God loves the person He created you to be, and He hates what sin has done to you. His compassion toward you is matched by His relentless opposition to the disease that enslaves you.

The refrain has been repeated often enough over the past 50 years that it now passes for common sense: The big problem we face is that we don’t love ourselves enough. We must learn to respect ourselves, love ourselves, and accept ourselves. You are enough in a world that tells you you’re imperfect or needy in some way.

There’s an element of truth in this counsel, especially for those who assume the religious path requires self-loathing, or the kind of self-hatred that diminishes our sense of worth as people made in God’s image. But then there are these unsettling words from Jesus himself:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, and even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26, emphasis added)

Since Jesus also told us to love our neighbors as ourselves (implying that love for self is natural, even good), his requirement here cannot mean an unqualified hatred of one’s own life. Nevertheless, in our context today, we’re too quick to explain away rather than sit with this startling saying.

Augustine and the Fear We’ve Lost

Augustine, in a famous sermon “on the ten strings of the harp,” preached at Chusa around AD 420, dared to read Jesus in a way that resists our instinct to soften the blow. He put forward a striking interpretation of Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount about “[settling] quickly with your adversary” (Matt. 5:25–26). God’s Word is our adversary “because it commands things against the grain which [we] don’t do.”

Augustine turned to Psalm 86:15, noting how popular it was to emphasize that the Lord is “compassionate and gracious, abounding in faithful love.” But the text goes on to say “and truth.” The Lord abounds in truth. If the text had stopped before that line, Augustine told his listeners,

You would already be devoting yourself to your sins with a feeling of security and freedom. You would do what you like, you would enjoy the world as much as you were allowed to, or as much as your lusts dictated to you. And if anyone tried to scold and frighten you with some good advice into restraining yourself from the intemperate and dissolute pursuit of your own desires and your abandonment of your God, you would stand there among the scolding voices, and as though you had heard the divine judgment with a shameless look of triumph on your face, you would read from the Lord’s book: “Why are you trying to scare me about our God? He is merciful and compassionate…”

Augustine believed the psalmist’s emphasis on truth rules out “the smugness of misplaced presumption” and instead awakens “the anxiety of sorrow for sin.” A healthy fear of the Lord must remain, even if we aspire to follow God’s commands out of love rather than fear of judgment.

When God Refuses to Be Made in Our Image

But is it really possible to follow the Lord out of love and not fear? Back in Augustine’s time, people were saying, If the Lord really wanted us to obey him out of love and not fear, he wouldn’t have made all these threats against sin. He would have come to be indulgent to everybody and pardon everybody, and he wouldn’t send anyone to hell.

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