Jerry Basel

Almost 25 years ago we started working as Christian counselors to help people who wanted to love God with all of their hearts and to love others in the same way, but struggled to do so. We became aware that there was a critical piece missing—that being the ability to love themselves the way God does. In our book we establish a process to help people begin to identify the reasons why they struggle in living out the fullness of the Gospel, and we provide a clear path to bring healing and freedom to their lives.

First, we don’t believe that we “naturally love ourselves”—at least in the way that love is described in Scripture (see 1 Cor. 13). And we don’t believe that Jesus, knowing our true condition, was attempting to communicate that either. When you look at His words to “love others as you love yourself,” we see it as the full command, not a “command and an assumption.” We often hear people say that one of our problems as Christians is that we “love ourselves too much,” because we are too self-focused and selfish. However, they are not defining love the way it was defined by Jesus, Paul and others in Scripture. In our experience, when we can start loving who God loves—us—that begins to flow back to God and to others, and we start fulfilling the Gospel as it was intended.