Every one of us comes into this world with the need to feel loved, even people who say they don’t do the “touchy-feely” thing. They need love like anyone else – they just don’t acknowledge it. To meet this need for love, we often go “lookin’ for love in all the wrong places,” to borrow the title of a country music song. We hope that success in our careers, money, power, or pleasing people will win us the love, attention, respect, and approval that we so desperately need.
These sources of love and approval may suddenly disappear. What if you get passed over for that promotion, or worse yet, you get laid off? What if the bubble bursts in the stock market, the investments you depended on lost a large portion of their value? Does anyone seriously believe they can please all the people all the time? There’s always going to be one in the crowd that finds fault. And what if your harshest critic is yourself? You can’t exactly avoid yourself, or the nagging voice of self-criticism and self-rejection. And what if the person we’ve looked to for love and approval is taken from us by death?
More fundamentally, what if we never felt loved, accepted, and secure as a child (what psychologists call Attachment Disorder)? A loving, secure bond should develop between an infant/child and a caregiver (hopefully the parents). When this doesn’t happen because of abuse, neglect, or caregivers who themselves are wounded emotionally, children can grow up to be adults who often develop some very undesirable coping strategies, among them being judgmental, critical, controlling, “clinging vine”, pushing others away (to read more on this, go to www.attachmenttherapy.com/adult.htm). So this isn’t just all about us. Each one of us affects other people, even people we don’t even know. A friend of mine once told me, “Wounded people wound others.”
Unless…
Unless we know God’s love. Romans 5:6-10 and 1 John 4:7-10 tell us that God IS love; and that He sent Jesus to give His life for us because He loved us, even when we were His enemies and sinners by choice. He didn’t wait for us to “fix ourselves”, or straighten up, because He knew we couldn’t do it. He came for us in our worst, most messed-up state, so that we could have a relationship with Him. And all this because He loved us.
In Ephesians 4:14-19 the apostle Paul prays that we’ll be rooted and grounded in God’s love; and that we’ll know just how deep and wide His love is. It’s not something we can “work up” ourselves. It takes divine revelation to apply this love deep in our hearts; a love that never leaves us, never forsakes us, and isn’t conditional.
I like the song “I Want to Know What Love Is” by the group Foreigner. The song was written to talk about romantic love; but it seems to me we could easily sing this back to God. I like the song “I Want to Know What Love Is” by the group Foreigner. The song was written to talk about romantic love; but it seems to me we could easily sing this back to God. Click the link and listen to the lyrics with your heart. Jesus came looking for you, because He loves you. Just say yes to Him, and rest assured that in Jesus we can know what perfect love is, because He is perfect love.