Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. Col. 3:2.

If I could wish one thing for all the young people who have sat in my classes through the years, it would be a capacity to love and to receive love at its best. Only righteous love is adequate for life and religion. Only by love does one make the right response to God and to man. "God so loved the world that he gave . . ." In the Bible God is not only lecturing us; He is giving Himself.

Paul speaks of our being able to comprehend the height of the love of God (see Eph. 3:18). One of the great scandals of our day is the perversion of what people call love because men will not relate it to the purity of God's love and grace. All men need to surrender their basic needs to the elevated love of God.

Love is the gift of God. But no gift has been so warped and perverted by man. When men say they love, they mean they want to possess, they want to gratify themselves, to exploit the functions people perform. Everyone has functions—religious functions, money functions, sex functions, social functions. Today the functions that people perform have become more important than the people themselves. But people don't like to be used. Using people destroys their sense of self-worth.

The love of Christ gives people a true feeling of self-worth, a sense of well-being. God never limits or cripples a man's basic needs. Always there is a new capacity, an enlarged emphasis on love. It is the work of Christ to make people loving. It is the work of the devil to debase men's urge to love.

The perverted love of our day is best vanquished by the pure love of God. The immorality of this generation is most effectively eradicated by the Spirit who sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts. To the heart fully opened to the uplifting power of Christ, no sordidness can mar it; no evil can pollute it; no fear can make it afraid; no temptation betray it. "Know and believe the love that God has to us, and you are secure; that love is a fortress impregnable to all the delusions and assaults of Satan."—Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing, p. 119.