March Devo - For The Love Of God

A few minutes of scanning radio stations will confirm it – we are all obsessed with finding true love! No one questions the Beatles when they sing, “All you need is love.” We empathize with Queen and their plea, “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” Unfortunately most of us can also identify with Waylon complaining about, “looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in too many faces.”

We know that our two greatest psychological needs are to love and be loved. If you choose to believe that humans are the result of random evolution, good luck figuring out where that deep need for love comes from. If, on the other hand, you’ve recognized the handiwork of a Designer in everything and everyone you see around you then it won’t be hard to understand why we desperately crave “endless love” (isn’t that right, Diana and Lionel?).

The Bible, our Designer’s instruction manual, explains why. In one place it says that “God is love”; in another we are told that we are created in God’s image. It seems our need for love was placed there intentionally by the God who created us to be in relationship with Him. The Bible also tells us that the only way to fill that gaping hole in our hearts is to discover God’s love for us. When we do, we find that we now have the capacity to love Him and other people with the same kind of unselfish love He has for us: “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” (1 John 4:7,8). This word for love is “agape,” a word reserved only for God’s kind of love. As we approach the Easter season we are going to be reminded about how selfless and unconditional God’s love is.

I remember sitting at a fast food counter beside a young girl with some striking tattoos up one arm. One colourfully emblazoned a man’s name who I naively assumed was her husband. When I asked her about that, she reluctantly told me about her impetuous love for an old boyfriend. After they broke up she tried only dating boys with the same name but that severely limited her options. Her plan now is to remove it but she’s dreading the pain. What a vivid metaphor for the pain we all go through “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Let’s face it – “Love hurts!”

So often we get disillusioned and embittered about love because we haven’t yet discovered true love. Let’s take this month to think about the loving sacrifice of saints like St. Patrick and the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on Good Friday and Easter. Let’s join the quest of Foreigner: “I want to know what love is!”