Dishonesty limits the love you can give to and receive from others

Recall that all forms of dishonesty harm our ability to see all parts of reality. This reduction in awareness will decrease your ability to give and receive love in multiple ways.

Love is the measure of what you are willing to suffer for the benefit of others. In order to give or receive love, you need to accurately perceive the qualities of yourself and others, as well as know enough about reality to accurately predict what would benefit you and others.

How can you love another person without correctly seeing their attributes and the rest of reality? You cannot calculate what would be beneficial for them, or the threshold that exceeds what they deserve without first being honest.

You cannot be loved by others beyond how honest you are with yourself. How can someone love you for who you really are if they do not know who you really are? How likely are they to know who you really are without you showing yourself to them? How can you show yourself to another if you don’t yet know who you really are?

How can you recognize and receive love beyond the limits of how fully and accurately you know yourself ? How will you accurately quantify the love others have for you until you accurately measure how good a person you are?

Liars overestimate their self-worth, conveniently ignoring their faults and inflating their virtues, thus chronically underestimating the love others give them. How can you recognize when someone treats you better than you deserve if you do not accurately see who you actually are? You might be immersed in love, but blind to it, mistakenly believing you are entitled to what actually far exceeds your worth. For example, it is a great act of love for someone to expose the faults in you that they have lived worthy to see, but which you refuse to see. Would you see what they share with you as love, or just hostility? Would you respond with gratitude, or would you just be offended?¹

To the extent that you lie, you lower your value. To the extent you lack self-respect, confidence, and improvement, you will be less likely to receive the love of others because of your lack of love for yourself. Any degree of self-hatred can increase your hatred of others, as human nature makes it difficult to see others in a better light than we see ourselves.² If you don’t have ample evidence of self-improvement, you will struggle to believe that other people are capable of improvement, and this will cause you to withhold the good you might otherwise do for them. This results in a condition Jesus referred to as one’s love waxing cold,³ or the abandonment of concern for the benefit of others. One whose life is full of actualized improvement cannot deny what God can do to a person, because they have experienced it firsthand. A person who recognizes the benefits they have received is more likely to give great sacrifice for the potential benefit of others.