Loving Yourself Isn’t Enough
Recently, while walking in a department store, I came across a shirt with “I love myself” emblazoned on its front. While it’s only a shirt with a silly slogan, its message captures one of the most deceptive and hollow philosophies of our day—the assertion that the greatest good in life is self-love.
In a hundred different ways, our society trumpets the idea of the self as paramount to the good life. You need to find yourself, love yourself, and then give full expression to your newly discovered self. We used to call such obsession selfish. What was once a vice is now heralded as the chief virtue. Self-love is the false gospel of our day. How’s this philosophy working out?
By just about every measure, we are not doing so well. For example, the rates of depression are rising at an alarming pace. Additionally, our deaths of despair have doubled in the last couple of decades. As a people, the signs are evident all around us—an increase in loneliness, deaths of despair, unwanted singleness, and a general feeling of meaninglessness. Yet, the prophets of despair continue to urge us that salvation comes from within, but the more we turn inward, the more miserable we become. The uncomfortable truth is that this gospel of self-love is powerless to save.
How did we get here? The secular age has exiled God from most of life. Far from rescuing us from “religious oppression,” all secularism did was create a vacuum of meaning in life. If the world is reduced to the immanent and material, then there is no lasting meaning to life. Such a life becomes unbearable.
Man is a meaning-making machine; we yearn for our lives to matter, to have lasting impact, and to possess purpose. If we can’t turn to God for meaning, we inevitably try to create it on our own. Without God, we are left with only two options—either life is meaningless, or we have to create our meaning. The nihilism of the first option is intolerable for most, so many try to replace the infinite and transcendent God with the finite and immanent self. We will create the meaning we long for by ourselves. Thus, self-love takes center stage.
Without an infinite reference point, moderns turn to the self to determine truth, reality, and meaning. The quest for the good life flows through “finding your true self,” yet how can we find ourselves if that elusive self is also the standard by which we measure all things? How do we find the self with the self?
Such an unstable foundation leads people to seek happiness through a thousand journeys of self-discovery and self-definition. From the absurdity of furries to the damaging ideology of transgenderism, the bankruptcy of the gospel of self-love has been laid bare. Reality is a stubborn thing that does not bend the knee to the whims of the self-deceived.
We have built modern life on shifting sand. Our finite selves simply cannot bear the weight of replacing the infinite God. All our searches for meaning without God are doomed to fail. Deep down, we know our self-obsession is nothing more than a distraction from the truth that all our self-made meaning dies with us. Without a reference point outside of ourselves, we become nothing more than a meaningless, self-referential collection of atoms marked for death. The ache of modern life finds its root in our innate knowledge that without God, we cannot have meaning, love, truth, or hope.
But here is the good news—life isn’t about you. Self-love is not the greatest love. The gospel of Jesus Christ reveals that the greatest love is not self-directed, but other-directed. There is no greater love than laying down our lives for others, just as Christ did. Instead of seeing others as obstacles to self-discovery, love, and freedom, the gospel calls us to see love as seeking the good of others, even at great personal cost. Life is not about me loving myself, but about loving God and neighbor. Instead of viewing God and others as oppressive, Scripture reminds us that the blessed life is found in losing yourself in the pursuit of loving the highest good that is God, and then turning to love others. Life isn’t about you. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you will be free from the shackles of the false gospel of our day.
Pastor Levi Secord
Christ Bible Church
