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Why do we all need to be loved? We have a great need for love.
Let’s ask why we need love?
- Knowing we are loved gives us comfort.
- Knowing we are loved gives us confidence.
- Knowing we are loved helps us get past our insecurities.
- Being loved gives us emotional strength. It helps us prevail in hard times.
- Being loved inspires and motivates us.
- Being loved makes us joyful, happy.
Thankfully love can come to us from many different sources: from parents, siblings, mates, friends. So even if we’re missing love in one area, we can find it in another. It also comes in many different forms. In his book on love languages, Gary Chapman lists the five love languages as:
- Gifts
- Quality time
- Words of affirmation
- Acts of service
- Physical touch
You can probably quickly identify which one of these five languages speaks love to you, or maybe you’re thinking you need all five! There’s no question that we need love and lots of it throughout all our lives, in all stages of our lives, from lots of people in our lives.
The great message of the Christian faith is that God loves all of us. We are all loved by God:
John 3:16: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
1 John 4:10: In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
We’ve sung it since we were children: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. But how many of us truly experience the great benefits that come from knowing that God loves us? Many people think, if God loves everybody, what’s so special about the fact that God loves me? After all, God loves everybody.