The deep-seated need to feel loved and to love, when unfulfilled, creates varying kinds of disorders ranging from simple personality peculiarities and emotional disorders to severe sex ual maladjustments and abnormalities. Children from broken homes, or homes where love is not expressed, of ten display aggressive or depressive re actions. Sometimes in reaching out for affection and attention, they are drawn into associations and friendships that warp and ruin their lives. Severe emo tional disorders apparent in adults of ten can be traced to a lack of affec tion during critical periods of develop ment as children. Eric Fromm, well known psychia trist and author of the book “The Art of Loving,” states that in many cases of mental illness “Therapy is essential ly an attempt to help the patient gain or regain his capacity for love. If this aim is not fulfilled, nothing but surface changes can be accomplished.” Dr. Richard Cramer states that “This love is a dynamic force, an action. Such love does not come full grown into our lives . . . it has to be cultivated and allowed to grow.” As parents, we need to spend much time before the Lord, receiving from Him His own overflowing love and seek ing the wisdom which He promises to give liberally (James 1:5) in order that we might meet the otherwise over whelming demands placed upon us. But what of those who áre not called to marry and have families? The ques tion is often asked how their need to be loved and to experience affection is to be fulfilled. May I suggest that the great heart of God’s love is such that can be known or experienced. Paul prayed for the Believers that they might “know” the love of God that passeth knowledge. He was seeking that they, as he (un married) might truly experience the love of God. In Jeremiah 31:3, we have the assur ance that the love of God is an un wavering love: “. . . I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness (or affection) I have 12
The Need to be Loved (continued) for our souls, our minds, and our emo tional natures has God provided if, with open minds and hearts, we simply sit at His table and feast! The first message was a brief dis cussion of the problem of guilt and the manner in which prayer permeates the matter and yields essential results. Now in the second of this series, we must turn our attention to another of these basic anxiety-causing factors which psychologists call the need to LOVE AND BE LOVED! Indeed, one psychologist has said, “Love is the very crux of personality” (Angyal, Andras, Foundations for a Science of Personality). Dr. Karl Men- ninger, noted psychiatirst, in a book entitled “Love and Hate,” in which he deals with the importance of giving and receiving love, has said, “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence . . . Love is the medicine for the sickness of the world.” Another practicing psy chologist has said, “To be able to give love and receive love in return is the most convincing sign of maturity.” How very important this is to healthy emotional development! And how very foundational it is in the entire fabric of God’s Word! And the Bible, in a very real sense, is a love story. It’s sixty-six books have been given to us that God loves us! Indeed, as John 15:13 states, this love surpasses anything known to man, for “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Paul, in Romans, tells us that He loved us even when it was impossible for us to reciprocate, and compares this to earthly love by saying, “God commendeth his love to ward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:7, 8). What is perhaps even more im pressive is that according to the verses that follow, Christ keeps on giving Him self for us in love, by the infusion of His very life in a way that it is difficult for us to comprehend. Indeed, such love has He for us that we are told in Ephesians it “. . . passes understand ing . . .” (Eph. 3:19).
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