Is Your Love Bank Full?

 

I am currently rereading a book called, Love is a Choice, by three professional Christian counselors, and it is about the condition that they term, “codependency,” which they say many people have. The main issue with this condition is that people become unhealthily dependent on people or things, such as drugs, work, sex, anger, food, and bad relationships. Most of these unhealthy dependencies started in their childhood because they did not get the love that they needed and then sought to fill their internal love tank with things or people that could not give them true love. These things or people cannot truly make them whole again when they have such a love deficit and so they go deeper and deeper into an addictive cycle.

We are created to love and be loved. The greatest commandments are first to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39). The most famous verse in the Bible is about God’s love for us through giving His son so that we could have eternal life (John 3:16). So it should not surprise us that when we face a lack of love and/or abuse, especially in our early, formative years, that we end up being wounded and seeking to make up for what we did not get. Unfortunately, when we do not know good love, we do not know how to give good love. Our addictions and sinful patterns perpetuate the problem to the people around us, especially if we have kids of our own. They end up not getting the appropriate love that we should be giving them, and thus the cycle continues on and on until someone intentionally seeks to break the cycle.

Some of these addictions, such as drugs or alcohol, have more immediate outward effects that others can see and lead to lives collapsing more quickly. If you go to jail for a DUI or your kids are taken away because of your drug addition, you are forced to at least consider what has gone wrong in your life. But other patterns are more subtle and sometimes are even encouraged by the society around you. Many of the examples given by the counselors in the book are of people who are externally very successful, but who are miserable in their marriages and personal lives. They highlight multi millionaires and starlets who have “made it” in worldly terms. Their clients even include “good Christians”  who put on a mask of happiness in public, but who hate each other in private.
Are you one of these people? We live in a fallen world where each of us has experienced some love deficit or abuse in our lives, so almost certainly you and I have sought out wrong ways of making up for that. Have you ever taken the time and energy to examine how you have been impacted by your past and what patterns have developed as a result? If you are living in pain right now, even private pain that you hardly even admit to yourself, God does not want you to stay there. Jesus came to give us an abundant life (John 10:10), but before we can love well and even be loved, we have to be willing to let God examine our hearts (Psalm 139:23-24). Then we can understand how we have run to the wrong things to find love and let God’s true love heal us. This is not just a one and done process, but rather a lifetime of learning to examine ourselves and then letting God change us into the person He created us to be!