“Everyone today is an expert on love,” is Dr. Allan Fromme’s cryptic reflection on our current mood. With a sense of human adventure, Eugenia Price suggests in Make Love Your Aim that anyone can be “an expert on love” if he will dare to discover for himself the love God offers.
“We have so sentimentalized our concept of love that it bears no resemblance to the original,” Miss Price writes. “We have taken the word of romantic novels and motion pictures and TV and perfume and men above the Word of God. The Bible declares that God is love. How closely does your concept of love resemble the love of God? We tend to judge the quality of love according to the way it makes the loved one feel. But to judge love by feeling is our big error and the point at which we turn aside from God’s original concept.”
Make Love Your Aim is a companion piece to the author’s last book, The Wider Place, which was described by some readers as a “controversial challenge” to try the inner freedom God grants to anyone who want it enough to assume the responsibilities that come with it.
Freedom and love are two sides of the same coin. And we can only understand them enough to practice them if we know the way God defines them. How does He do this? In Jesus Christ, the final yet continuing revelation of God’s true intentions toward all of us. Those who are familiar with Eugenia Price’s books will recognize this as a recurring theme. Make Love Your Aim develops it with imagination and versatility: “Jesus said, ‘If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.’ But He was offering to wave no magic wand over our heads so that we could do as we pleased. He also said, ‘This is my commandment, That you love one another as I have loved you.’ His is the love of the Cross, without self-defense, without self-pity – and totally free.”
Miss Price’s style is maturing noticeable in vigor, accuracy and objectivity. Here is a bold thinker who can write; a committed Christian who can light up experiences common to us all in a language literate and understandable. As her readers have come to expect, she does not hesitate to share a viewpoint that has rejected the hot house conditioning and automatic answers which produce impotent disciples. Rather, she invites the reader to take a bold look at the pretensions he has substituted for reality, the doctrinal escapes he has too long preferred to God himself.
And there is more. There is an underlying reverence, a compassion that springs from a most personal attention to the very subject: love – Christ’s kind of love!
