Self-Love

by A.W., Tozer

"The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal, there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinions of friend and enemy, will never let the mind become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them.

Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort. He developed toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, "Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm in the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to care what men think."

True Love

by E. Stanley Jones

"Remember that while love involves a self-surrender and, therefore, seems the way of sacrifice, it is really the easy way.

While love takes on itself impossible tasks, yet it finds that love lightens all loads. It is the same burden that wings are to a bird, that sails are to a ship. Nothing is hard if done for love's sweet sake. The yoke of love is easy; the yoke of duty is hard. There is all the difference in the world between being drawn by love and being driven by duty. The task may be the same, but love makes everything light, and duty makes everything drudgery. They are two different worlds.

The way of love is therefore the easy way. The way of loveless duty is the hard way. And harder still is the way of loveless living. Everything without love is drudgery. There is fun and freedom in loving, and the more widely and deeply you love, the more fun and the greater freedom you have.

To grow in love is to grow in life. You begin to be alive to your fingertips. And your fingertips begin to be healing. You heal everything you touch, and you touch everything."

Submitted by Paul and Ruth Goguen