I Love Me

2 Timothy 3:2 “For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,”

An article in The New York Times written by a law professor at San Francisco University described divorce as an expression of “radical self-love.” Far from being the shameful event we’ve known it to be, she says divorce liberates us from being tied to responsibilities keeping us from reaching self-fulfillment. She readily admitted she still loved her husband, but she just loved herself more.

A sign of the times.

Today’s culture seems bent on self-love. If someone hurts you, deal with it by indulging on a quart of death by chocolate ice cream and binging on episodes of The Office. Feel like you’re giving more than receiving from a friendship, from your church, from your job? Ditch them and move on to places where you get more bang for your buck. And don’t forget virtue signaling to let everyone know how you’re a tiny bit better than the rest of us.

Self-love covers all generations. It transfixes Baby Boomers into perpetual baby mindsets of wanting what we want and wanting it now. It tells Gen X-ers to X out anything that crosses their own agenda. And it transforms millennials into me-llenials.

In this haze of self-love, truth becomes whatever we say it is. So you have your truth and I have mine. No inconvenient truths that might threaten our well-being in the landscape! But truth that is not true will never last.

Paul warns us to mark such days as the precursor to “terrible times” (2 Timothy 2:1). How could they not be? Because self-lovers relish in what gives them pleasure, what gets them ahead. In their conceit, they lack humility, forgiveness and gratitude—all the virtues necessary for fallen people to live together.

So how do we respond to such a dire forecast?

No matter how crazy the times, stand firm in the truth. Cultivate forgiveness, kindness and thankfulness. Jesus said if we love our life, in the end we will lose it. He created us for a far higher purpose than loving ourselves. If we love him with all our heart, and seek our neighbor’s good, we’ll guard ourselves against this prevailing cultural madness. That, friend, is true love. Far better than me love.