What is Love

There is a lot of talk about love in society in songs and music. They define what love looks like. We, their audience, absorb that definition and look for it or try to create it in our own lives. In our own lives, we know some people who talk a lot about the love that is on their mind. We also know others who do not speak much of love at all, because to do so would be to make us vulnerable to the scrutiny of outsiders who wonder if we are defective because we are not in a relationship.

 

But what is love? What is the characterization of the kind of love that leads to marriage? It is much more than a physical expression. Rather, it is predominantly an issue of the heart.

I will be discussing the following four topics relating to our experience of love before marriage:

• Love is not driven by fear.
• The hope for love must be self-controlled and grounded in reality.
• Love requires active waiting and responsibility in timing.
• Love is relationship cultivation.

Love is not driven by fear.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

Sometimes, as we get older and feel more pressure from society, we begin to fear that we will never marry. Mostly, this fear is driven by the fear of what people will say about us. We could probably live a happy life being single, but we imagine that people will pity us or talk about us behind our backs, so we fear singleness. 

This fear makes us more willing to lower our spiritual standards when choosing to enter into a relationship. It makes us want to cling tightly to a person, for fear of them leaving us. 

A wise man once told me to hold God's gifts in an open palm rather than a clenched fist. If God gives us a gift, He may require us to give it up. Trying to hold onto it with all our might will only cause more pain, denial, anger, etc. 

Remember that God's purpose is not that we should be happy or that we should be married. His purpose is to transform us into Christ's image. Joy comes in that, certainly, and marriage may come too (though God does not owe us marriage). He may give us the gift of a relationship or the hope of a relationship to cultivate our dependence upon Him, our trust in Him, our love for and preference of Him. And then He may take away that gift or that hope, so that we may then be further sanctified in dealing with disappointment, learning to be satisfied in Him. 

So love must not be driven by fear. If we feel this kind of fear, we must go to God and cling to Him. Clinging to a fallen human being will always prove to be disappointing, and more than that, it is a heart issue, because we may in a sense be making a god out of this person, hoping that they will meet our every need. Only God can do that. 


The hope for love must be self-controlled and grounded in reality.



When we like someone, we may allow our imagination the freedom to create all sorts of sentimental hopes and ideas of what love with that person could be like. In doing so, we are adding fuel to a fire that may need to be extinguished altogether rather than encouraged. 

Remember that we may in fact not marry this person, but if we spend time imagining all sorts of things, we may fall into sin in our hearts. Two sins that threaten us here are the sins of idolatry and adultery.

An out-of-control hope for love (it may be a love sickness at this point) may bring us to make an idol out of that person. We have heard the saying that our god is what most often occupies our minds. We must be careful to guard our hearts from such idolatry, because God will certainly crush these hopes in order to bring us back to worship Him. He alone is worthy of worship. He requires it of us and will move circumstances in our lives to make us worship Him.

We must be careful, too, that in hoping for love, we will not fall into adultery in our hearts. We do not know if we will marry that person or if we will marry at all, so it is crucial to work out purity in our thoughts to safeguard against adultery in our hearts.

Purity in thought will also help us to stay grounded in reality. We can get carried away imagining all sorts of things about a person, creating in our minds an image of who we would like that person to be rather than who they actually are. This can lead to greater disappointment because now that person is not living up to the expectations we have created in our own hearts.


Love requires active waiting and responsibility in timing.



In our young single years, we tend to live our lives as we please because we are single and tied to less responsibilities than those who are married and have familial concerns. We tend to eat out more, hang out more, spend more, travel more. All of these are fine in moderation. But remember that to be married, we need money. 

We need money for the wedding itself, which today costs a great deal more as people try to display their style and creativity and go all out. If we want to have a beautiful wedding, we will need to prepare for it. We must not expect our parents to cover the bill. 

Much more importantly, we will need money to live, after the wedding. We all know that marriage does not end after the honeymoon but sometimes, when we are on the single side, we see the wedding as the end result towards which we strive, rather than the beginning of something new. 

We must wait through our single years actively and wisely, working and saving money for the future. Think ahead. We must not spend all of out time and money on today's pleasures. 

We must also be responsible and wise in our timing of marriage, because love that is of God can and will wait.

If we are not yet able to get along with our sibling and parents, it may be wise to put off thinking about getting married, choosing instead to work on our character. Our family of origin is God's training ground for marriage. If we are unable to adapt to and have a good relationship with these people, whose habits and understandings we know, what makes us think we will have a good relationship with a person who will most certainly have entirely different understandings and habits to which we will have to adapt?

If we do not yet have a stable job, it may be best to wait a while to get married. Proverbs 24 says, 

Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house,

the point being that we should think ahead and prepare all that we will need to build a family. Sometimes we can be in such a hurry to get married and do not prepare properly, only to find ourselves struggling to survive on our own. 


Love is relationship cultivation.




In our culture of dating, couples may spend much time doing stuff together to get to know each other. Often, we end up getting to know each other on a superficial level and after the wedding find that we've married a complete stranger. 

It is crucial to cultivate a relationship in which we talk about the deep things of the heart. Remember that a marriage is first and foremost a relationship in which we will help sanctify our spouse and they will help sanctify us. It is all about our relationship with God still. We are not trading in our relationship with God for a relationship with another person.

It can be beneficial to talk about our history--our testimony of God's work in our life, what we've been through and learned, our favorite childhood experiences, etc. This way, we set the context for understanding the other person. 

