My Tank Runneth Over

In The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman presents a concept he calls the "love tank."  It's the idea that in order to love someone, you have to have love in your love tank.  Your tank is depleted whenever you love someone and is refilled whenever you are loved.  It explains why it's so difficult for those who feel unloved to love others and why those who feel very loved can more easily do it.

One note I'd like to make on it, though, is that many Christians want to pour out a pure love for others, yet don't have enough pure love flowing in.  Imagine that you are a waiter or waitress going around the restaurant refilling people's glasses with water.  They want pure, clean water, yet you got the water from a rusty tap and the pitcher you're using had been used as a makeshift flower vase but wasn't washed afterward.  What are the odds that the water you're pouring out is even close to pure?

Your love is no different.  You can't give out any better or purer than you're receiving.  To truly love others, to give them what they really need, you have to be getting what you really need.  We so often look for love from other people and seek to fill our love tanks with friends, relationships, and family, yet we don't realize that all this love, wonderful as it may feel, is still contaminated if it is only human.  Love is only pure if it comes from the source of all love, God.  He can show His love through others, certainly, but these others have to have received it from Him.  You can't give what you don't have yourself.

I'm not going to offer the overly simplistic advice of "just get in the Word and pray" if you want to love God more.  It's good and necessary, but your relationship with God should be alive and real, not formulaic.  Besides, I'm still working out how to desire Him more myself.  This post is just to offer another reason we all need Him.  :)