Editorial June 13, 1988 Issue

Loving your nearest neighbor—loving yourself

William E. Moody

I've sometimes heard people say that they don't feel very good about themselves. (Maybe most of us have felt this way from time to time.) Some people think of themselves as unworthy or without value. Some feel insignificant, that they just don't matter all that much. It would seem that people aren't always able to express love freely to their closest of neighbors—to themselves. And yet, so much of what Christ Jesus conveyed to his disciples was fundamentally about the liberating power of love that surely there must be important lessons in the Master's teachings for our own lives today.

An essential element of Jesus' teachings on love may have been best summed up in the reply he gave to a Hebrew lawyer who tested him with the question "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus' answer was straightforward, unequivocal, firmly grounded in the Scriptures: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment."

And then Jesus voiced a second essential demand from the Scriptures—a demand by which his followers would be always able to measure their success as faithful Christians. Referring back to the original commandment that he had already stated, Jesus said, "And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."^{Matt. 22:36–39.}

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