Well, self-love is a loud mantra in our culture. It echoes in our advertising and it's on repeat in our social media feeds. Self-love is becoming inseparable from our cultural image in America. Self-love is what we do. So do we need to learn to love ourselves more? It's a question from a perceptive teen listener to the podcast.

"Hi, Pastor John. My name is Danielle. I'm currently in high school and I've heard lots of variations on the 'love yourself' mantra, constantly spoken to young men and women like me. We're told to love our personalities, our own skin, our bodies, and our choices. This seems like an extremely secular worldview, yet the Bible says to love your neighbor as yourself.

So here's my question for you. Should we love ourselves? Is this something we need to be mindful of or is it an assumed inborn inclination?" What does the Bible say, Pastor John, about self-love? So let's start by talking about the command, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," which Jesus said was the second greatest commandment after "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength," and which both Jesus and Paul said was the fulfilling of the whole law.

That's Matthew 22, 40 and Romans 13, 8. Now first, notice it's not a command to love ourselves. It's not a command to love ourselves. It's a command to love others as we love ourselves. So the love of ourselves in that command is an assumption, not an imperative. Jesus assumes we all love ourselves, and on the basis of this assumption, he can make our inborn self-love the criterion, the measure of how we treat other people.

So we should ask, "Well, in what sense do we all love ourselves?" And of course the answer is not, "We all feel good about ourselves." Nobody feels good about themselves all the time. Lots of people dislike their bodies, their hair, their limited intelligence, their limited athletic ability, me, how slow I read, limited speaking ability, hot temper, moodiness, on and on and on.

Goodness gracious, there are a lot of good reasons not to like yourself. There are just many things in this world that Jesus is not referring to. He's referring to the fact that all of us have an inborn instinct or reflex to seek our own happiness and to avoid harm.

In other words, self-love, our self-love that Jesus assumes in this commandment is our desire for happiness or our desire to minimize our unhappiness. So even people who commit suicide are not a contradiction to this assumption that Jesus has because suicide is motivated by a desire to be done with misery.

That's why people kill themselves. They may not have any idea what's coming on the other side. All they can right now is feel like, "It just can't get any worse, and so I want to minimize the mess and horror of my life." So when Jesus commands us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, he's not at all saying that we should work up some kind of approval of our hair or our complexion or our abilities or our goodness.

He's saying that we should make the measure of our own desire for happiness or our own desire to minimize our misery, make that the measure of our desire for other people's happiness. We should want their happiness the way we want our happiness. We should want their good and their success the way we want our good and our success.

We should want them to avoid harm and suffering the way we would like to avoid harm and suffering. And this is, as you can feel, extremely radical. I mean, devastatingly radical. It severs the root of all selfishness deeply, profoundly. You can't be self-exalting while seeking another person's happiness as much as your own.

You can't. Now, there are two other confirmations of this understanding of Jesus' command. In Matthew 22, 40, Jesus says that all the law and the prophets depend on this commandment, and he says the very same thing about the golden rule. In Matthew 7, 12. Remember the golden rule? It goes like this.

"Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets," which probably means that the golden rule is the same as the command to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is virtually the same as love your neighbor as you love yourself, if you interpret self-love as your desire for happiness and your avoidance of harm.

So that's the first confirmation that we're on the right track when we interpret "as yourself," love your neighbor as yourself that way, because it's parallel to the golden rule. Here's the second confirmation that we're on the right track, namely in Luke 10, when the lawyer asks Jesus, "Well, who is my neighbor?" Seeking to justify himself after Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." Who is my neighbor?

Well, Jesus tells him in answer to that question a parable, namely the parable of the Good Samaritan. And the point of the Good Samaritan parable is not that he liked the wounded Jew the way he liked himself, like he had really good feelings about himself, so he could have really good feelings about this wounded Jew.

That's just not the point at all. The point is he treated this wounded Jewish man the way he would like to be treated. He loved him as he loved himself in the sense that he sought his good. He picked him up, he put oil on his wounds, he put him in a motel, he paid his bill, because he thought, "Well, if I were lying here like this, that's the way I'd like to be treated." But let me close by giving a biblical alternative to the mantra that Danielle considers so worldly, and rightly so.

She says, "We're told to love our personalities, our own skin, our bodies, our choices." And she says, "That just doesn't sound right to me." It's not. Now here's the alternative. As Christians who believe in the sovereignty and the goodness and the wisdom of God and everything he does, nobody, none of us, received a body from our parents under God's providence different than the one God appointed.

We got the body God appointed. God knit us together in our mother's womb, the psalmist says. Our attitude toward our bodies, therefore, should be to accept our bodies and our brains with all their limitations and all their imperfections, and trust God that he is wise and good and merciful, and then offer our bodies as instruments of righteousness for God's glory with all their imperfections and all their limitations.

Johnny Erickson Tada has been paralyzed in a wheelchair for over 50 years. Here is an example of the faith I'm talking about. She said that she would like to take her wheelchair to heaven temporarily. She's got an agenda here. She will stand, she says, on her own two legs in her new body and say this to Jesus, "Thank you, Jesus, and he will know that I mean it because he knows me.

And I will say, 'Jesus, you see that wheelchair? You were right when you said that in the world we will have trouble, because that thing has been a lot of trouble. But the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you, and the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be.

It never would have happened had you not given me the bruising of the blessing of that wheelchair.'" God did not ask Johnny to like her wheelchair, but he did ask her to trust him that he knew what he was doing and to dedicate herself with all her limitations to him, and she did.

And we should too. That's an incredibly powerful testimony, and I think Johnny actually listens to the podcast and says, "Sir, if you're listening out there, we love you. We thank God for you. You have such a powerful testimony, and we're grateful to God for you." Thank you, Pastor John.

You know, for everything you need to know about this podcast, you can find it at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well speaking of self-love, how can I kill this pride inside me? Pride is a nefarious enemy, one of our great enemies. Pride is an ancient enemy of God's, and yet when the Lord gifts someone with natural skills and abilities beyond the norm, that struggle with pride can become even more intense.

Sunday we will address this fight against our enemy, the fight against our own pride. I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you then. Have a great weekend. "Pride and Self-Love" by John Lennon, co-author of "The Power of Self-Love" (1987) © The Pursuit of Self-Love 2012