It can also be beneficial to talk about our hopes for the future. I don't mean that we should compare bucket lists. It can be helpful to talk about how we view family life and what we would like to accomplish in life, in church, in education, in our career. This way, we can see if we are headed in the same general direction or if we would be continually moving apart after marriage.




There is much to consider for love and marriage. The point is, think it through. Do not rush. Do not fear. Trust God.

 

The Time and Heart of an Excellent Wife

An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones. Proverbs 12:4

I think in all reality, that is my most serious fear concerning marriage--that I would be rottenness in my husband's bones. It is disheartening to think that I can do that to someone I love. 

In light of that, I should turn inward to focus on cultivating godly character so that I can be an excellent wife, instead of daydreaming about becoming a wife. That can be rather difficult to do at our age. O Lord, help me turn my heart from men to You. I am already complete in You. Help me cling to You as I seek to become like You in all things.

Currently, I am struggling with two sins:

1. My irresponsible use of time
2. My self-serving heart

These are important in an excellent wife because her use of time and the posture of her heart will either stimulate or inhibit her family's growth. My self-serving heart will lead me to indulge my flesh in sleeping a little longer, in relaxing a little longer, in spending a little more time or money on myself. Sure, there are times when these are wise choices to make, but your conscience knows when you're being wise and when you're being indulgent.

When I dawdle with time, I am pushing back my responsibilities to temporal things (vacuuming, doing homework, etc.) which still have to be done. So when I finally get to work on these things, I have already given up opportunities to invest in cultivating my relationships with my family members. Because I am now behind in my family relationships, how can I even think about serving in the Church or community?

 

My Irresponsible Use of Time
I am letting myself slip into unproductiveness in my morning hours of devotions and homework. My weekends tend to feel like a holiday from schoolwork. Instead of doing as much as I can in a day, I float along, stretching out a small workload to fill the day instead of finishing it quickly and starting on whatever else I must do, because there is never such a thing as having nothing to do.

My Self-Serving Heart
I waste time, yet am frustrated when my dad asks me to do something for him, under the pretense that I do not have time to help him. Help me cultivate selflessness and higher concern for the needs of my family.



O Lord, please forgive me for these sins. Jesus used all His time on earth to do Your bidding, to lay His life down for the Church. How far I am from Christ-likeness.



O Lord, help me set You before me so that I may always remember Your grace towards me and strive for excellence in my character, because You are excellent. 








Who can discern his errors? 
Declare me innocent from hidden faults.
Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins;
let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless,
and innocent of great transgression.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
Psalm 19:12-14

Here's a sad song about a woman who is rottenness in her husband's bones. At least, I hope he's her husband, but judging by society today...he probably isn't...

And here's something that'll be much more useful to you. It's from among Pastor Briggs' reruns. It's what got me thinking about this in the first place.

Choosing a Spouse of Godly Character

 

She Keeps Me Warm: How Songs Can Move a Society

Two weeks ago, I had two hours to drink in the beauty of a morning's walk by the river. 

The fresh green of the grass, the fluttering butterflies, the songbirds, the violets, the tree swallow's dance--they filled me with so much joy! I wished I was a bird so that I could sing my joy without words, because as much as I should wish it, I cannot embody my joy and God's beauty in words that bloom and blossom at the sound of sweet music's voice.

Last week, I heard for the first time the song about lesbian love, "She Keeps Me Warm." It is beautiful in its gentleness, sweet in its meandering exploration of a new friend's heart. 

Yet it distorts truth. Portraying same-sex relationships as acceptable is an obvious distortion. But they added Scripture to it, singing, "Love is patient, love is kind." This is distortion too, because it seeks to lend credibility to something untrue by adding a little truth to it. Love is patient. Love is kind. But love does not rejoice in wrongdoing. 

Lesbian love is not the only distortion of truth in songs. Songs about heterosexual lust and sex are acceptable in mainstream society. These too are distortions of truth and are songs, above all, about unrighteousness. 

Whether society is desensitized to unrighteousness by opinion leaders such as musicians, or opinion leaders write songs that reflect the values of a society that's desensitized to unrighteousness is not exactly clear. Probably both are true. In either case, songs about unrighteousness further pervert people's minds and can lead to greater lawlessness in posterity if the Lord does not intervene.

Someone once said that culture is religion externalized. What a group of people believes to be true will be evident by the content and style of music, art, movies, and books that are made and accepted in a society. 

What does the quality of our music, art, movies, and books say about our society? And what does this say about the involvement and effectiveness of Christians in our society?

The Lord Jesus commanded us to teach all nations to obey His commands. Some commands need to be expressly taught but others can be caught, through song. We can be salt through songs. We can create beautiful songs about pure love. We can paint a musical picture of love as it should be. How will the people believe in true love if they never hear of it on the radio? And I'm not talking about Christian radio.  

Do you like to sing? Sing truth.

Do you like to paint or draw? Draw truth.

Do you like to act? Act out truth.

Do you like to write? Write truth.

Sing truth, draw truth, act out truth, write truth, and share it with the world. Re-sensitize people to purity. 

May the Lord raise up for Himself people who will be culture changers, like Bizzle. He got a lot of bad press from secular media for his response to "Same Love," which uses parts of "She Keeps Me Warm" to relate the plight of the LGBT community to that of black people in America. Listen to his song through the link below. 

Bizzle's response to "Same Love"