Loving God is something we do both individually and corporately. Our foundational desire for every member in our church is that they walk with God. We want to know Him and enjoy Him. Our greatest longing is for the presence of God. We believe that a crucial part of our walk with God is to spend time alone with Him everyday and seek to abide in His presence through the day in faith and obedience. Though broken and in need of his power and grace, we seek to live holy lives. We gladly surrender all that we have, including our money and possessions, for his glory. In our corporate gatherings, whether it be our Sunday morning celebration service, an hour in our prayer center, or a Lifegroup meeting, our hope is that every person would meet with God. Passionate worship is central both individually and corporately.

Loving each other involves the building up of one another in the church. We believe that Lifegroups meeting house to house provide the best forum to foster intimate community. Through accountability and encouragement, Lifegroups provide the best life-on-life help to live out these values. As we seek to serve, honor and submit to one another, we believe God will draw out spiritual gifts as well. We seek to build up healthy families. Ultimately we desire to live in unified, Acts 2 communities so that the world will see our love for one another.

We love the world because God so loved the world that He gave his Son. That’s exactly what we want to do... give away His Son to those who don’t know him. Whether in Waco or at the ends of the earth, we desire to be a people who boldly share the good news of Jesus Christ through personal relationships in our sphere of influence and to others we meet as we go. We especially choose to remember the poor and oppressed and seek to minister to practical needs whenever we can. We value short-term mission trips and long-term church planting so that the unreached people of the earth may hear and know God’s great love for them.

This type of love should be the simplest... on paper, that is. But in reality there's a magnified complexity surrounding it because of culturally-delivered messages we receive. Our Western culture has always pushed on us messages that are contrary to the Word of God. Therefore we cannot ever prescribe a recipe of "self-love" as part of our solution to loving neighbor, without ever clarifying and Biblically showing the way in which the Bible portrays this type of self-love. To do justice to Scripture in our need to "love ourselves" for healthy love to issue out to others, we must first begin in our understanding of the nature of man, sin, and in our relation to God. But even before this, we need to understand the nature of the focus of our culture when it comes to self-care and self-love. 

One common way the world is directly calling for your personal, relational health is a call to reduce stressors that affect us. We do live in an age of great intensity in all that is happening around us. Technology, as one major factor though not the only, has greatly accelerated information overload and increased our access to people's opinions on social media, among many things. Because of these and many other advances in our digital culture, we are left to deal with some serious stressors if we are to care for ourselves. We cannot be on 24-hours a day without it taking a toll on our minds, heart, and bodies. We are being zapped emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, and socially at an unprecedented rate. Therefore, we have to reduce our stressors if we are to take care of ourselves.    

"Okay, but how do you “reduce stress” [how does the world tell you to do it?]— for instance, stress about a struggling marriage, or about consistent interpersonal conflict at work, or about years of chronic pain or disease, or about habitual, demoralizing personal sin or weaknesses?  [Earth's approach to self-care] it’s all [about] diversion. Every item on the list of 75+ activities [of how to deal with stress, in a "self-care" article] is simply meant to get your mind off of the stressor.... It’s medication by distraction, not redemption. Practicing forgetfulness, rather than pursuing forgiveness." - Marshall Segall (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-insanity-of-self-care) 

The world tells you to practice self-care and self-love by separating yourself from stressors, by isolating them away from your life. This means you stay away from a "negative" person, which ends up becoming more and more anyone who does not agree with you, anyone who questions you, or challenges your lifestyle. Leave them behind, unfriend them in social media, because you don't need that negativity to traumatize you. On paper this sounds good, but in reality it is a direct path to self-indulgence (I am going to surround myself by only good things) and to a rejection of anything or anyone that doesn't think or act like you. You basically become an intolerant person with cultural permission to do so. That is not the call of Christ. It is in direct opposition to His heart. 

"...The temporary relief we might feel [by the world's path] to self-love cannot compare to the overwhelming relief of true love and acceptance by God. The “self-acceptance” of the children of God is not an active striving to love ourselves more. Rather, it is coming more and more to see ourselves as God sees us: sinful, guilty, inadequate humans who have been washed clean and declared righteous by faith in Christ (Romans 3:24). True self-love is acceptance of ourselves as redeemed people. Yes, we are loved and accepted, but it is precisely not because we are worthy in ourselves, but because Christ is worthy. Only when we accept the reality of redemption can we find freedom to look outwards. When our gaze is bent inward on ourselves, we fail to love God and cannot hope to love others." - James Beevers (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/do-you-love-yourself-enough) 

So what does self-love and self-care look like according to the Bible? 

• Living Under God's Grace - Loving yourself as Christ has loved you in your imperfections and brokenness. 

• Setting Limits through a Sabbath mentality - 

• Self-Forgiveness - Forgiving yourself as Christ has forgiven you. That is you receive God's forgiveness and give up the need to continue to be hard on yourself for things he has forgiven you for, already. -  "8 The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. 9 He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; 10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. 11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; 12 as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us." - Psalm 103:8-12 NIV

• Living Free of Offense - Practicing forgiveness of others, which releases direct blessing to us of not living with offense. This is a built-in means of self-care for those who embrace forgiveness. 

• Getting Rid of our Walls of Self-Protection -  These self-chosen defenses to getting hurt by others do need to come down if we are to embrace a life of the mature love that Jesus lived and embodied.

• Shame-Free Living 

• Seek Inner Healing - We have wounds from our upbringing/childhood, and this is often by our parents or other kids or adults who were suppose to provide the safe surrounding for us to grow up into healthy adults. 

• Seek Deliverance  (if needed) - We have generational brokenness and generational sin that may mark us ever tilting us towards behaviors and practices that have existed in our direct ancestors sometimes unchecked. We need God's deliverance, a breaking off of these sin curses.