Self-Love: The Ultimate Solution

Dedication

To my dad, late Samuel Oni Odedoyin; and my mum, Victoria Bamidele Odedoyin; and

To everyone who sincerely desires ‘higher-level happiness’.

***

SELF-LOVE: THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION

Published by Austin Macauley at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Remi Odedoyin

The right of Remi Odedoyin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is

available from the British Library.

www.austinmacauley.com

ISBN 9781788481915 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781788481922 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781788481939 (E-Book)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

First Published in 2018

AustinMacauley

CGC-33-01, 25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ

***

Acknowledgements

I would like to appreciate my spiritual father, Pastor E.A. Adeboye, the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (worldwide), for providing sound and admirable leadership from which I am privileged to draw invaluable tutelage, and for kindly acceding to my request to write the foreword to this book.

I am also sincerely, profoundly indebted to the following people for a wonderful relationship and their kindness in finding time in their very tight schedule to review the book draft and write commendations on it: Dr Daniel Akhazemea, the Rector of the Christ the Redeemer College, London; Professor Dele Balogun, the Regional Pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Oyo Region 1, Ibadan, Nigeria; Dr James Fadel, a special Assistant to the General Overseer (worldwide) and the Chairman of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, North America; Rev George Adegboye, the president of the ever-increasing word ministries (aka the walking Bible) and Founder of Rhema Chapel, Ilorin, Nigeria. I am tremendously grateful to these wonderful and great men of God. My sincere thanks also go to Pastor Peter Adeyemi (a.k.a. Daddy Mate) for his fatherly relationship and encouragement.

I am deeply appreciative of the congregation of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, House of Faith Connections, Dagenham, UK, with whom I have shared some of the ideas in the book through sermons and Bible studies. I sincerely thank you for the platform and for your questions that often set me meditating for answers.

To my pastors who pointed me towards pastoral ministry: Pastors Chris and Abi Adeoye, sincere thanks; and Pastors Sola and Grace Sola-Oludoyi, I am thankful for a cordial relationship.

I thank my children, Tola, Wale, Funmi and Tolu, for their understanding that has enabled me to have as much time as possible for the pastoral work and for the time required to write this book. My appreciation also goes to all our ‘covenant children’, without whose support, my wife and I would have found the ministry works much more heavy-going. May the Lord abundantly reward you all!

Special thanks to my biological brothers – Kayode, Gbenga and Femi – for their loving support and constant companionship, which help to enrich my understanding of the self and self-love beyond the purview of the family of procreation.

I am particularly immensely thankful to my wife, Christie, for her invaluable encouragement, support and prayers. Her support all along is inestimable and one of its products is this book.

For the urge and inspiration, the aspiration, the writing, and further logistics and all the human resources, all of which gave birth to this book, I am profusely thankful to Almighty God. It is unto Him and Him alone that I return all glory.

***

Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said unto him, Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

On These two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

(Matt. 22: 36–40)

***

***

***

***

***

***

***

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction: The Supreme Commandment

Chapter 1: Created in the Image of Love

Chapter 2: God Is Love

Chapter 3: The Necessity of Self-Love

Chapter 4: God’s Prototype for Familial Love

Chapter 5: Who Is My Neighbour?

Chapter 6: Contents of Self-Love

Chapter 7: Self-Love and Deceptive Happiness

Chapter 8: Self-Love and Vanity

Chapter 9: Self-Love Is Eternal Hope

Chapter 10: Self-Love Is Wisdom

Chapter 11: Love Your Neighbour as Yourself

Epilogue

***

Foreword

In Self Love, Dr Bayo Aderemi Odedoyin is making a clarion call to the body of Christ. One of the simplest and most sublime verses of the scripture is I John 4:8. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.

The call is timely and should be urgently heeded by anyone who claims to be a member of the Church. This is not a denominational or generational or seasonal issue at all.

We are called by love, to act in love, and to walk in love in all areas and at all times. The consequences of ignoring this call are too frightening to be imagined.

Love is not just an emotion or feeling. It is more than an attitude. It is the central motive and unchanging theme in the life and ministry of every Christian. Any act not done in love is a sin.

Without love, nothing matters and nothing counts. Please read this book prayerfully and with the presence of mind and consciousness that it demands. The body of Christ needs to take heed and turn away from religion, competition, envy, rivalry and all carnality. Love is the escape route from the rot in many areas of the Church, today.

Remember brothers and sisters.

