Or do you dislike yourself when fearful? This is not self-love/self-acceptance, but self-hate/self-contempt. Does Jesus love you when you’re fearful? Of course He does. His love for you is not conditional. But your love for yourself, is conditional, your acceptance of yourself, is conditional, if you are irritated with yourself when you don’t perform up to your expectations. And fear is never allowed. Failure is never allowed. Fear of failure is never allowed. Fearful feelings typically result in self-rejection/self-hate. This is sin, to hate what God loves, and the enemy could not be more pleased, than to get you hating yourself. Why? Because you cannot love God, and you cannot love others, while hating yourself. Giving yourself permission to be fearful, imperfect, while not living in denial about your sin, while still loving/accepting yourself, is giving to yourself the same kind of unconditional love, that your DaddyJesusSpirit gives you. Ahhhh. Being as loving to yourself as your DaddyJesusSpirit is to you. Glory. Ecstasy.
If you try not to sin, you don’t understand sin. Sin is not something you try not to do: sin is something you confess. In the Church we have dumbed down the law, and dumbed down sin, to where it’s outside-the-cup kinda stuff, that’s manageable. Like the Pharisees. The Christian life is impossible. There is never anything you’ve ever done, simply and only because you love Jesus: there’s a dark side, a sinful side, sinful motivation, to ever seemingly-noble, seemingly-selfless thing you’ve ever done. You have never done anything, sinlessly, even though your flesh, the world and the devil want you to think so. Why? So you can feel good about yourself, based on your performance, and not need the imputed performance of Jesus, which you find unsatisfying if you can get some of your own. And this self-righteousness/self-performance is what keeps you from enjoying God, enjoying others, and enjoying yourself, another way of describing loving God, loving others, and loving self, especially the impossible to love. And for emotionally-wounded adults, self is the most impossible to love well. Self-love is not selfishness/idolatry. Selfishness/idolatry is self-hate. I know, it seems wrong, but the devil has done a number on us. Why? To keep us from loving God and others with a contagious humility and a contagious love, especially pre-believers with values most different from our own.
–DumbSheepDave, smiling at himself more than ever, because folks have been praying (please keep praying, and please pray now)
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