We're obsessed with it, and rightfully so—it's the deepest human need and most fundamental reason for being. It's so elusive at times, because we try to find it in all the wrong places. We think that if we find a soulmate, a great group of friends, a close family, a rich lifestyle with uninterrupted pleasure, and so on, we'll find love—perfectly and eternally. If we keep looking in vain, life becomes so disappointing . . . even depressing. "Hope deferred makes the heart sick" (Proverbs 13:12 NIV). Our focus in life can turn inward as we engage in an endless quest to fill our greatest need.
From the time we're born, so many voices—from music to movies, professors to poets—tell us that we'll find love anywhere but in God. If I were to search a lifetime for the greatest treasure, looking everywhere I was pointed, but never finding it, I would be disheartened to say the least. But love is a commodity worth far more than any type of material wealth. It's what we're made for, our very purpose in life.
To live is to love.
Jesus clearly taught this in the two greatest commands: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength," and "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:30–31).
When we love and are loved, we find fullness in life.
The God who is love, the perfect and only source of love itself, made us for it. When we look to him for love, we find it. The search is over. Through a close relationship with him, we discover the complete, eternal love we crave. He supplies this love directly, but also through others, and here's the ironic thing: we tap into it most fully by giving it away.
To love is to be loved.
As I think back on the most treasured relationships of my life, they've been ones where I was deeply loved as a result of deeply showing love, or because someone exhibited Christlikeness by giving love to me without trying to gain something for themselves.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:7–12)
So how do we do it? How do we love? In the next post, we'll dive into 1 Corinthians 13 and other scriptures to look at living out love in real life.
