Have you ever heard someone say, “If you can’t love yourself… you can’t love others” or ” “How do you expect others to love you, if you do not love yourself?”..?? Anyone? Well I have and I’ve heard it several times throughout my life and quite frankly…I’ve NEVER believed it. I would hear that and want to vomit as I thought to myself, “That’s horse rubbish! I can love others just fine… and I don’t love me… so… that’s a flawed statement!”

True story… I’ve thought this for years.

I’m 27yrs old now, no I’m not lying… but thank you for the compliment as you thought to yourself, “oh my gosh… she’s that old? she doesn’t look it” , very sweet of you, HAHA!

So I’m 27 and have JUST BARELY realized what a horrible lie I have allowed myself to believe. Perhaps, in my mind, I felt that my thoughts were true … as some sort of justification for my actions. Well maybe not so much a justification per se… but in my mind I felt that “this is just how I am”… and because I believed that, I felt there was nothing wrong with me and the way I loved otheres, therefore there’s nothing I needed to change because I was fine and it was ok to not love me and give love to those around me. I don’t know if I’m making much sense.

I’ve had issues with loving myself for years! Where does this come from?  Well I believe from several different events in my life that have hurt me emotionally and therefore I have carried them with me and telling myself that this is just how I am.

Such as elementary, I was one of the chubby girls, you know.. the thicker ones with super cricked teeth.. no, I mean SUPER BAD! So bad that neighbors would ask my dad or even give the suggestion “Hey, you should think about getting Tita some braces… when are you going to get her braces” etc. So when I realized I wasn’t the pretty girl, insecurity creeped in and I guess it never really left. 6th grade to 7th grade was a drastic difference if you were to look at my school picture. I had lost weight but… it never seemed enough to me. My friends were size 0’s and I felt that my 3/5 was huge compared to their tiny bodies. With this weight loss and now having braces and learning to do my makeup.. I had become friends with the “popular girls”.. so then the thoughts of “am I even cool enough to hangout with them” came in.  It seemed as though insecurity after insecurity after insecurity founds its way into my thoughts… ruling nearly every decision I made. Insecurity, fear, worry, not trusting, etc… are all a part of the same family. The family of LIES.

There was a guy that started to pursue me after high school… I can remember one night when we were on the phone… “Martha, you’re beautiful… but if you worked out… you would be gorgeous” I felt so gross and ugly and not worthy to be liked by this guy that I held on a pedal stool. There was a guy I was dating who ended it with me because of my insecurity and then went on to say he was dating me and another girl at the same time, so of course I felt dumb and not good enough. For years I’ve allowed my negative perception of myself to stay in my mind and take residence in my heart, it was mighty fine with me because I thought it was normal and ok to feel this way… to not like me, but allowing this mentality to rule only makes the love you give to others completely unfair. Why? Because when you show them pieces of your heart with fear behind it, a fear that they will not love you back? Well that alone confirms the thoughts you have that say… “they just don’t love you, you’re just not that important.” I would really think this of people… I believed lies so easily, Bill Johnson says “when you believe a lie, you empower the liar”….oh man, looks like I did lots empowering because I would just eat up any negative thought I had of me.

I don’t know where these thoughts came from of just NOW realizing that loving yourself is SO KEY to loving others, ok had to be God telling me, Duh! haha!  The bible says to lovers others as yourself…

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: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these. -Mark 12:30-31

There’s no way you can purely love others when you have remnants of insecurity or even portions of you that cannot trust others, its flawed love and can cause your character to look questionable. I’m no expert but I now know that in order to love people… I need learn to how to love me and give no room for lies and no room to operate from those lies.

Loving yourself = Freedom to love others. I say freedom because if I have still have some insecurities or areas where I do not trust… then I’m enslaved to those negative emotions and lies I have believed which are NOT from me but from who else? Who hates God? Who was cast out of heaven because he was so mad that he was not greater than God therefore had to be cast to Earth where he had to sit and watch MAN be MADE IN GODS IMAGE? The Devil. We are hated because we are made in the very image he isn’t… and the devil HATES that about us… and will do anything he can to destroy us and I have a feeling a part of his tactic is getting us to not love ourselves, to think so negative that we don’t move or go very far in life because we sit and are so convinced that we just suck at the very things God has gifted us in.

And until we are free from those thoughts that we have believed, those lies will continue to stay alive within and therefore we become a slave to them. The goal is Freedom, the goal is to LOVE others from a place of Freedom… not from a place where you justify your negative thinking to continue living the way you do yet “love on others” and call it Godly. It’s not Godly, its a lie you believe, and it’s unfair to those you are loving on… to give them a love that is flawed all because you are not happy with yourself, all because you really truly believe you suck and are not worth much. Who thinks that of you? Only ONE, and he’s just a jealous mc.nasty trying to get you on his level.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.- Galations 5:1

Many thoughts we have of ourselves… are not our thoughts, but we receive them and believe them to be from us. I was watching a video by Dan Mohler on how to resist the devil, he said something that struck,  “Who’s ever thought something that bothered them? It wasn’t you, it was interjected, it was lie trying to grab your identity and sell you cheap… as soon as you accept it as you, you give things a place”

Do not give a place to thoughts that do not belong to you, recognize where it is coming from and then Get FREE!! How? Fall deeper in love with the ONE who created you… ask Him to reveal things about you that you didn’t know before or have seen before… ask Him to tell you who you are and listen as He talks about Himself, because you’re made in his image… expect to hear ONLY remarkable things. We owe the world a genuine real love, but we have to take our thoughts captive and close the space we have made to give a place to the negative lies we believed of ourselves. 

There is NOTHING wrong with YOU… my prayer for those in this same boat as I, is this:
Lord, help us to see ourselves the way YOU see us and to deflect the lies that we are not good enough, that we are not lovable, that we cannot succeed, that we suck at what we love to do etc. and most importantly, Lord help us to fight off the thoughts that we believe and have allowed to stay and take residence in our hearts… we declare our minds to be FREE from any lie we have believed where we have spoken ‘this is me, these are my thoughts, this is how I am’… we rebuke lies in Jesus name and we declare LIFE over our hearts, joy, peace and pure love!

-MarthaInez