1 samuel on Self-Love

I think the most selfish, self-centered individual in this world is not an unsaved person. It's a Christian who accepts the salvation God offers freely and goes out and lives for himself.

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

To be fully known and fully loved is the most healing gift one human being can give another.

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

At some point in childhood we all make the powerful discovery that we can manipulate the truth about ourselves.

It’s difficult for people to love the real you when you are covering up who you really are. We connect with others when we take our mask off and let others in.

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

Emerson once observed, Do you love me? actually means Do you see the same truth? Or at least . . . Do you care about the same truth?”

I lust after recognition, I am desperate to win all the little merit badges and trinkets of my profession, and I am of less real use in this world than any good cleaning lady.

Be less concerned with what you have than with what you are.

George Herbert Mead, an influential early 20th-century sociologist, coined the term “generalized other” to describe the vague group we consider when shaping our actions. How often do we behave a certa...

Love is an agreement on the part of two people to overestimate each other.

Lord, examine our hearts with honesty. Find any impure way in us. Help us to find your search of us to be kind and forgiving as You tell us the ways we’ve disobeyed You.

Any social science study will tell you relationships are key to happiness and well-being. But there’s more. Friendship isn’t just an elective in the course of life, it’s required. In my line of work I...

Loving God, we do not love others as you love us. We are often rude and insistent on our own way. We hold onto resentment and are then held captive by bitterness.  Bring us to repentance and help us l...

Read any study on human satisfaction and you will see the paramount role of relationships with others. And yet, so many of us readily exchange friendship and community for success and achievement, onl...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

The new command is simple enough for a toddler to memorize and appreciate, profound enough that the most mature believers are repeatedly embarrassed at how poorly they comprehend it and put it i...

On a little study table in my office, there’s a card with a quote from Victor Hugo’s epic novel Les Misérables: My coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt...

Desire is something no child has to be taught. Early in the developmental process, most of a child’s desires center around physical needs being met or objects that attract interest. If a child is secu...

I heard about a woman who married a very demanding, hard, and unloving man. Her husband made her existence miserable by presenting her with a list of his demands and expectations… The woman’s husband ...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

Heavenly Father, You shower Your love on us throughout every stage of life. We praise You for Your steadfast love. Through Your Son we see the extent of that love while through Your Spirit we experien...

Father God, you come to us in the everyday. You give us your Word and your Spirit that we might hear your voice, and follow your ways. We confess that we have neglected your words to us and pretended ...

In 1998, Nick Cave*, an Australian rock/pop artist, was asked by the Vienna Poetry Academy to give a series of talks on the nature of song-writing. A year later he gave a slightly revised version of t...

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so.

“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

For those of us who live in the shadow of self-doubt, who may wonder what meaning a life of relative anonymity may have in a society filled with the cult of celebrity in which likes, reposts, and digi...