How Much Do You Love Yourself?
I believe that you must really love yourself to change.
If you want to win over temptation, you have to heal your relationship with yourself. Jesus said, “a kingdom divided unto itself cannot stand.” In other words, can a country win a war if it’s divided within? Of course not.
In order to fight the bad outside you, you’ve got to friend with the good in you. You have to celebrate your goodness.
Last week, I gave you the first reason why loving yourself is necessary for overcoming temptation. Sin is a counterfeit of love. (The pleasure of sin is the pirated version of the pleasure of being loved.) By having the real thing and satisfying your deepest need for love, sinful desires lose their urgency.
But there’s a second reason why loving yourself is crucial to fighting temptation: You don’t have enough “why” to fight.
Establish Your Why
The Bible says, In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. (Hebrews 12:4)
Are you willing to die in your fight against temptation?
Many people aren’t willing to fight to the death. There’s not enough fight in us. That’s why we lose.
Why?
Because we don’t have a reason to fight.
There’s no fuel. There’s no fire. There’s no fight!
If you don’t love yourself, you won’t fight. If you don’t love your freedom, you won’t fight. If you don’t love your future, you won’t fight.
If you study men who have gone in the battlefield and fought to the death, you’ll realize that they have a burning “why” in their soul.
Without this “why”, you won’t bother going to battle.
You’re in a battle too. There are temptations around you that want to destroy your life. Your marriage. Your finances. Your health. Your inner peace.
Will you fight this temptation?
Here’s the truth: You will only fight temptation to the degree that you value yourself. If you don’t value yourself, you won’t fight.
This is why I said that the greatest weapon of the devil isn’t lust, or greed, or pride, but self-rejection. This is the Trojan Horse that opens the gate of our souls to temptation.
To get rid of Self-Rejection, you need Self-Acceptance. To explain this, let me tell you the love story of Brad and Angelina (Note: any similarities to actual persons or events is purely coincidental).
(To continue reading Bo's inspiring article, click here.)
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