Week 12—Monday 1 John 5:1-3
Week 12—MONDAY
“LOVE IS THE ANSWER TO HUMAN LIVING”
We continue to look at love as inherently necessary to human living if that life is to be called life and not tragedy. Here is Dr. Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist, writing in From Death Camp to Existentialism, the story of his life in a German war camp. Out of that environment and experience he says: “Then I grasped the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Here is high intelligence and tragic experience coming to a Christian conclusion, namely, “that salvation is through love and in love.” This from a man who is apparently not a Christian. Life is taking everybody by the hand who will be led and leading them to Christian conclusions. Life is rendering a Christian verdict.
Dr. Pitirim Sorokin is an outstanding sociologist at Harvard University and has organized a department of sociology to have research into the effects of love, or “altruism,” as they call it, in the affairs of nations and society and individuals. They have produced thirteen books on this subject. He said: “My investigations have led me to the conclusion that love is the answer to human living.”
Then we hear this word from Dr. Adler, a famous psychiatrist: “I suppose all the ills of human personality can be traced to not understanding the meaning of the phrase, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” But Jesus said that two thousand years ago, and psychiatry comes along and says, “If you don’t understand that, you do not know how to live.” And note he said, “all the ills of human personality”—that is sweeping and conclusive. And yet it comes not from a scholar’s study, but from a clinic dealing with human ills.
Comte was the author of Positivism, certainly not a Christian movement, and yet the three principles of that movement are: “Love, order, progress.” For where there is no love, there is no order and hence no progress.
O Lord and Father, your children are learning, through trial and error, that your way is their way. Help us to learn it speedily lest we destroy ourselves before we do. We are foolish and break your law of love and get hurt in the process. Teach us to be wise and live. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If love is the answer to human living, then that answer is within my capabilities for I can love.