How to seek to have our relationship needs met

Listening to: Sovereign Grace Music: Worship God

In The Four Loves, CS Lewis begins by making a helpful distinction between what he calls "need-love" and "gift-love". He explains that:

The typical example of Gift-love would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother's arms

He successfully shows that there is nothing wrong with "need-love". We all have emotional, physical and spiritual needs that we need meeting. So how should we go about having those needs met in our relationships?

Firstly, I think it is helpful to take the point that Ed Welch makes in When People Are Big and God Is Small. We need to examine our "needs" and consider whether they are actually sinful wants. We shouldn't just assume that because we feel the need for something that it should be met.

But given that we have done that, how should we pursue the meeting of those good relationship needs we have? Perhaps we should just look for them from God. Shouldn't he meet our needs for love, recognition, friendship etc? This seems to have some weight because to seek the meeting of our needs elsewhere looks (a) like idolatry; and (b) hopeless, because of people's limited ability to "deliver".

But if we should look only to God, is there still a place for desiring marriage, friendship etc? We know that these things are good things, but maybe only in moderation. You shouldn't love your wife too much, or be too dependent on anyone. Perhaps we just have to keep things in proportion, and ensure we always are more dependant on God. Perhaps Tim Keller definition of an idol is helpful:

It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God (my italics)

But the first commandment, is not "You are to have no other gods more important than me", but "You are to have no other gods". God is one.

Martin Luther is right when he says that "it is God alone ... from whom we receive anything good". But, no sooner has he seemingly backed some super-spiritual monasticism than he says that "much that is good comes to us from human beings". He believes both these things because:

we receive our blessings not from [human beings], but from God through them. Creatures are only the hands, channels, and means through which God bestows all blessings. For example, he gives to the mother breasts and milk for her infant or gives grain and all sorts of fruits from the earth for sustenance - things that no creature could produce by itself.

In fact, to reject our needs being met through other human beings is to "through arrogance...seek other methods and ways than those God has commanded". In seeking to have our needs met only in God, we could be in danger of actually spurning his gifts and before we know it we would "not be receiving [our needs met] from God, but seeking them from ourselves".

But returning to the practicalities of how we should seek to have our needs met in relationships, this means that if our emotional needs (as well as 'spiritual' ones) are met by God, then we should receive them in the same way as we always receive gifts from God: passively.

But as when we receive our righteousness passively, that does not mean that we are not active. But we are active not in earning or obtaining it for ourself. The activity comes from the faith that we already have everything in Christ, even if we do not see or experience it yet.

On reflection I think that it is in those relationships where I have set out to serve and give, and continued to have to do so, have been the ones that have given the most to me and helped me through the most. But when I think about relationships that I have sought for what they give to me the fruit goes rotten in my hands. They just don't deliver.

Perhaps then we should seek only gift-love in our relationships, but then we will receive need-love anyway. The problems with idolatry come when we are actively looking for our needs met in relationships with other people, instead of passively expecting to receive through them by God's grace. Only in self-giving love are we free (as Jesus was when he gave himself for his people) and only in that way do we actually receive the love and glory we long for (as Jesus received from his Father who glorified him because of his obedience).

In Luther's book The Freedom of the Christian he sets out two famous statements:

1. "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none"
2. "A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all"

He is basically saying there are two dimensions to life and if we misunderstand this then everything goes astray (The two kinds of righteousness). By faith in Christ we share in his lordship of Creation. Everything serves us and works for our good (Rom 8:28 etc), and this happens freely apart from any effort or works of our own. But at the same time we are called and empowered by this grace to serve everyone we meet. We don't do things to receive justification before God, or good things from people, but we serve everyone without any hope of gain because we already have everything in Christ who gives through his creatures.

By the way, I haven't thought about all this a great deal until very recently, so please feel free to poke holes. It would be helpful if you do. Hopefully, its not totally obscure.