Is self-love biblical? Here’s why humility was never meant to be self-hatred, and what it looks like to love yourself the way God does.
Can we talk about a phrase that makes a lot of Christians squirm? Self-love.
I’ll be honest, for most of my adult life, I thought self-love was worldly. Anytime I entertained the idea of self-love, I felt guilty. I wanted to nourish myself, and yet I thought the holy thing to do was the opposite: push myself aside, keep myself small, and call it humility.
Only recently, while reading the Bible through God’s perspective, did I start to see things differently. I realized self-love is not only biblical. It’s foundational. That opened the door to rethinking what humility means. In my latest podcast conversation, I unpack that with Blake Guichet, host of The Speakeasy podcast and author of Confessions of a Crappy Christian.
Can You Love Yourself and Still Love Jesus? A Conversation with Blake Guichet
Blake is one of my all-time favorite people to talk faith with, because she goes straight to the questions most of us are scared to ask out loud. This one hits home.
On the podcast, we talk about what humility really is, the line between self-love and self-centeredness, and why self-care was never about bubble baths. If you’ve ever felt guilty for taking care of yourself, or wondered whether loving yourself is even allowed as a Christian, this episode is for you. Grab your coffee, hit play, and then come back here. Below, I’m sharing the biggest takeaways that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.
We Got Humility Backward
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that humility means self-hatred. Shrinking. Always putting yourself last. Even talking down to yourself so you don’t get “too big for your britches.”
And trust me, I do think there is a threshold of speaking too highly of oneself, leading to the consumption with “self.” But with one extreme there is always an opposite: self-hate.
I love Romans 12:3, which says, “For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.” Sober judgment is honest. It doesn’t inflate you or tear you down. It just seeds you the way God sees you.
As C.S. Lewis states, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” Doing that comes from being so certain of who you are and whose you are that you no longer need to worry about yourself. Because you are made complete in Christ.
Love Your Neighbor As Yourself
When Jesus was asked for the greatest commandment, He said to love God with everything you have and to love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31).
We love to focus on the neighbor part. That’s what a distorted view of humility does. But Jesus doesn’t just talk about the other without addressing you. He put a measuring stick in that sentence: “as yourself.” You could call it a reminder or an assumption. He put it there to show us that we can only love others by loving ourselves.
As Blake said, most people’s default isn’t to love themselves, choose themselves, or think you’re great. For most people, the default is criticism, even self-hate. And if that’s true, that’s often how you treat your neighbors.
For me, things started to shift when I began reclaiming Scripture and actually believing it. I started meditating on verses like Psalm 139:14: “You were fearfully and wonderfully made.” And Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” To let these words become the story I live from.
The Line Between Self-Love and Self-Centeredness
When I said I struggled to believe self-love was part of God’s plan, it really came down to this: the line between self-love and self-centeredness. And fair enough. Paul warns us in 2 Timothy 3:2 that in the last days people will be “lovers of self.”
So which is it?
Honestly, I don’t think it’s either self-love or hate, but I think it’s the heart behind the self-love. It’s the direction of it. Self-centeredness keeps you as the main focus, or, better put, you hoarding love for yourself. It’s an isolated, independent, solo way of living that sees life only in terms of what benefits you.
Biblical self-love, on the other hand, starts with God’s love for you, but that flows out of you. It’s an interconnected connectedness towards God and all of life that fuels you to go out and be the hands and feet of Christ. It’s not that you don’t matter or that you’re in the center of your story. But it’s really how the love flows.
Here’s a quick example;
- Self-centeredness asks, how do I get what I want?
- Self-love asks, how do I care for and steward what God gave me, so I can use it well?
Self-Care Isn’t Bubble Baths
Here’s the thing: I love a good bubble bath. I love a good moment of self-care, and that’s not wrong. But it’s also not the foundation for real self-care that refills and fuels us.
Blake used the oxygen mask analogy in the podcast. She reminded us to put your mask on first so you can help the people around you. As she noted, that mask isn’t just self-care in all the ways the world tells us. Real self-care is returning and sitting at the feet of Jesus.
It’s like Mary in Luke 10. Martha was busy serving, pulled in a dozen directions, and bitter she was doing it alone. Meanwhile, Mary sat at Jesus’ feet, listening. And even Jesus acknowledged that Mary had chosen the better thing. Not because Martha’s work wasn’t important, but Martha was working for, not from, and that changed things.
Real self-care is not just escaping your life. It’s being filled by the One who gives you life. Everything else, the rest, the nourishing food, the early bedtimes, flows from there.
From Punishment to Tending
The trickiest thing about Christ-centered self-care is that it looks very similar to worldly self-care. But the outcomes are completely different. If I had to sum up how my relationship with myself has changed, it would follow this progression:
One, punishment. For a long time, I treated my body and my soul like a project to fix. Workouts made up for what I ate. Harsh words to push myself harder. Rest was reserved for when I “earned” it. It was here that my health completely crashed.
Two, nourishment. After my health crashed and burned, I started to realize that pushing my body to punish it was not real health or even real care. I started feeding myself and nourishing myself. As Ephesians 5:29 says, “no one ever hated their own body, but nourished and cherished it.” That’s how God talks about care.
Three, tending. Finally, I’m starting to understand tending. Stewardship. A holy responsibility to care for my body, not out of punishment, but out of love. This is where I want to live. It’s steady, patient, and daily.
Here is what I’ve learned. Punishment says you’re not enough yet. Tending says, “This is good, and I’m going to take care of it.”
Working from love, not for it.
Truthfully, the movement from punishment to tending happened when I shifted from working for love to working from it. And this changed everything for me.
When you work for love, everything becomes a performance, an arrival, a destination. You’re always striving to prove you’re worthy, to God, to others, to yourself, and in the process, you never quite get there. You don’t arrive.
But when you work from love, you start from a place of being accepted. You are working from a place of being beloved. Ephesians 2:8-9 reminds us we’re saved by grace, not works. You don’t earn God’s love. You live from it. Your effort stops being an audition and becomes an act of worship.
That’s why tending your body and stewarding your life is truly an act of worship. That’s at the heart of Christian Self-love. It isn’t about making yourself the center or ruling your life. It’s about agreeing with what God already says about you and living out of it.
A few simple but powerful choices
Our lives are made up of a few simple but powerful choices. Loving yourself the way God loves you isn’t one big decision. It’s a small one you make over and over.
And that becomes your choice for today: the next time you hear yourself say something about you that God would never say, stop and swap it for what He does say. That’s not pride. That’s a standard.
Speak this prayer over yourself: God, teach me to see myself the way you see me. Pull out every lie I’ve believed about who I am, and help me tend what you’ve given me with the same love you’ve shown me.
And if you haven’t listened to the full conversation with Blake. She says it better than I ever could. Listen to the podcast. Follow Blake, and check out her book and the Speakeasy Podcast.
