LOVE
Daily Devotional
Cultivate love each day this week.
December 28: Love for Self
- Scripture: Matthew 22:39 – ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
- Meditation: This commandment, part of the two great commandments to love Godself and to love our neighbors as ourselves, actually has two parts to it. We are asked to love others. We are also asked to respect and be compassionate toward ourselves. We cannot fully love others unless we also love ourselves. Recognizing our own worth is essential.
- Spiritual Discipline: Take time to practice self-care today. Treat yourself tenderly, engage in something you enjoy, and remind yourself of God’s love for you.
SONGS:
- I Choose to Love Myself by Fearless Soul: https://youtu.be/9bUdPYRnPLU?si=82Avw4dg5kiu_7hp
- Be Kind to Yourself by Andrew Peterson: https://youtu.be/sYiM-sOC6nE?si=7MljtMuKjAEhh0IT
- Love Yourself by LaTocha: https://youtu.be/dEbfcylk2iA?si=SxGtwCZ8Sfl_9TOR
On Living and Loving Wholeheartedly (excerpt) — Rachel Held Evans
… I write especially for those who feel fractured by the lie that their faith precludes their doubts, their politics, their biology degree, their cultural heritage, their diagnosis, their sexuality, their intellectual integrity, their intuition, their uncertainty, their sadness, their joy.
I’m not the first to make the observation that to love your neighbor as yourself, you obviously have to learn to love yourself. To love oneself is not synonymous with self-obsession or narcissism—or perhaps it’s better to say that to love oneself well is not those things. To love oneself well is to regard one’s place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one’s strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one’s weaknesses. To love oneself well is to be able to distinguish between what one wants and what one needs. To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made nor to cultivate an outsize image of that same person.