Love That Lasts 5- Day Devotional Sample

We are lovesick and love diseased. Our views of romance, sexuality, dating, and marriage are killing us. We’ve been infected for years and hadn’t realized it. It almost killed me in high school and stayed with me in college, like shrapnel in my soul that I’m still plucking out and finding healing for. Nothing has caused me more pain, grief, and hurt than previous relationships and my pursuit of love. . . . The reason love, romance, and sexuality feels so right, even when it’s wrong, is because we were created for it. Even the distortions hold an element of truth; that’s what a distortion is, an alteration of the original. But there’s more. So much more. God doesn’t want to take away our joy; He wants to give us more of it. He doesn’t want to take away our sexual desire; He wants to give us the context in which it works the best. God doesn’t want us to hate romance; He wants to introduce us to the greatest love story of all time. In order to realize where we went so wrong, we first need to see where it was all so right. Where this intoxicating intimacy and love comes from in the first place. In the first couple of words of Scripture, an assumption is made: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” which implies that before those things were created, God still was, and is, and is to come. He was there before anything. And immediately we get a hint as well at the divine mystery that is the Trinity. He says, “Let us make man in our own image,” implying a plurality, yet at the same time we see the obvious singularity of this Creator. It takes a while for the Scriptures to fully unpack this beautiful truth, but in doing so we can read backward and see from that very moment God is and always has been an endless cycle and circle of love. The perfect picture of three persons yet oneness—the Father, the Son, and the very Spirit of God—eternally surrendering and submitting and exalting one another. So when God says let Us make man in Our image in Genesis 1, that means humans are actually born out of the overflow of God’s very own image. We are born out of that. And whatever we are created out of, also is what we were created for.