Made for MoreНамуна

"All you need is love." The Beatles sang it, our world professes it, and just about every other Instagram post boasts it: Love is all we need. 

God knows our world needs love more than ever in 2020, but we frequently miss the real meaning of love. We often fail to miss the great depth of the definition of love and its place in our life. 

Stories, songs, movies, and TV shows all paint the picture that love is the ultimate destination. Some of you may even be looking for love. Some may find romantic love or someone you will marry. While that is a love we are made for, it is not the love we were made for. 

It is true; we were all made for love—to love and to be loved. Of course, there was One who displayed this for us perfectly—Jesus Christ. He came not only to tell us love is the greatest commandment of all (Matthew 22:36-40) but to show us by sacrificing his very life for us. 

While love continually holds a recurring and robust message on this earth, there is increasingly a strong message to turn our focus towards self-love. The issue with self-love is that its primary focus is to have a deep regard for one's own happiness or advantage. And though self-care is a crucial component to life, it is naturally our first instinct to care, worry, and fend for ourselves. The act of self-love is not a sacrificial love. Jesus came to show us love in its most raw, vulnerable, and valuable form. 

Self-love can lead us to self-righteousness, self-importance, being self-consumed, and, overall, placing our desires utmost and foremost in every way. It leads people to care for themselves before others, considering themselves (even their races, ethnicities or statuses) as more important than those around them. Our culture is consumed in this idea of self-importance and it is an attractive love to pursue, but it is an empty, barren, and fruitless love that can never be quenched. This is not the love Christ gave his life for and it is not the love we were made to experience. 

Jesus Christ came to show us a love that thinks of others first, that "always protects," that "trusts" and that "hopes" (1 Corinthians 13). This is the love that we, as Christ-followers, are made to live and operate within—a love that dies to itself and embodies humility at its highest form. 

It was for love that God desired to send his Son, Jesus Christ, to us. It was for love that Jesus died. And it was for love that Christ lived a life of selfless love, so that same love could be born, lived, and experienced in us. 

Pastor and writer, Andrew Murray once said, "Pride must die in you, or nothing in heaven can live in you." To love others sufficiently and follow God's commandments, we must set ourselves aside. Humility is vital to loving others as God intended because it gets you out of the way and allows his love to work through you.

If we want to partake in all the peace, hope and goodness God has for us, if we truly seek to operate as God created us to, we must live a life of love as we were made to love.