Nearly all persons place love as the foremost factor of their own personal and spiritual ideals. In a study of all known cultures it was found that love was the only factor found in all of them – without exception. Persons admit that the practice of love for self and others is less than their imaginations of love. They have a feeling that if love is strong it leads to solutions for just about any interpersonal ills, and may be so meaningful, if engaged, as to be partial solution to societal problems. Love seems related to spiritual enlightenment. Love is held before the human race as something of a goal context toward which persons are supposed to be striving. Who can find fault with the Apostle in 1 Corinthians 13, and who truly wants to? Yet, we have seen caricatures of the complete love described in the chapter. When have we ever seen the personification of: love never fails? Reading the words in church on Sunday morning, and believing them, families may bicker hatefully Sunday afternoon. The chapter is reflective of God’s model love.
No matter how highly love is regarded, it doesn’t walk alone. Love is rightly cherished and helpful at all personal points in the lives of nearly all persons, but love has been weakened by an emphasis that does not relate it sufficiently well to other issues of life – commitment for example. Joshua wrote almost nothing about love and a great deal about commitment. Trace of Scripture makes clear that there is human and divine love, alive and well for the people of any generation, but there is limited development of the concepts of love in the Old Testament. Law seems primary for rebel man. Even so, it is clear that love is a basic spiritual issue, necessary for human life. One can, in love to God, find his or her freedom and will to choose the laws of God.
As a Christian counselor I have talked and worked with persons who passed over responsibility to make commitment. Some persons lived together because, by their witness, they loved each other, but they were not going anywhere, they had no sense of life fulfillment or direction that would justify long life. Every counselor has heard the statement, I tried it, but it didn’t work. When there is time to walk troubled persons through their predicaments, we may discover they didn’t try as diligently as they imply or attest. They made gestures in the right direction, but did not take on duty of commitment to see matters through to meaningful and lasting conclusion.
Love is ancillary for paying bills, for cooking breakfast, for shoveling snow. These features of domestic life require something of commitment to duty, to chores instead of ecstasies, so mature persons take on responsibility making for orderly life. Persons can discover love in a marriage to which they made commitment, as is often true even in arranged marriages. Commitment has considerable virtue in it. We are told that fewer couples make life commitments, so they live together, as long as our love shall last. They give less to others, less than do the committed; they seem to have a self-orientation that reduces their corporate children; and, they seem to have less faith in God – spiritual disregard. Commitment is the cup that holds the contents of love. The best love is love with commitment – so demonstrating a concept that as water is absolutely necessary to life, it becomes deadly in a flood. To put it another way, love loses dimension without commitment. The good of a river is lost in losing boundaries and becoming a danger in flood. Love is safe in committed fidelity to all those loved. Further, it is a gift perhaps achieving ecstasy, and is universally sought. Commitment directs it so to protect from the ravages of the emotions and the spoiling of a gift that is so enveloping – as is the love gift. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020