If You Are Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

I have looked for love in all the wrong places.

I have looked for it in my marriage, in my kids, in my friends, in my career, in myself.

I tried hard to love and failed miserably.

I have redoubled my efforts to love and fallen short again and again because I was trying to do loving works without actual love in my heart, and that will never work.

Love is the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  The overflow of His life in us pouring out. 

If we don’t love, then it is evidence that we need more of Him. 

Not that we ever love perfectly, not that we ever get it completely right, but when we see our lack of love, it should cause us to ask one thing, for more of Jesus.

The mission trip to Costa Rica for me was a place that God overflowed my cup.  A place where He filled me up with His love to pour me out on others.  But even more striking is the fact that I feel like I have lived way too long with less than His fullness.

I have lived way too long settling for less than all of Jesus.

I have lived way too long with less than His overflowing love in me.

And I wonder how it happened that my love grew cold.  I wonder how Jesus lost first place in my heart and how I could have possibly lived this many years with less than all of Him.

It breaks me open.

I am undone.

I can’t  tell you exactly how or when but I know that slowly, painfully other things, even good things crept in and stole my heart away from Him.

Things like my marriage, my children, my homeschooling, my selfishness.

Things that I am supposed to love like my family but when good things become your god, the stuff we look to to satisfy us, then they are life-stealing things.

And that is exactly how I feel, like my life was sucked away, because that is what idols do.  They promise life, fullness, happiness, fulfillment but they will never deliver.  It is only in the giving away of your life, in the fully surrendering, in the letting go to hold on to all of Jesus, that we truly find our life.

Because Jesus is Life.  And when He is your life, you get your life back.  The only way to get your life back is to lose it to Him.  The more we try to hold on to it, to grasp, control, to do it ourselves, the more we lose our True Life.  Our True Self. 

And the craziest thing of all, is that when I fully give myself to Him, fully surrender, Love Him best and first, then finally I can love others the way I have always wanted to.  Because it is His love in me loving them.  Loving deeper, richer, fuller than anything I could ever come up with, than anything I could ever force or white-knuckle.

 Because if you have to force yourself to love someone, is it really love at all?

I have heard people say that love is a verb and so we do loving things because it is what God commands of us.

But I say that our loving actions should flow out of a heart that deeply loves others or else it is one thing: hypocrisy.

And I have been that. A hypocrite.

When we tell people to go and obey the words of Jesus, to love others by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, we offer them the vain self-help methods of this world.  But Jesus said that apart from Him, we can do nothing.  To obey Him, we must depend on Him to do the work in us and through us.  We look to Him to live out His life in us.  Like the man who asked Jesus, “what must I do to do the work that God requires?”

Jesus replied, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent.” John 6:28-29

All works for God begin here: with belief in Jesus, with trust in His life in us to do what we cannot do on our own. 

And when we look into our hearts and see how loveless we are it should point us one place, the Cross.

It should cause us to cry out for more of Jesus, more of His Life in us, more of His love in us.

We can’t do anything apart from Him. (John 15:5)

We can’t ever really love others apart from Him. It should remind us that we are wretched and poor and needy and desperate without Him.  And He knew that about us.  That is why He came and died for all our selfishness, our lovelessness, our mess.  He paid for it all, to bring us back to Him and to give us the fullness of His life, the Life we always really wanted.  Because everything else, is empty, hollow, it will never satisfy.  But His love is everything.

And it is only when we throw ourselves on His mercy and cry out for His help, His grace, His love that we can finally live the life He intended us to live by His Spirit.

And so we cry out, Jesus, we are nothing without you, nothing.

We need you more and more, Holy Spirit, come and fill us or else we have nothing to offer this world.

Fill our lives with your Life that we might love with the love you have given us.  Love through us.  Live in us.  Let your love be our everything.