Real love. Everyone wants it, but not many end up finding it.
My life has been a journey in search of love. This is true of every life every person who has ever lived, regardless of when or where the life existed, and regardless of personality types.
The great quest of life is to find real love.
I’ve often heard it said of women that they are searching for love, but I am a man, and I can freely confess that it is true for me as well. When you don’t find real love, it’s easy to try and replace it in your life with things that can consume you and destroy you from the inside out. That’s why this topic is so important.
The reason why it’s so hard to find real love is because we are all broken. Real love can only come from real love, and there are many today who have never received it from those who, from their earliest years, should have immersed them in it. And so we go through life, looking for real love, but unable to tell the true from the fake, and only able to share flawed versions of love ourselves.
When you don’t have real love in your life, you try to replace it with other things that appear to satisfy, but in the end, they always let us down.
Whether we recognise it or not, every life is a journey in search of real love. The reason why this is true for everyone is because we were created for love. We are only fulfilled as human beings when we love fully and are loved in return.
But the world is full of fake love that tries to deceive you into accepting is as the real deal. But it isn’t real love. And most people fall for it!
What is the difference between fake love and real love? The difference is you have to earn fake love, while real love is freely given. Fake love depends on who you are and what you do, while real love comes from who the giver is and what he does. Fake love comes mainly from the desire of the recipient while real love comes solely from the nature of the giver.
Real love can only be found in Jesus.
To a world in which the very meaning of love is corrupted by selfishness, the Bible announces what real love is:
This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins (1 John 4:10 NLT)
Here, God tells us some five very important things about real love.
The first one is that real love originates in God. He loved us first. Our love of him is our response to him, merely a reflection of his own love for us.
The second is that real love is not transactional. It is based on his love for us and not our love for him.
The third is that real love gives. Remember John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave…”
The fourth is that real love hurts. Real love is always, in some sense, sacrificial. It has its greatest manifestation at the Cross.
The fifth is that real love makes us better people. The love that God showed to us by sending his Son as a sacrifice, took away our sins. We don’t have the ability to take away sin, but real love is always transformational.
That’s why, in the same letter, the apostle John writes,
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters (1 John 3:16)
This is the great quest of life. It is to find real love. I’ve learnt that it can only be found in Jesus. I’ve also learnt that when I’ve found it, I simply can’t help loving others in response to how I have been loved by God.
Article supplied with thanks to Dr Eliezer Gonzalez.
About the Author: Dr Eli Gonzalez is the Senior Pastor of Good News Unlimited and the presenter of the Unlimited radio spots, and The Big Question. Sign up to his free online course called Becoming a Follower of Jesus to learn about Jesus and His message.