love of self | Stephen Nielsen

From 2 Timothy 3:2 “…For men will be lovers of self.”

Is A Love of Self Ever Good? The answer to that question is yes. If our love for self is not a selfish kind of love, and if we use it to help us love others, then it is good. Here are eight scriptures that indicate that in some cases it is good.

Philippians 2:4. Paul teaches here, “Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.” This verse definitely indicates that we naturally care for ourselves. But the teaching here, with verse three, is that we must also, at the same time, care for others. In fact, we must regard others as more important than ourselves. I think Paul is saying to the Philippians, love of self will always be there, but we must push it down so that we have room to love and

care for others. We must not let our self-love be selfish or to end there. We must move on with our love to include others.

Leviticus 19:18, 34. These are the very first verses in the bible that directly tell us that we ought to love others as ourselves. And the following six scriptures that we will look at say the same thing—that we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves—assuming that we do naturally (in a good way) love ourselves. Verse 34 includes the teaching that they were to see and treat other strangers among them just as they wished to be treated when they were strangers in Egypt; hence, they were to love all people just as they love themselves.

Matthew 22:39. Here is what we may call the second to the greatest commandment. Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, and He said,

” ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ 38 “This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 “The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’

The thought that comes to my mind here is that these are commands from God. We are commanded to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and then also to love our neighbor. But how? Well, if God commands us to do it, I would think He would show us how, and give us the ability to do it. And really, I don’t think one is any harder than the other. He will give us the ability to love. And the love for our neighbor will come when we love ourselves.

Mark 12:31. This verse is of the same teaching as Matthew 22:39. Mark says nothing different. I will, however, add something more here. The reason why Jesus gave the scribe more than he asked for—that is, more than what the greatest commandment was—was because the second greatest commandment is tied to the first one. We can’t genuinely

love God without loving people. If we don’t love our neighbor, we won’t be loving God, because to love Him requires that we love our neighbor.

Luke 10:27-37. Here Jesus gives us the same two commandments, but with a teaching to a lawyer. The lawyer asked Jesus what he should do to inherit eternal life. When they agreed that he should follow the two greatest commandments, Jesus next asked him who his neighbor was. If he was to love his neighbor as himself, he needed to know who he was.

Well, I think you know the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the story, which of the three men proved to be a neighbor to the man who was robbed and left for dead? It was the Samaritan who showed the man mercy. Here it is interesting that Jesus reversed the lawyer’s original question of “who is my neighbor,” to bring the idea that we are all neighbors to each other. We all have a responsibility to be a good neighbor—to care for others as we would want to be cared for, or as we would care for ourselves. And here also, we can see the idea of regarding everyone the same, with equal values, and treating everyone the same.

Romans 13:8-10. Here Paul explains that love to our neighbor (to anyone) is a fulfillment of the law. In other words, if we love others, we are fulfilling the law—we will not commit adultery with them, we will not murder them, we will not steal from them, and we will not covet anything that they have. Hence, love does no wrong to a neighbor. And the way we love them (treat them) is to think how we would want to be treated, and then we would love them just as we love ourselves.

Galatians 5:14. Here the idea is to show our love for others by showing them Chrisitan freedom in Christ; that is, we should not only love them if they keep our rules (read chapter 5); we should love them just as we love ourselves.

James 2:8. Here, much like the previous verse, we must love others without showing partiality. We are to love and care for others just as we do for ourselves.

Okay, we have pretty much outlined from scripture that we naturally do love and care for ourselves. The next thing we need to do is to discuss how we do that. Where does this good self-love come from?

We know, or we should know that all of us were born sinners. However, despite our sin nature, we all were created in God’s image. And since God always loves Himself, we discover that we do too. It is a natural God-quality that we have.

Now since God is perfect, with no flaws, His love is vastly different. In 1 John 4:8 it says that “God is love.” Love is central to His character. We could never have this kind of love, but we do have several qualities of love. For instance, we care for ourselves. We find that we are always watching out for our own danger. We instinctively want to be healthy, so we try to eat healthy foods (but we often fail in this). We set for ourselves firm boundaries when we discover things or people that are bad for us.

After we are saved, when we are made “a new creature,” (2 Cor. 5:17), our self-love will be better; that is, since we are in Christ (living for Him) we will care more for ourselves. But since we still sin, we often let ourselves go.

My next post will be on when our love of self becomes evil—or selfish.

Well, I think it is about time for me to start blogging again. I have taken a little break. Normally I like to blog on what I am writing about in a self-published book. For the last couple months, I have been writing a book which I will entitle, Difficult Times in these Last Days: 19 Attributes that Depict these Days. It is taken from 2 Timothy 3:1-5. I have written about 50 pages in the book so far, and so I will try to keep ahead.No problem, since I will only blog once or twice a week and no more than about 600 words. I will also include an unrelated photo—just something nice to look at. So here it is. The first chapter is on “lovers of self,” and you will probably get about five posts on that topic.

Lovers of Self – 2 Timothy 3:2

The Apostle Paul writes to his good friend Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:1-5 saying,

But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. 2 For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, 4 treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.

Generally speaking, the last days is that period from the first coming of Christ until His return—in which it reaches a climax shortly before He comes.[1] Hence there is no doubt that we are in the last days; and so, the list of nineteen evil attributes in this text are before us now in this present time; and they will get worse before the very end. In Paul’s day, he was looking at these evils as being in the future; but I think, for the most part, we may see them as being now correct to the text in intensity and maybe getting a little worse before He comes. Things were very different a thousand years ago, and a hundred years ago, and in some cases, even twenty years ago. I mean, the same evils were there many years ago, but not as bad as they are now. In these next upcoming blogs, I will attempt to show how they have gotten progressively worse. As Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:13, “But evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse.” My purpose in these blogs (this book) is not only to show how evil these days are, but more importantly, to indicate by the progression of evil, how close Jesus’ coming is.

In these blogs, we will go through each point of evil and devote three or four blog posts to each one. I think this first point, that men (people) will be lovers of self, is particularly important as it sets a negative tone for all of them. As Matthew Henry states in his commentary, “Self-love brings in a long train of sins and mischiefs. When men are lovers of themselves, no good can be expected from them…”2 Therefore, in this first point on self-love, eighteen more evils will follow after it.

Stay tuned to more verses in the next blog post.

[1] John MacArthur, The MacArthur Study Bible: (Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2006), John MacArthur’s notes on 1 Timothy 4:1.