Looking for Love

We must not allow our grasp of total depravity to lead us to miss the remnants in us of the image of God. We are plenty bad. Sin touches every part of us, and makes us utterly unable to do anything in ourselves pleasing to God, including coming to faith. We do not, however, run in precisely the opposite direction of where we ought. Romans 1, wherein Paul’s chief goal is to explain the universal guilt of man, for instance, tells us not that man in his sin, made to worship God, merely refuses to worship God, but rather says we worship the creature rather than the Creator. Because we’re fallen we won’t worship God. Because we bear His image, however, we will worship. Even at Babel they didn’t merely turn their back on the dominion mandate but rather twisted it. They built the tower because of God’s image. They built it for their own glory because of their depravity.

Distortion, Not Destruction

The same principle, that many of our desires (to work, to worship) are good and proper but because of sin, misdirected, applies to our desire to be loved. We are relational beings, just like our Father in heaven. It is not good, He told us, for man to be alone. Wanting to be loved isn’t a shame, weakness, a failure. Looking for love in all the wrong places, however, is a shame, weakness, a failure.

Seeking, Not Finding

When we are men pleasers, ear ticklers, hungerers for the approval of the world we are seeking love where we ought not, and missing the love that we have. When we commit adultery, indulge in pornography, escape into fantasy we seek love where we ought not, and miss the love that we have. When we gossip, slander, bear tales, we are seeking love where we ought not, and missing the love that we have. When we use social media to present our lives as one glamorous success after another, we look for love where we ought not and miss the love that we have.

Our Hearts Are Restless…

The answer to our longing, the one thing that will satisfy our hunger is the Father who sent His Son to dwell with us, to be our Husband, and to feed us. If I am in Christ, I am His beloved, and I am in turn beloved of the Father. The Spirit is ever with me, encouraging me. If I am in Christ I have all that I could ever ask or hope for. In my sin I’m like the beloved son of the wealthiest man the world has ever known, going to the seedy part of town to pick through dumpsters, seeking to fill my belly. A feast is laid out for me at home, my Father’s table heavy laden with the choicest delicacies, and I’m looking for a pizza crust in a trash can.

Full and Famished

My shame is not that I am hungry, for I was made to eat. My shame is missing what my Father has given me. My weakness is not that I want, but that I don’t recognize that I have. My failure isn’t that I long to be loved, but that I’m wrong to not know I am infinitely loved. He is my beginning- I bear His image. And He is my end- I will be with Him always.