contrary to denying oneself or else, Christ would not have taught it. It was Jesus Christ who commanded us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul and with all our mind and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.  Jesus Christ presumed that we humans love ourselves.  It is not a sin to love oneself.

The “self” means two things: it can mean one’s own soul (the mind, the emotion and the will); one’s own personality; it can also mean the carnal nature that seeks its own promotion and its own gratification. The self which is my soul (who I am individually), is different from that tendency in me to seek my own will, my own desires and my own way of doing things.  I have to love my “self” my “personhood” but I have to deny that ever present tendency in my “self” to choose my own way.  The “self” I have to love is my identity, that part of me which makes me unique in the world and different from all others.  The “self” I have to deny is that tendency in my “self” that insists on having my own way instead of submitting to God’s way..

Part of loving myself is knowing my “self.”  In the work of salvation, if I do not realize and admit that my “self” is a sinner condemned to eternal punishment and I do not love my “self,”  I will not choose to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross as my substitute.  To choose not to believe in the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ is to choose the destruction of the “self” in the eternal fire of God’s punishment. Therefore, because I chose to believe in Christ as the only way of salvation, I love my “self.” Because I chose to accept the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus, I love my “self.”

Part of loving my “self” is reckoning my “self” to be dead to sin.  If every day I do not take into mental account that I am a sinner and I have died with Christ, I cannot live in personal victory over the domination of sin in the daily life.  I cannot commune with God without my “self.”  Part of loving my “self” is knowing that I have been crucified with Christ and yet, I still live.  Loving my “self” means knowing that I no longer own my “self.”   That is, I have been bought with the blood of Jesus Christ, so my person (my mind, my emotions and my will, all of it) belongs to Christ.

Part of loving my “self” means knowing that apart from Christ who is the source of my new life, my “self” means nothing.  My “self” can never be whole as God intended it to be without Christ.  Therefore, clinging to Christ is truly loving my “self” because loving Christ above all, surrendering all to him, and losing my life to him is the only way by which I save my life. Luke 9:23 does not stand alone.  The command to “deny himself” is followed by verse 24 that shows us how to “deny  himself:” by choosing to lose one’s life to Christ instead of claiming it as my own. It was the missionary Jim Elliot who said that “he is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to have what he cannot lose.” To choose Christ and to live for Christ is ultimately to love myself because only in Christ can I have “all in all.”

To love the “self” is to love the individual God made.  It is to acknowledge that I was made in the image of God. My personality (the sum total of all my experiences and my reactions to stimuli) is the person God created. My personality (who I am) is known to God and loved by God.  If God did not love my “self” He would not have sent His Son to die on the cross for me.  If God loved my “self” why should I not love my “self?”  To love my “self” is to take care of the body that houses the soul.  This is why I feed my “self” with the milk and meat of the Word of God.  I have to take heed unto my “self” and to my doctrine.  I cannot do anything without my “self” (my personality).  This is why Christ commanded us to love our neighbors as our “self.”  To love my “self” is to use my body as an instrument to serve God instead of yielding it as an instrument of unrighteousness.

You cannot give up the “self” without knowing what it is.  You cannot surrender your “self” without owning it in the first place.  Why do you think it is a struggle to “deny” oneself?  Because we love our “self” inordinately, we love it more than we love God.  That was Adam’s problem.  What is sin is to love my “self” more than I love God for then, I have made my “self” my idol.  This is what is meant to deny my “self”  it means to take my own desires off the throne of my heart and ask Christ to reign there as Lord and King.  When I do that, I become true to the “self” that God had created, the “self” that will live eternally with him in fellowship.

The reader’s response to me “DENY YOURSELF” presupposes the Catholic way of looking at the “self.”  The Catholics, especially the mystics and the spiritualists, deprive the body of food, willingly undertake physical torture of the body to purify the soul.  The Hindus and the Buddhists do the same.  This is not Biblical.

The capacity to love my “self” means I can see what is wrong with me, what is ugly in me, and yet, treat myself with kindness and not commit suicide or drink myself to death or take drugs so that I become numb to who I am.  The capacity to love my “self” means identifying myself with the way Christ loves: Christ saw what is in man (all the ugliness and deformity of sin) and yet, Christ had the capacity to treat man with goodness and kindness.  Christ used the harshest words only for the Pharisees who had no true knowledge of their sinful “self.”  Therefore, they could not be humble enough to ask Christ to save them.

Christ loved me: he laid aside his own Godly glory to be a man like me.  This way, he also had a “self”  but, because He is the Son of God, and he is obedient to His Father, he laid his own self to be broken on Calvary.  Christ denied every instinct of self-preservation and avoidance of pain and he obeyed the Father so that Christ can show men the love of the Father. That is the loving “myself” that Monday’s article was talking about.  It means choosing to behave to others (who are impolite and insensitive to me) and still treating them with kindness in the same way that Christ has behaved toward me.  It does not mean choosing myself and glorifying myself above Christ—this is the “self” will that we are to deny,

I hope this makes my position clear to the reader who made the comment. Thank you for your input.  Thank you also for giving me the chance to explain it.  I hope that with this new article, I have shown to you that denying the self is ultimately loving the self.