LOVE - WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW
By Norman and Ann Bales
of All About Families
Burt Barcharach and Hal David wrote the following lyrics
What the world needs now
Is love, sweet love
It's the only thing there's just too little of.
How could you disagree with the songwriters? We all want love.
Several years ago, Thomas Malone, a psychiatrist in Atlanta said,
"Almost every emotional problem can be summed up in one particular
bit of behavior. It's a person walking around screaming, 'Love me!
Love Me!' That's all. He goes through a million manipulations to get
somebody to love him." The late Eric Fromm, also a noted figure in
the mental health field, said, "The final goal in all therapy is to
release within the individual a greater capacity for love."
The songwriters and the therapists did not make a new discovery in
our time. Jesus said "A new command I give you: Love one another.
As I have loved you, so you must love one another" (John 13:34). He
also said, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his
life for his friends"(John 15:13).
In one way or another you can trace the root cause of practically
all human conflict and degeneracy to a lack of love. Our
involvement with family ministry convinces us that families are
breaking down in the Western world because we neither understand nor
properly practice love. But why is it so hard?
If the answer to love will cure some of life's worst problems, why
don't more people do it? Will people really punish themselves and
refuse to provide what they need for emotional and spiritual
survival? Apparently they do, but there is really more than one
reason why people don't love.
1. We confuse love with sentimentality. Aldous Huxley was a
cynical secularist, but he was not entirely wrong when he wrote, "Of
all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, love is
surely the grubbiest, smelliest and slimiest." What was Huxley
getting at? Perhaps he was taking a swipe at sentimentality. Some
people don't think you love at all if you don't have warm, tender,
caring feelings. Husbands and wives walk away from each other with
the lame excuse, "I don't love him/her anymore." If they really
want to stick the knife in a partner's back and twist it, they will
say, "I never did love you." If you really want to make a mess of
your relationship, you might try saying that in front of your
children. What people actually mean when they say that kind of
thing is that their sentimental feelings are no longer present.
But that's not love in the truest sense. Look carefully at the
words of Jesus. He said "a new commandment I give you." You don't
command a sentiment. Sentiments fluctuate like the weather, food
preferences and clothing styles. Marriage is not based on
sentiment. No where does the Bible say that we are entitled to have
marriage partners who are intelligent, attractive, romantic,
affectionate and polite. What the Bible does say is "What God has
joined together, let not man separate" (Matthew 19:6).
2. We confuse love with sexuality. With ever increasing regularity
we hear sexual intercourse described as "making love." When your
local movie theater features a love story, you're almost guaranteed
that the protagonists will end up in the same bed together and it's
a pretty safe bet that they will not be married to each other.
Somehow we have bought into a belief that if you really love a person
of another gender, you will prove that love by performing a sex act.
The Greek word for sexual love is "eros." That word never appears in
the New Testament. When Jesus commanded love he used the word
"agapao" which is a type of love which can only be known by the
actions it prompts. It is a love that does not always run with
natural inclinations, a love in which you give yourself to another
person unselfishly. You even sacrifice your own interests and
desires for the good of the other person.
3. It is difficult to practice love because it is often painful.
Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and
take up his cross and follow me." When you do that, you aren't
always appreciated. When you do that, you make yourself vulnerable.
Sometimes people don't understand your intentions. Sometimes they
take advantage of you. People have the capacity to hurt you and it
is very tempting to retreat from expressing love to anyone when you
have been hurt. A person who has been abused sexually, physically
or verbally may find it hard to ever risk loving again. It's human
nature to be self-protective.
4. It is difficult to love because many of us have not been trained
to love. We don't instinctively know how to love. If we did there
would have been no need for the Bible writers to tell us, "love one
another." It's necessary to acquire many skills in life, like
swimming and riding a bicycle. We have the capacity to do those
things, but we have to develop our capabilities. I know just
enough of the Spanish language to get myself in trouble. I can
order from a menu in South America and I know how to find the rest
room, but don't ask me to discuss events of the day. However, I
believe that I have the capacity to learn how to speak Spanish. I'm
a reasonably intelligent person. I have a working knowledge of
grammar, which is essential to all languages. If I ever decide I
want to pay the price of becoming fluent in the Spanish language, I
will have to submit to training.
The same thing is true with loving. Some of us are taught how to love
by our parents. Some of us don't get that from our parents, so we
look elsewhere for training. Books can help. Workshops and seminars
can help. Mentors can help. Sometimes counselors can be effective in
love training but the Bible is our primary love-training manual
because Jesus Christ models love. Near the end of his personal
ministry, he knew it was time to leave this world. According to
John 13:1, "Having loved his own who were in the world, he now
showed them the full extent of his love."
CONCLUSION
To us it seems strange that the whole world screams for love and yet
they look for it everywhere except in the one credible place they
can find it - the Word of God. Dr. Malone, the Atlanta psychiatrist,
who spoke of people screaming for love, also said, "When they realize
that if they give up their screaming and go on to the other business
of loving another human, they can get all the love they have been
screaming for all their lives." I wonder if he ever read Matthew
10:39. "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his
life for my sake will find it."
