All You Need Is Love

It might seem hard to argue with the sentiment that all you need is love, but I would like to try.  First of all I need to say it’s not in the Bible.  Some people might want to suggest it is in the Bible by pointing to the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul keeps saying (in essence), “If I don’t have love I’m nothing.”  But even before that chapter concludes Paul says that “faith, hope, and love abide”.  In other words he lumps love in with two other vital aspects of our being; faith and hope.

To me, saying that love is all you need is like saying that warmth is all you need, or light is all you need.  The similarity is that I would respond to those assertions by saying that if it’s warmth you need, then an ever-renewing source of warmth is actually what you need.  If light is all you need, then an ever-renewing source of light is really what you need.  If you don’t have a dependable, lasting source for those things then you’re going to find yourself often without what you said you need, and sometimes desperately looking for another outlet of that essential resource to replace the last, now-depleted outlet.  To those who want to make a case that all you need is love, I suggest that what you really need is an ever-renewing source of love.

Does the Bible have anything to say about that?  Well of course!  The Bible says that God IS love (1 John 4:8 and 16).  It also says “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).  In other words, God is that ever-renewing source.  God is the point of origination for love.  The only reason we can even ponder the concept of love, let alone experience the beauty of it, is because God took it upon himself to share and ship a bit of it our way.

So I would like to suggest a substitution.  Rather than all you need is love, I think it more accurate and appropriate to say that all you need is God, the source from whom all blessings flow.  Or as it says in the Bible, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23).