Culture at large tells us we must love and accept ourselves as we are. The doctrine of self-esteem and the creed of self-affirmation have created a generation of narcissists worshiping a false god.
Since at least the 1960s, popular culture has told people that it is OK to embrace and even celebrate their flaws—be that unnatural sexual desire, ravenous gluttony, perpetual laziness, or whatever.
It is spiritual and emotional garbage, physically destructive, and morally bankrupt.
Humanity has long been about the business of attempting to dethrone God by erecting gods in our own likeness, complete with our own failings. It always ends poorly.
This is, in part, why our Founding Fathers rejected the idea that kings have a divine right to lord over the citizenry. They wisely created a pluralistic republic grounded in the biblical principle of self-governance.
To be self-governing as a people, we must also govern ourselves individually. Yet we have become so infatuated with self-love and self-service that we are trading away our republic. Theoretically, the bargain made between a king and his people was that—when push came to shove—he would trade his life for theirs. In practice, human monarchs have always demanded that their subjects die in defense of the crown.
Only Jesus, guiltless and sinless, took on the kingly duty of self-sacrifice for His people—not because we were beautiful but because we were ugly. He loves us more than He loved Himself. He took on the ugly weight of our sin so that we could stand before God.
Nothing could be further from our self-love culture.
Jesus was asked to summarize the most important commandments of God. The Gospel of Mark records Jesus as saying God’s law can be summed up as, first, to “‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
For several decades, modern culture has preached a selfish gospel, putting pride in ourselves and our various fetishes first. The Christianized self-help books are better; they say to put ourselves second, behind God. Jesus, though, said to first love God, and then, the love I would have for myself is to be directed at and to the benefit of others.
This was the cultural model that underpinned the founding of our nation 250 years ago.
For our self-governing republic to function as intended, you and I, as the citizen-leaders, must die to ourselves and live for each other.
