Love Fights Loneliness

July 27, 2015

How do we defer our desires?

Think about this: are your desires loving?

Are your desires holy?

Could they be destructive to anyone else? Could they eventually be destructive to you?

Psalm 37:4 tells us to delight in the Lord and He will give us the desires of our heart. Have you let Him provide His desires for you and accepted them as your own? You can, and if you do you can be sure they are in His order for your life.

Now, the word “delight” doesn’t necessarily mean hilarity. Among other things, it means luxury, delicate, and enjoyment. We can simply enjoy or relax in our relationship with the Father without having to struggle with trying to feel delighted. (I don’t think anyone feels like that all the time!) And when we relax, He is freed to bless us with His desires for us.

Does He desire us to strive and struggle with loved ones in an emotional game of “King of the Mountain?” I don’t believe He does. He’s already told us to prefer one another, to lay down our souls.

So how do we lay down our souls? It starts with God and His love.

Remember part 3 of this series? It talked about feeling unloved and lonely. When we feel unloved, whether we are married, single, or somewhere in between, our feelings of loneliness grow. When we know we are loved, loneliness decreases. Being physically alone has very little to do with it.

And who is our source of love? God.

I John 4:19 says it like this: we love because He first loved us. His love is unconditional. It’s there always. When we develop a reciprocal loving relationship with God, it allows us to love others with His love.

The more we love God, the more we accept His love for us. This allows us to love ourselves with His love and then to share that love with others.

Nothing can increase His love for us. It’s already unconditional and complete. What does increase is our perception of His love. Let me put it this way: we can only give from what we have.

And that’s His love, not ours.

In ourselves, we are incapable of loving without expecting something in return. That’s lust, not love. And that makes laying down our souls impossible because we are not doing it in love. We are expecting some type of reward. Trying to do it on our own, even from a sense of duty or obedience, is a recipe for heartache, anger, and frustration. We feel like throwing a tantrum because it just isn’t working like we think it should. Or we feel like a doormat.