The Love of God is shed abroad in our hearts (Romans 5:5), so love does begin within. This scripture can be interpreted several ways. I see one of the interpretations as God's love in our hearts teaches us how to love ourselves.
We often give so much on behalf of others that
we don't allow God to work on ourselves with ourselves. Sometimes, we need to be separated from others in various
ways and for various periods of time in order for God to work
exclusively with us about loving ourselves.
Of course, God is also doing a work in us as we interact with others. Our Father, however, wants to reveal to us how we are not valuing ourselves as He is. We neglect ourselves because we believe that our confirmation of
being in Christ is confirmed through our unceasing, loving activities for others.
We don't realize that we never learned to unconditionally love
ourselves. If the love that we think we have for ourselves is a scam and a sham, a false illusion, then nothing that we do for others proves that we love them.
How can we love then when we haven't learned to love ourselves? Until we begin healing towards ourselves, our
relationships with others will continue to begin and be maintained by our fleshly reaching out.
Our efforts for others should be a reflection of our inner love for ourselves. As we learn to love ourselves as God loves us, we won't be motivated through ulterior motive, inverted pride, secret goals and selfish orchestration. These are the facts that the Holy Spirit wants to help us to accept.
Once we begin to see ourselves with the respect, admiration and validation with which God sees us, we come to love ourselves in a way in which we never learned. We did not learn through our families, church members, spouses, friends or through any other person.
No matter how good they may have seemed, we could not learn to love ourselves through them. Some of them were not good at all, for they took away what love we could have learned to have for ourselves. As we grow in The Lord, we become able to accept the brutal truth.
Godly love for ourselves comes through acceptance of the truth about our deficiency and personal revelation from God about who we each are. When we start loving ourselves with the spiritual dedication provided for us by the Holy Spirit, then we can act upon a true love for others. This will result in wisdom, circumspection and restraint about what we do on behalf of loving others.
The God-established love for ourselves is one of the pillars that
we must sink into our foundation on the Rock of Jesus Christ. It is what
helps us to build a stable Christian life. It is how we exhibit solid and
unselfish service to God. We learn to be obedient to God rather than being self-sacrificing busy-bodies. (1 Samuel 15:22)