Do you love me? How many times have we asked this question? How many times have we heard others ask this of us? The Pharisees had to follow the 669 laws of Moses. That’s a lot of rules! Too many to remember or even try to keep. Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the Law, tested Him with this question: "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law? He answered ‘Love God with all your heart, all of your soul and all of your mind".

He went on to provide another answer. Love your neighbour as your love yourself. Love your neighbour to the same degree as you love yourself. Loving God will result in self-love and that self-love then becomes loving others. I’ve been following Dr Myles Munroe and his teachings. He shares about self-love and how to love others. For we cannot love others, if we don’t love ourselves first. He stresses that loving others is not our priority. The first and most important relationship to develop is not interpersonal relationships, it is the intra relationship. We have to know ourselves completely before loving others. If we are having problems with others, it means we are having problems within ourselves. It’s a singleness issue. We have to understand ourselves first, our strengths and weaknesses. It can be easy to blame other people for the decisions we make. The most important person for us to love is ourselves.

Self-love is a result of self-discovery. Self-love is a result of self-source. You cannot love yourself if you don’t know where you came from. Source determines value. If I took a rock and cut it in half or quarters, no matter how I break it down, it will remain the same form. If you don’t know your source, you don’t know your value.

Self-love is a result of self-worth. We are suffering from other people’s values of us. We sometimes add value to ourselves by collecting things and when we lose them, we go crazy. Self love is a result of self-esteem. How much do you estimate your cost or worth? We sell ourselves in relationships, jobs and compromise on so many things. We shouldn’t marry anyone or be with anyone to make us feel important. When we realise how much we are worth, we fall in love with ourselves. This goes against our culture as we are taught to think collectively. I’m not talking about selfish and self-centred love. Self-estimation makes you treat yourself and not feel guilty about it. If you highly value yourself, you won’t just settle for anything. We won’t be easily swayed and influenced by others.

Self love is a result of self-concept, an idea or picture of who we are. How you picture yourself determines how you treat yourself. A diamond is a diamond is a diamond. You don’t walk around allowing people to pinch you and tell you how you should see yourself. Again our culture says, don’t talk about yourself even if you are good at something. This is seen as pride as that’s where most of us get our low self-esteem from. As children, we are told not to put ourselves first and not talk about ourselves so much. "I" is important in self-love. We don’t need other people’s opinions to tell us who we are, so we must know ourselves. People can have opinions but when we have a sense of who we are, a picture of who we are, we do not allow other people’s opinions to affect or change us.

Self love is self identity and self value: How much do you value yourself? If you believe you are valuable, you fall in love with yourself. We’ve been asking the wrong question. Do you love me? First ask them, do you love yourself? We don’t get others so we can feel loved, we have to love ourselves so much that if no one loves us, we are still alright. As we enjoy another peaceful Sunday Samoa, let us all practise self love, starting today.