You Don’t Need More Self-Love

Ask Pastor John

Desiring God

John Piper, Unknown, 163859, Pastor, Ask, Theology, Desiring God, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Questions

4.8 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jesus’s command to love our neighbors as we love ourselves isn’t a call to raise our self-esteem. It’s a charge to seek others’ good in the same way we seek our own.

Transcript

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0:00.0	After one quarter of a century at Bethlehem Baptist Church, John Piper looked back and reflected
0:10.1	on one of the most troubling trends that he followed in Christianity. It was the trend of self-esteem
0:16.2	and self-love. Big in the 1970s and 1980s, self-esteem was said to be the key to Christian love.
0:23.5	Love yourself more, then you'll be able to love others more effectively. But such a model was a
0:29.2	distortion, actually, where the Bible demands from Christians is far more radical than self-esteem.
0:35.6	It's more radical because the Bible does not call us to love ourselves more, but to love others
0:40.7	with the same earnestness and zeal that we already love ourselves with. This more radical calling
0:48.6	to love is such a high in demanding calling. Pastor John will come out and call this revelation
0:54.1	utterly devastating, devastating because it really renders Christianity to be, quote,
1:00.0	an impossible religion. Here's Pastor John to explain in one of his 2005 sermons.
1:08.8	How is the debt of love we owe to others related to self-love?
1:13.8	Verse 9 is a quotation from it's 13-9 is a quotation of Leviticus 1918. It's quoted by Jesus.
1:24.1	It's quoted by James. It's quoted by Paul. This is the royal law of love. You shall love your
1:30.0	neighbor as you love yourself. And my question is what does as you love yourself mean as yourself?
1:37.8	I've been here 25 years now. We just celebrated that on Wednesday night and I can remember in the
1:44.1	six years before I got here being over Bethel and I would say among the dominant concerns of my life
1:51.6	from 1974 to 1986, 789 was this issue. What does as yourself mean? And I point out that little
2:04.3	historical fact just because either I've got my head in the sand or things have changed a little
2:11.7	bit. I don't hear as much now as I did 30 and 20 years ago the psychological scheme that was built
2:22.4	on this verse that was so wrong. But I'm going to tell you what it is just in case my head is in
2:28.2	the sand and just in case it's got a hook in you in a second or third generation. I'm going to try
2:33.2	to get the hook out right now. Okay. For many years people, Christians would write articles and books
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