Love your neighbors as yourself pt 2

some thoughts about the morning service that i attended today... i was wondering about why repentance is important, actually necessary to better appreciate forgiveness, and how this is related to the commandment of "love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind..and love your neighbor as yourself.

i think there is much of needing to temper our tendencies of being self-idolatrous, that repentance is required in order to recognize our status as ones who has received grace and have been pardoned, and keeping us in check from our tendencies to equate ourselves with God (recognizing our sinfulness to help us be aware that we are in the receiving end, instead of refusing our culpability from our actions)...i think it's also similar in the commandment..that there is more to why God put the command of loving him in relation to loving our neighbor as self...again, i wonder if he is referring to our tendency of self-idolatry, and thus needs to be tempered by loving ones neighbor because that this is necessary in order to help us to not just focus on ourselves...and that our neighbor would critique us if this was happening. but i don't think that loving our neighbor was merely functionally necessary to avoid self-idolatry...but maybe it was also necessary because our neighbors are created in God's image, that if we are to love God, that we would need to love our neighbors who are more immediately accessible and are 'God-like" due to being creatures in His image. that maybe God's commandments are not merely commands to protect from an outside intruder/perpetrator or lists of things to do..that maybe this is also something to protect us from ourselves (well, history has proven that this is quite necessary) and keep us aware of our own tendencies...whether we accept his 'commands' or not...and the command to not make idols might be directly referring to us.