Today’s 333 Devotional: “Love: Life’s Driving Priority”

For centuries, if not millennia, people have been looking for love. If I could borrow the lyrics and title from an old country-western song, they’ve been looking for love in all the wrong places.

How else can we explain the record number of divorces, the rise in pornography, and a society that is replacing the traditional definition of marriage with alternative lifestyles?

So, where can we go?

Where can we find a love that truly works in a world determined to redefine the word itself? We can’t go to society because it hasn’t got a clue. We can’t go to religion because it abuses and misinterprets love through rules and regulations. We can’t go to Hollywood because it’s misrepresented it. We can’t go to the authors and playwrights; they have as much trouble defining it as everyone else.

But people need something they can hang their hats on, something they can understand and put into practice.

So where do we go? Maybe it’s time to go to the source of all love, God. Maybe it’s time to go back to the One who created us and placed the need for love within our very DNA. Maybe it’s time to go back to the Bible, God’s word for His creation, and to its basics, by which life finds meaning.

Over this week and next, we’ll look at what Jesus says about love, and we’ll see that love is life’s driving priority; you might say Jesus is giving us our job description.

In the Great Commandment, Jesus says love is the very essence of our relationship with God and one another. He tells us that our love authenticates this relationship and God’s calling upon our lives. He also said that love is the greatest defense of the gospel message, and that love is literally the great essential of life.

Love is truly then life’s driving priority.