A man came out of church one Sunday and said to me, “Preacher, be good to yourself today.” It was his way of saying, “You are important also.”
It reminded me that I had often been better to other people than I had been to myself. I think a lot of people are that way. They have gone through a divorce, failed in business, had a child go bad, or committed some grievous sin. So now they go through life beating up on themselves.
I’m not suggesting that you be soft on sin. As evangelist Billy Sunday once noted, we need to treat sin more like a rattlesnake than like a cream puff. But we don’t have to live with guilt and regret the rest of our lives.
Get your life right with God, right with your family, right with others, and then right with yourself. That’s what the Lord wants. After all, he wants us to love our neighbor “as we love ourselves.”