Someone else said with tongue-in-cheek, “Heaven help your neighbor if you hate yourself!” They were right.

Every normal person wants and needs loving relationships, but if we hate ourselves we are not going to experience loving relationships. We will unconsciously project our self-hatred onto others and set them up to reject us, for what we project is what we get back!

Actually, only to the degree that I have learned to love and accept myself in a healthy sense am I able to love and accept others in a healthy sense. What I hate and have rejected in myself, I will also hate and reject in others. My relationships will only ever be as healthy as I am.

Healthy self-love and acceptance isn’t a prideful thing, but rather, it is learning to know and accept ourselves as we are—dark side and all. Only then are we able to change and keep growing to become healthier and more loving persons.

To grow in self-love we need to be fully known by at least one other loving and accepting person—a person who will not put us down, judge or criticize us, tell us what we should or shouldn’t do, try to fix us, give unsolicited advice, or preach at us, but accept us just as we are. It is through their knowing, accepting, and loving us as we are that, little by little, we learn to love and accept ourselves. This truth cannot be over-emphasized for we can only feel loved to the degree that we are known, accepted, and loved by at least one loving, trusted person. This is not to imply that this person approves of any negative or destructive behavior. Not at all.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, please give me at least one safe, loving and accepting person whom I can trust with my total life—dark side and all—and through their loving acceptance of me, help me to learn to love and accept myself as you love and accept me, so I can truly love you with all my heart, soul, and mind, and love my neighbor as you want me to. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Matthew 22:36-40 (NIV).

I recall teaching a group where I said that it was okay to be angry. One lady was absolutely amazed. She told me that she had been taught all her life that Christians never get angry. So she had reasoned in her mind: “Christians never get angry. I’m always angry. Therefore I can never be a Christian!”

That night she was freed from 20 years of anguish and received assurance of her salvation. She was indeed a Christian because she had received Jesus as her Savior.

Anger is amoral; that is, of itself it is neither right nor wrong. It’s what we do with it and how we handle it that matters. The Bible actually says, “In your anger do not sin,”1 or as an older translation says, “Be angry—sin not.”

Anger itself (not rage, hostility or bitterness) is a God-given emotion. Its purpose is to fight evil and right wrongs. This is how Florence Nightingale used her anger. She was angry at the way wounded soldiers were being badly mistreated, so she did something about it. We, too, are meant to use our anger in creative ways.

The reality is that everybody gets angry at some time or another. Some people bury and deny theirs, while others lash out and hurt others. Neither of these is healthy nor Christian.

When expressing anger we need to own it as our own, and remember that the biblical principle is to speak the truth in love. One way to do this is to say something like, “I know my feelings are my responsibility, but I feel angry and need to talk to you about such and such.”

Never say to a person, “You make me angry.” This is because nobody can make us angry without our permission. All they do is trigger our anger but the anger is always ours.

Unfortunately, when we have a lot of bottled up anger or anger from the past that has never been resolved, our anger button can get triggered real easy and we overreact. As I’ve said many times, what the other person does to me is their issue. How I feel and react is always my responsibility—but to the degree that I overreact, that is totally my problem.

For healthy, intimate relationships it is imperative that we learn to identify our feelings—positive and negative—to be honest about them, and learn how to handle them in creative, rather than destructive, ways.

As the Bible teaches, “If you are angry, don’t sin by nursing your grudge. Don’t let the sun go down with you still angry—get over it quickly, for when you are angry [and don't resolve it] you give a mighty foothold to the devil.”²

For more information on anger and how to handling it creatively, click on “Taming Your Anger” at: http://tinyurl.com/tame-anger.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, thank you for the gift of feelings. Please help me to be in touch with all of mine, be honest with them and, when expressing them, help me to always speak the truth in love. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Ephesians 4:26 (NIV).

2. Ephesians 4:25-27 (TLB) (NLT).

Michael Josephson of Character Counts was addressing a group of journalists regarding journalistic ethics. He “posed the question, ‘When is it proper for a journalist to report about the private life of a public official?’

“Jack Anderson, a well-known investigative columnist, replied: ‘I don’t think we should report on the private behavior of a politician unless it’s relevant to his job.’ Then he added, ‘but we don’t always follow our own tests.’

“I asked him to explain and he said: ‘A few years ago, a woman came into my office and gave me an airtight affidavit that the mayor of Tucson had bit her on the thigh. Now, I didn’t think this was too relevant to his job, but some stories are too good to pass up.’”²

In this political mayhem going on in the U.S. at this time, between competing politicians attacking each other, and considerable biased media, there are many times when I feel like throwing up. One wonders if there are any ethics.

I think there ought to be a strict rule that governs all media that says, “No politician or journalist (or anybody else) is allowed to confess anybody else’s sins and failures publicly, before confessing his or her own publicly.” Zero chance of this ever happening.

Sad to say, far too many of those who call ourselves Christians don’t do too much better. We can be quick to confess others’ sins while hiding our own. The Bible tells us to confess our sins to each other . . . not to confess others’ sins to each other. There’s another name for this. It’s gossip. The Bible condemns it.

When it comes to Christian growth groups, rule number one is, “Confess nobody’s sins but your own. Period.” True, in life there are times when a leader’s behavior needs to be confronted, but before we do it, let’s make sure our own life is squeaky clean, that our own sins are confessed and resolved, and that our life is right with God.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, please deliver me from the sin of gossip. Help me to see my own sins and faults, confess these to a trusted friend and to you, and with your help overcome these. And help me always to live and abide by Christian ethics. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. James 5:16 (NIV).

2. Josephson, Michael, Character Counts, 553.1, http://charactercounts.org/michael/the_nature_of_character/.