Treasure Table
Adjust Your Lens | Love the Image Bearer in the Mirror?
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:5 NASB)
Loving the Lord was not the place I stumbled over. There was one command I quietly stumbled over. I could never quite reconcile it with the rest of Scripture:
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:18)
Centuries later, Jesus brought those two commands together:
“Upon these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:40)
Then Paul wrote,
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves.” (Philippians 2:3 NASB)
I thought I understood. So I spent years trying to become smaller. I became quieter. I explained less. I served more. I disappeared so slowly that I hardly noticed it was happening. I thought that was humility.
Then one day, while sitting with the King, I realized I had been asking the wrong question. I had been asking,
“How do I love myself while considering others more important?”
The KING gently asked another question:
“Who is yourself?”
I had never thought about it. The verses had become so familiar that I had stopped seeing it. Who exactly is “yourself”?
I went back to the beginning. Genesis. Before Adam tended the garden… Before Eve… Before responsibility… Before purpose…
There was an image bearer. One personally formed by the hands of the King. One personally breathed into by God Himself. One lovingly declared “very good.”
Genesis 1:31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. … NASB
Then another thought quietly arrived. Perhaps the first earthly stewardship God ever entrusted to Adam was not the garden.
Perhaps… it was Adam.
That thought changed everything. For years, I had heard people say, “Loving yourself is selfish.”
That never sat comfortably with me. Jesus had told me to love my neighbor as myself.
I believe Scripture is cohesive. If it seemed contradictory, perhaps it was my lens that needed adjusting…
Then I realized something. The image bearer does not belong to me.
The image bearer belongs to the King.
1 Corinthians 6:19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. NASB
I am simply entrusted to steward His image.
Suddenly, “love yourself” sounded completely different. Rather than self-exaltation or self-neglect—Stewardship.
The command was inviting me to faithfully steward the unique image bearer the King entrusted to my care because that image bearer belongs to Him.
Everything changed. Boundaries changed. Relationships changed. Money changed.
Even Philippians changed:
Philippians 2:3 Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; NASB
I saw Paul was never telling me I had less value. He was inviting me to freely honor another image bearer from the security of my image in Christ.
Humility was never self-erasure. Humility is love expressing itself through faithful stewardship.
Then I noticed something else. The Bible keeps telling the same story.
We are:
Made in His image. (Genesis 1:27)
His workmanship. (Ephesians 2:10)
The temple of the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:19)
Not our own. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20)
None of those verses invite me to think more highly of myself.
Neither do they invite me to think less of myself.
They invite me to agree with the King.
This image bearer belongs to Him.
Perhaps that is why Jesus could say, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Because every person I meet—including the one in the mirror—belongs to the same King. My neighbor is an image bearer entrusted to the King’s care. So am I.
Love simply asks me to faithfully steward what He has placed in my hands.
The first image bearer I encounter each day is the one in the mirror.
For eight years, I wrestled with those verses.
Then my struggle quietly ended as I adjusted my lens with this question:
How am I faithfully stewarding myself—the image bearer the King entrusted to my care?
Perhaps that is where love begins. Faithfully stewarding every image bearer the King places in our care—including the first one we meet each morning in the mirror.
What do you notice?
Until next Friday… I’ll be listening for the next glimmer. I hope you will too.
— Your Treasure Guide