It is often said today, in circles which blend popular psychology with Christianity, that we must love ourselves before we can be set free to love others. This is certainly the release which we must seek to give our people. But no realistic human beings find it easy to love or to forgive themselves, and hence their self-acceptance must be grounded in their awareness that God accepts them in Christ. There is a sense in which the strongest self-love that we can have, in the sense of agapē, is merely the mirror image of the lively conviction we have that God loves us.
