So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17–19, ESV)
Learning to love yourself starts with abiding and resting in the love of God. God is utterly, totally, madly in love with you. God loves you in a greater way than you could ever love yourself. Let that sink in for a moment. God loves you more than you could ever love yourself!
Real, true, and authentic love comes from God. We see love portrayed in movies but it is only a cheap imitation of the real thing. If we don’t truly know the love of God we are never going to fully grasp love.
To be loved and to truly be able to love comes from being filled with all the fullness of God – the breadth, the length, the height, and the depth. The more God is in our life the more we will experience love and offer love.
The first step in loving yourself is having a profound and significant relationship with God. In other words, it is a relationship that is both deep and wide. We are intimate with God.
Immersing ourselves in the love of God happens when we regularly talk with God through prayer and through worship. It comes when we listening to him in his Word. It is experiencing intimacy with God as loving Father. That is when God love runs deep.
The experience of God’s love also runs wide. The relationship transcends the breadth of our life. God doesn’t want to be kept at church or in my morning devotion time. God desires to be in every part of my life – my work and play, my marriage and parenting, my health and fitness, my buying and saving, my eating and drinking, my serving and being served.
It is popular to talk about putting God first in our life. He doesn’t want to be first, he wants to be everything. He wants to be are all in all. God is not to be reserved for one part of our life, but to be brought to every part.
The reason that we don’t know love more in our life is because we keep God distant in our lives. We keep him at shoulders length. We keep him at church rather than allowing him to dwell in our hearts. Loving yourself starts with receiving the love of God.
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