There is one thing that does not seem to be in short supply in our world today: unhappy people. Everyone it seems has a gripe; has a “chip on his shoulder” and they are daring someone to knock it off. Nobody seems to be able to find a measure of satisfaction in life. I think the problem is quite simple. It brings to my mind a song that was popular in the early 1980s, “Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places.”

The Scriptures tell us “God created man in His own image” (Gen. 1:26). One of the ways in which this is true is that God “has put eternity in [our] hearts” (Eccl. 3:11). Therefore, it is impossible to satisfy our deepest need regarding love without having an eternal being as the central object of our love. Of course, that eternal being is God! As David says in Psalm 62:1 – “O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.”

People are striving to fill the great “love void” in their heart with temporal things: material things, political ideology, family, casual sex, intoxicants, fame, fortune, glitz, glamor, etc. In the end they always come up with an “empty sack” because temporal things cannot satisfy our deepest longing. We are “Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places”! Only God can fill that void!

Jesus put it this way. “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets’” (Matt. 22:37-40).

God does not command us to love Him because He is on an egomaniacal power trip. He commands this because He knows the truth that only He can fill that deepest need at man’s core. He knows because He made us this way! In another Psalm David says, “The LORD is righteous in all His ways, gracious in all His works” (Ps. 145:17). We will only fill that great void in our heart and find true happiness when we too seek to be righteous like Him – “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matt. 5:6). Our “hunger and thirst for righteousness” is a “hunger and thirst” for Him!

The choice is ours. To “hunger and thirst for righteousness” is to place a righteous God at the center of our life; to make Him the central object of our love (cf. John 14:15; 1 John 2:3-5; 5:3). Only He can fill that great void. If we try to fill it in any other way, we are doomed to a life of misery in the “here and now” and in the “here after.” Where are you “Lookin’ for Love”?

- Words of Life, June 20, 2021 (bulletin for the Westside church of Christ, Bloomington, IN)