Read Matt 22:34-40

“³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

In discussing modern morality, Christians often spruik that we should, “Love the sinner but hate the sin”. Christian theologian C.S. Lewis initially considered this saying quite silly until he realised that he had inadvertently been loving one sinner in this manner his whole life – himself. He says: 

“You are told to love your neighbour as yourself. How do you love yourself? When I look into my own mind, I find that I do not love myself by thinking myself a dear old chap or having affectionate feelings. I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself and quite apart from my character. I might detest something which I have done. Nevertheless, I do not cease to love myself. In other words, that definite distinction that Christians make between hating sin and loving the sinner is one that you have been making in your own case since you were born. You dislike what you have done, but you don’t cease to love yourself. You may even think that you ought to be hanged. You may even think that you ought to go to the Police and own up and be hanged. Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940

This powerful realisation offers us an incredible internal challenge. If we are so adept at love, why are we so willing to offer it to ourselves but so challenged to offer it beyond ourselves? As C.S. Lewis discovered, self-love is natural to all of us. This is why Jesus so confidently bases his command on two universal facts. Fact one, we have a seemingly unlimited capacity for self-love. Fact two, we do not love our “neighbour” as Jesus modelled, or even as we desire ourselves! 

Given our lack of ‘natural’ capacity, we require not just a “better” love, but a new nature. This internal ‘gap’ between our original nature and our preferred one is the gap that Jesus came to not only reveal but to recover. His sacrificial death in our place removes not just the guilt of our sin, but gives us a new, “resurrected” life just like his. This new nature has a capacity for love that our old nature didn’t. This is an ancient idea that God introduces in Genesis. He says we are all created in His image and designed to live accordingly. Jesus’ invitation to follow him in a life of love literally returns us to the kind of life we were originally designed to live!

So, do you graciously “see the best” in yourself despite your sin? If so, how might you learn from Jesus how to love others in the same way you have loved yourself?