[Cal]

Drake doesn't know what he is talking about.

Jesus could have said love your neighbor instead of yourself. But he said love your neighbor as yourself, i.e. love your neighbor in the same way you love yourself. If the love for self he was talking about was the fallen kind, that would have meant he was saying love your neighbor in a fallen way, in the same way you love yourself in a fallen way, i.e. making his every whim your top priority. Clearly this is not how Jesus wanted us to love our neighbor.

So the love he is talking about for the self, which we are supposed to use as a model for how to love our neighbor, must be pure and of God. How does God view us and want us to view ourselves? As precious and good creations of his! Once you see that he wants us to see ourselves that way, we can then go on to view others that way. In some cases, it is the reverse. Sometimes we see how much God loves others and how much he wants us to love them, and then we see we can love ourselves in the same way. This is healthy, holy self love.

God loves himself. We are in the image of God. If we are to be like God we must love ourselves too, not in the fallen selfish, me-first way of the world, but in the pure, holy way God loves himself.

Further, you cannot truly love your neighbor if you don't love yourself. Self-loathing people are crippled when it comes to loving others. A person who likes and loves himself in a holy and healthy way is gracious and giving. He knows he is rich and has much to give.

The self love the Bible condemns is the fallen, me-first kind. That is not holy self love. Holy self love sees oneself as a precious creation of God, and loves oneself the same, neither better nor worse than all the other precious creations of God.

Drake endorses the errant religious model of self-loathing that is actually a form of asceticism. Nee and Lee endorsed this model, in part because they were influenced by people clueless like Drake, but also because it is easier to control Christians who you've trained to hate themselves. People who like themselves don't let presumptuous pontiffs push them around.