LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR OR LOVE YOURSELF?
By: Cathy HargettAugust 3, 2025In a world where there seems to be no lack of people loving themselves and exalting themselves, perhaps the second greatest commandment makes sense - or maybe not? Are we supposed to love ourselves first and then our neighbor?Here is how Yeshua answered when one of the Torah scholars asked Him which is the greatest commandment in the Torah:
“And He said to him, ‘You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.”(Matthew 22:37)And then Yeshua went further and told the Torah scholar the second greatest commandment:
“And the second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The entire Torah and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’ ”(Matthew 22:38-40)Note that Yeshua said that these two commandments are the foundation for the entire Torah. In other words, without both of them, you do not have the Torah in its completeness, in its fulfillment.
And remember this, Yeshua said He did not come to abolish Torah but to fulfill it with His very life:
“Do not think that I came to abolish the Torah or the Prophets! I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.”(Matthew 5:17)To go right to the point, with the question “are we to love ourselves first and then love our neighbor”? I think not. The main reason for my conclusion is that Yeshua did not say there are three greatest commandments; i.e., “love God, love yourself, and love your neighbor”. No, He said there were two greatest commandments – “love God and love your neighbor as yourself”.
Getting to this conclusion was not without much prayer and study, especially because of the strain to filter out all the background noise and the voices “in the world”, and even in Christian psychology and counseling. So many of these voices are crying out to us with human logic, encouraging us to embrace “self-esteem” and “self-care” and to build ourselves up. But God says we are to build ourselves up in our most holy faith (Jude 20). It’s the Word that divides our flesh from our spirit (Hebrews 4:12). This is how we can hear the Lord. The answer for us, as followers of Yeshua, is in the Word, not in the world.
From what I have learned from the Scriptures, mankind does not need to practice ways to love themselves. It’s our default value. It’s clear in this passage:
“After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body….”(Ephesians 5:29)To be clear, the Lord made us in His image. This is our identity, but it is not the same as self-love. Neither are we to be self-deprecating. We are to respect and honor everything He has made. We honor Him who lives inside our mortal flesh. He gives us the responsibility to take care of His creation, which does include our own bodies. We are to steward everything that He has given us. He values us, and we are in awe that we are fearfully and wonderfully made by God. In this regard, yes, we have our identity. And in a manner of speaking, we can say, we love what He has made and we take care of it.
This is very different from being “lovers of ourselves”. God makes this distinction in the Scripture when He says that being lovers of ourselves is not a good thing:
“..There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God - ”(II Timothy 3:2)We are admonished throughout the Scripture not to love ourselves but to love others. This is the lesson we are taught, not the lesson about loving ourselves. We are to think of ourselves with “sober judgment”, to understand who we are, not to despise ourselves or to exalt ourselves, but to give freely of all that He has created us to be:
“For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.”(Romans 12:3)He is teaching us how to do what He has required – in Him:
“with humility, consider others as more important than yourselves, looking out not only for your own interests but also for the interests of others.”(Philippians 3:3-4)“Let your attitude toward one another be governed by your being in union with the Messiah Yeshua.”(Philippians 2:5)And let’s not miss that Yeshua is the fulfillment of Torah. He desires us to walk in this way, too. In this way we join our Rabbi in reflecting Torah and the Prophets:
“So in all things, do to others what you would want them to do to you – for this is the Torah and the Prophets.”(Matthew 7:12)Finally, and amazingly, let’s really listen to what Yeshua told us about the first and second commandments. He said that the “second commandment is like the first commandment”.
“And the second is like it..”(Matthew 22:39)This is the major key to the revelation of what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves. And it answers the question, “Are we to love ourselves”?
I prayerfully asked Him, “in what way is the second commandment like the first commandment?”. “What do You mean that the second is like it?” He explained this to me with these words “love Me with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor the same way that you love Me, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength”. When you do this, you will fulfill all the Torah and the Prophets.
I am remembering, too, when Yeshua gave instructions to His disciples. He said, “a new commandment I give to you – to love one another..”. He is, once again, revealing the “Transcendent Torah”, higher than we’ve understood Scripture before. Not only are we to love Him, to love God, but we are also to love others the same way we love Him, with everything we’ve got.
There is only one way we can do this. We must allow Him to love us, to receive His great love for us. It’s not self-love that we need to nurture. It is the love of God inside of us that we must have in order to obey the first and second greatest commandments. In this way, yes, we do love ourselves, as the expression of Messiah inside of us, and only because He first loved us and chose us to be His. He is inside of us. He dwells here. In this way we understand that His life abides inside these mortal bodies, His temple. Because of this miracle, we are empowered to love others as we love ourselves.
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