God's Love Language

In Gary Chapman's bestseller, The Five Languages of Love, he describes and expounds on the different methods that individuals use to express and receive love. They are:

• Words of affirmation,

• Quality time,

• Receiving gifts,

• Acts of service, and

• Physical touch.

The express purpose of his book is to help people learn to correlate their expressions of love so that two people who may speak two different languages can finally understand just how much the other person loves them.

Satan would have us believe that God speaks none of these and that he can speak them all. Of course, Satan can't express true love, just imitations. To convince us otherwise, Satan attempts to compensate with immediate results: "And Satan said unto Cain: Swear unto me... and this day I will deliver thy brother Abel into thine hands" (Moses 5:29, emphasis added).

Though the timing of God's expressions of love to us may not be immediate, they are guaranteed to be perfectly timed to our eternal needs (see Deut. 34:4). And, if we are patient and exercise faith, we will find that God indeed speaks all love languages perfectly:

• Words of affirmation: "This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me" (Ps. 119:50);

• Quality time: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me" (Ps. 23:4);

• Receiving gifts: "I exhort you, my brethren, that ye deny not the gifts of God, for they are many" (Moro. 10:8);

• Acts of service: "[God] is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another" (Mosiah 2:21); and

• Physical touch: "And it came to pass that [Jesus] commanded that their little children should be brought. So they brought their little children and set them down upon the ground round about him, and Jesus stood in the midst...and he took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and prayed unto the Father for them" (3 Ne. 17:11 – 12, 21).