Most of us view love and relationships in an entirely
different light than what is painted in the Bible. Because of this, we are
content with broken relationships and believe that love can fade and die. This
is not the picture we get from the Bible. The purpose of this study is to bring
us to an understanding of Biblical relationships, romantic and otherwise.
Now all of us either came from a broken home or know someone
close to you who did. It has become the norm. We expect relationships to fail.
That is now the average. We expect people to hurt each other and put themselves
before each other. This is normal.
I’ve seen families not talk to each other for decades
because of a single fight. I’ve seen couples get divorced because they “fell
out of love” as if it were some tree they’d been taking a nap in. I’ve seen
friends hate each other because of a political disagreement. I have cheated and
I have been cheated. I have hurt and I have been hurt. The world will tell us
that this is normal. Expect it! Accept it! But thankfully, there is something
not of this world that says, Forget it!
At the center of every relationship there is something that
I like to call our “love definition.” What I mean is this: When we begin a
relationship with someone, whether a buddy, a sibling, a coworker, or a date,
we have already decided what kind of love, or meaning, we will ascribe to this
person. Some of us categorize this into different types, and some of us simply
have a scale of how much someone means to us.
It really doesn’t matter how you do it, just that you have some idea in
your head of how you do this.
Traditionally, we in Christian circles, use a category
system vs. a scale system when it comes to love. In this system, there are four
different loves: familial, brotherly, romantic, and unconditional. We’ll be
touching on the different types from time to time, but for now, we’re just
going to focus on how love affects our relationships.
The main difference that should be made clear, right from
the beginning, between Christian love and worldly love is that in one it does
not pass away and in the other it seems to be completely ephemeral.
“Do not love the world or anything
in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes
and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the
world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of
God lives forever.”
1
John 2:15-17
When we love the wrong things, we begin to have the wrong
outlook on love. We love the temporary, so our love becomes temporary. Back in
February, we did a study on Love. I encourage you to go back and watch it if
you have not. One of the things that we talked about is that love and meaning
are intricately intertwined. We put meaning into the things we love. I want to
go deeper than that, though. To truly understand love, we have to understand
where love comes from. When we understand the origin of love, we will be able
to better understand the meaning that comes from love.
“Dear friends, let us love one
another. For love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and
knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This
is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the
world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but
that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends,
since God so loved us we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen
God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete
in us.”
1
John 4:7-12
I want to share something from the younger, wiser me. When I
was in middle school, I once made the statement, “loving someone is seeing them
through God’s eyes.” I think that I was on to something there. Throughout this
study, we will be talking about love in families, in friendships, in the single
life, and in romance. The guideline for love will remain the same, though. It
has to come from Christ.
Most of the people who were interested in this study were
looking for some answers on their romantic life, so we will be focusing on that
here in the first few weeks. But almost all of it can apply to other areas of
life, so I don’t want you to be put off if you’re not interested in the
romantic side.
So we see, so far, that love is a constant. It doesn’t pass
away, and that love comes from God. And when we love each other, we get a
glimpse of God. So I want to put this in a different life. This is something I
wrote for a girl a long time ago, and every word of it is true, truer than I
probably knew at the time. And just be easy on the poor, younger me. I wasn’t
“For me to say I love is only to say the Jesus has loved
first. But yet, I do say that I love you. I hold no pretense that this is my
own love which I give you, but I know, in fact, that when I say I love you,
what I mean is that Jesus loves you, and out of obedience to that silent,
demanding call I must in turn love you so. For, mine is a world of love, a
place where the sun sets and rises at the same time, and all reflections are
gone. Look through me then, and see my love, my Jesus, and know that I lie not.
I love you.”
I know it’s corny, and I’m not totally confident putting
that on there, but I wrote it back in high school and I used to talk like that
apparently. But you get the idea: God needs to be in and around every
relationship and it will be filled with love. He needs to be the love that we
show and receive from each other. We’re just scratching the surface, but we’re
going to be continuing this study for, I hope, a long time. So what are your
thoughts?
For Americans there is a constant question put in front of
you your whole life: who are you going to marry? This question tends to cost
more stress and confusion in a persons life that, perhaps, any other. So we’re
going to take a look at what the Bible says about this question today. This
study is geared towards single and dating people, but you married couples will
definitely get something out of it too.
I want to set the tone for this topic right from the
beginning. One of the things engrained into me from a very young age was that
God brings you the person who is right for you. I never had a problem with
that. What took me a while to realize, and to wrap my head around was this: God
does not bring two people together to bring them closer to each other, but to
bring them closer to Himself.
Now, we will get into topics of divorce, heartbreaks,
infidelity, and all sorts of sordid things in upcoming sessions. Today, though,
I want to try and paint a picture, from Scripture, of what this idea would look
like.
I heard a story, once, of a pastor who had a very beautiful
description of how he met his wife. This pastor said that when he was younger
he had set his eyes on God and was running, full-force, towards Him. One day,
he looked over to his side and saw a woman running just as fast and just as
hard in the same direction, so they joined hands and kept running.
So we have an idea in our heads now. That’s cool, but how to
we come to this point. This first step is to have a right idea of marriage.
Marriage is encouraged from the beginning. Genesis 2:24 says “That is why a man
leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one
flesh.”
However, this does not mean that we are all supposed to
marry, nor that this should be our goal. Paul says, in 1 Corinthians:
“It is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so
much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own
husband.” (1 Cor. 7:1b-2)
When we are able to remain unmarried, we are able to do
more. God wants us to be able to do everything we could ever want. But
sometimes, he brings us a helper, to partner with us in our life’s work.
This sounds old fashioned to us because it is. It should not
be, though. There is a reason and a design behind marriage and relationships
that we need to honor. The reason we feel so unfulfilled out of relationships
and so frustrated in them is that we don’t follow God’s guidelines for success!
Now, this starts way before marriage. In first Timothy five we read: “Do not rebuke
an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger
men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.”
Let me tell you something: Abstinence is sexy. Hashtag that.
1 Corinthians 13
Agape love.
“A new command I give you: love one another. Just as I have
loved you, so you must love one another. By this they will know that you are my
disciples: by how you love one another.”
John 13:34-35
“No greater love has any man than this: that he lay down his
life for his friends.” John 15:13
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