Blessed rest indeed. Depending on our own self-esteem for healthy relationships or lifelong fulfillment is exhausting because it depends on a variety of factors that change every day: our job performance, our weight, our popularity, our mood, or our ability to think good things about ourselves. Instead, we choose self-forgetfulness, and we replace our self-love with God’s love, which is dependent on a factor that will never change: our salvation in Christ. Contradicting everything our culture tells us, it turns out the prerequisite for real love is self-forgetfulness, not self-love.
