Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith by Dave Hunt - "You Love You"

Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith by Dave Hunt – “You Love You” –

Acceptance of psychology’s delusion that a lack of self-love is our major problem means that Christ’s statement to “love your neighbor as yourself” has to be reinterpreted as a command to love ourselves. Why, if we all lack self-love, would Christ command us to love our neighbors as we [fail to] love ourselves? Christ’s apparent error is now corrected by books and seminars teaching us how to first of all love self so that we can fulfill His command.

In contrast, simple exegesis of Christ’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” would derive from Scripture the following: 1) clearly we must already love ourselves, or such a command would be foolish; 2) this is confirmed by Ephesians:5:29For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:
See All... (“For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it…”), which is substantiated by the obvious fact that we feed, clothe, and care for ourselves and seek to satisfy our own desires; 3) we are thus commanded to manifest love for our neighbors in the same way; that is, by caring for them as we cared for ourselves; and 4) the fact that this command is necessary indicates that, rather than lacking in self-love, our problem is an excessive amount of it, which causes us to be selfish and thus to neglect caring for others. It is this self-centeredness that Christ seeks to correct. Such had been the consistent interpretation of this Scripture for 1,900 years until humanistic psychology was embraced as a valid source of “God’s truth.”

As a result, Christian leaders now promote the very love of self that Paul warned would characterize men in the last days and from which Christ came to deliver us by His cross.