I Corinthians 13: 1–8, 13

13:1 – Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 – And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 – And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burnt, [a]but have not love, it profits me nothing.

4 – Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 – Does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 – Does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 – Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 – Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

13 – And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Agape will annihilate idolatry. The Lord has spoken.

God bless you.

Pastor E. A. Adeboye

General Overseer, Redeemed Christian Church of God

June 2017

***

Preface

In addition to revelations from different revered people of God and a couple of personal ones, my reflections upon what our world has become vis-a-vis the word of God, has left me in no doubt that the end time is, on daily basis, increasingly on us but at a faster speed than we could contemplate. The shreds of evidence are so graphic and stark.

Let us look at just seven verses out of the accounts of the end time volunteered by Jesus Christ in the book of Matthew 24: 6–12. In these verses, Jesus speaks of wars and threat of wars and of famines, pestilence, and natural disasters. He also speaks of hatred for and persecution of Christians. These, according to him, would lead to offences among Christians and generate hatred and betrayal of one another. He also mentions the upsurge of deceitful and false prophets who would succeed in deceiving many, even among Christians. He then warns of widespread lawlessness which would, in turn, make Christians’ love for God take a descending and evaporative turn. I take lawlessness here to mean something like vagabondism, distraction, love of the world and flesh, love of money etc.

Today, we don’t need to turn our necks around in order to perceive the fact of the prevalence of wars – civil and international; while spectacles of starvation, dehydration, natural calamities and their victims have become part of our natural daily experiences. Hatred and persecution of Christianity are all over and ever increasing now. Apart from those set to destroy Christians in the name of their religion, the institutional persecution of Christianity in the so-called Christian or secular nations in the name of politically correct dispensation is enormously lamentable. The fangs of the persecutors on account of religion are getting deadlier and sprawling (all over the world) while the national and institutional destruction of Christian ethos has spread into the fabrics of the societies that are supposedly ‘nurturing’ Christianity, in a way that Sodom and Gomorrah’s offence has now thinned into absolute insignificance. Worst culprits are those nations that were founded on Christian principles or which at least have in the time past had their polity underpinned by such principles and have been champions of Christian crusades.

I tend to believe that it is a matter of time that bestiality laws where they exist would soon be reformed to make sexual relationship and marriage between human and animals (domestic and wild) to be popular and legal, just as gay and lesbian marriages have become. And this would be with the active support of the Church in the name of self-discovery, rights and equality, and love of God and God’s people.

But what has the Church itself become internally? Harbinger of internal strife, backbiting, bitterness and hatred. All these have now seated comfortably in the hearts of men and women – Christians! I mean the same people that are saying thank God for our salvation. Yet, in spite of their salvation, the depth of bitterness and hatred for others in their hearts makes Satan envious that these people are more adept than him in his own speciality. In the Churches today, people steal God’s money without winking eyes, people defraud each other even their pastors, with impunity. Church members ‘borrow’ money from Church account with pre-intention not to pay back; members elope with other member’s wives or husbands; Church leaders abuse vulnerable congregants including children etc. Speaking of conscience in the Church today is more or less an empty verbiage. Rather than Christianity, it is rascality that is being masqueraded and thereby driving away discerning prospective converts

I must warn that it is easier to capture the image painted here in Churches with the small congregation where nearly everyone knows almost everyone. I must emphasise however that the situation is much worse in Churches with the large congregation as the crowdedness helps to cover the rottenness; and the majority of the so-called large (free-for-all) Churches are just ‘Churches’ for want of an apposite appellation.

With a few years behind me as a pastor and my connection with Churches with different sizes of congregation, I cannot help meditating on all these in relation to Jesus’s warning concerning the end time.1 As I reflect on these, however, I also have a prompting that the world might be able to do something in the face of its looming destruction.

I know, of course, that the unfolding events are in line with prophecies of God; and His word is settled and eternal. I believe at the same time that what God ultimately intends to destroy is the world full of evil and those people that are breeding and perpetrating it. God is not set to destroy the world in a way as if no one (human) else would remain outside of Himself (God) and His heavenly hosts. No; God wants to destroy the evil world but replace it with a world that meets His expectations. So, we can say that the intention of God is for this present world to metamorphose into a new and acceptable world through the instrumentality of destruction. This is why I believe that if we can go back to the godly basics and begin to transform ourselves in the way we relate to one another and our world, the world would get transformed along the godly patterns. That would bring about the emergence of the world that God intends but without going down the road of Armageddon.

In this sense, we would still be speaking of having destroyed the evil spirit that has