First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage
(1 Corinthians 13)
Happy Father's Day to all the fathers here. We've got a present for you at the end of the service. It won't be an edible one like the Dad's cookies we used to give out, but it will fit nicely in your toolbox and it's guaranteed peanut free. I hope you'll enjoy it.
We've been in a bit of a different series called Lies I've Believed, looking at some commonly held beliefs and why they might not always be helpful or true. We've looked at two already - if it feels good and doesn't hurt anybody, it's okay, and our lives are supposed to be comfortable. Today we're looking at a third lie. This one's a partial lie. Based on reactions I've received from people as I've talked about it, I may be heading into trouble today, so bear with me.
The lie we're going to look at today comes under the title of First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage. I've left out the part about the baby carriage that comes after. This lie is about romance, and you can see how I'm heading toward trouble. It's Father's Day and I'm about to suggest that maybe romance isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I may need help.
This past week I conducted the funeral for a man in his 85th year. Last year, I conducted a funeral for his wife. They met in the Second World War. When he first saw her, he said he felt like he was looking at a movie star. They fell in love and lived the rest of their lives in love with each other.
Here's the dream we have: that we will fall in love with somebody, and that love relationship will defy the odds and lead to lasting happiness. The airwaves are full of songs about love. Most movies - even ones about sinking ships and the Pearl Harbor invasion - are about this type of love. Explain it how you'd like - physical attraction, bio-chemical impulses, falling in love - but romantic love is part of our world.
I don't want to put romantic love down. Romantic love is a gift from God. In Biblical times, marriages weren't always the result of romantic love, but you still get glimpses of romance as you read the stories of the Bible. You see Jacob working fourteen years to marry the woman that he loves. The Song of Solomon is one a book of romance and passion, so risqu‚ that in the third century, Origen, an early church father, wouldn't let new Christians read it. Proverbs 30 says that one of the most amazing and mysterious things to understand is "how a man loves a woman" (Proverbs 30:19). Romance is certainly a gift from God to be celebrated and enjoyed.
There are limits to romance, though. Romantic love is that it's a feeling that ebbs and flows, that depends on circumstances. It comes and goes, and a relationship that is built purely on romance is a relationship that will not last. There comes a time when you look at your lover and ask, "What in the world did I see in him?" There comes a time when guys say something stupid like in this Herman cartoon: "Of course I love you. Why else would I eat your cooking?" Or that a wife will give her husband a card like this one for Father's Day: "For Father's Day, let's do something different tonight. How about you cook dinner, and I'll watch TV in my underwear?"
Romance is like starter fluid. It gets a fire going, but a good fire needs more than just a bit of fuel. You move on to kindling and gradually to larger pieces of wood, until the fire burns on its own. Romance is great for starting relationships, and it will also come and go as a relationship develops, but you need more than romance if you want a relationship that will last.
It's interesting that of all the things that the Bible tells men in how to treat their wives, it tells them to love their wives. This obviously can't be a command to feel a certain way. It has to be something within our control. The type of love we're commanded to extend to our wives isn't a feeling, it's an attitude and a behavior modeled after Jesus' love for us.
The Bible talks about a deeper kind of love called agape love in one of Paul's most famous writings, 1 Corinthians 13. Paul is writing to a church and he tells them that this is the type of love they are to have toward one another. Paul had a number of words that he could have used to describe love: eros for romantic love, phileo for brotherly love. He didn't use those. He used a word that was rarely used to describe a different kind of love.
This type of love is not confined to romantic relationships, but it can be applied to romantic relationships as well as any other type of relationship. Based on the command to love with a deeper type of love, I want to see what Paul says so we can figure out how to do this. Paul doesn't give some theoretical definition of love. He describes it in down-to-earth terms. Here are three things about love that we need to know.
1. Committed love is absolutely necessary
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 says:
If I could speak in any language in heaven or on earth but didn't love others, I would only be making meaningless noise like a loud gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I knew all the mysteries of the future and knew everything about everything, but didn't love others, what good would I be? And if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, without love I would be no good to anybody. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn't love others, I would be of no value whatsoever.
I'm always surprised as I read this. Take the most extreme acts of greatness - supernatural gifts, supernatural power, martyrdom (you don't get more extreme than that), or even extreme generosity - take any or all of these and subtract love, and you're left with nothing. A lack of this type of love negates anything else that we have going for us. This type of love is so important that if we don't have it, we don't have anything. Nothing can make up for a lack of love.
Paul isn't talking about some entry-level amount of love. We're about to read what this love is like. The love that we need in our relationships is a type that is impossible for us to manufacture by ourselves. It's unconditional, unselfish, giving. It's a love that doesn't depend on the circumstances or the worthiness of the recipient. This isn't graduate level love. It's the base line that is required in all of our relationships, and yet it's completely beyond what we are able to give ourselves.
We're all over our heads in the relationship department. Nobody here is capable of loving others this way. Yet, without this type of love, nothing else matters. No amount of success in any other area of life makes up for a lack of this type of love.
We could throw up our hands and say, "It's impossible!" But remember: this type of love is as necessary as it is humanly impossible. The other option is to ask for divine help to love others this way. Without God's help, this love is impossible.
Paul goes on to describe what this love is like.
2. Committed love is sacrificial
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)
I love how Paul describes this type of love. He doesn't give some abstract definition. He puts it in terms of behavior. Committed love isn't feelings-based. It's a matter of actions and decisions. It's how we act rather than how we feel.
Paul gives some positive descriptions of love: patient and kind.
He gives some descriptions of what this love isn't: it isn't envious. It doesn't want what it doesn't have. Every time we look at someone we're supposed to love and wish for something different, we're not displaying this kind of love. It isn't boastful, proud, or rude. It isn't self-seeking. It forgives; it keeps no record of past offenses. It sets the other person free for things they've done, but in the end it sets you free. It doesn't delight in evil.
Paul then concludes with some more positive descriptions of this love: it protects, it hopes, it trusts, and it perseveres. This kind of love never gives up.
The bottom line is that committed love acts in exactly the opposite way that we were act if we were being selfish. You can almost ask, "How would I react if I was motivated purely by self-interest?" and then do the exact opposite.
This sounds impossible, and on one level, it is. On the other hand, every one of us can love this way. Martin Luther said, "Everybody can be great because everybody can serve." Any one of us can choose to humble ourselves and to become a servant committed to loving this way.
God gave us a model for how to do this. When the Bible tells husbands to love their wives, it says that they should love the same way that Jesus loves the church.
It also means that this kind of love has more to do with our decision to serve than about the worthiness of the recipient of our love. C.S. Lewis wrote:
This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion: whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is - in her own mere nature - unlovable...The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage, but in its sorrows, in the sickness or sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one. (Four Loves)
Don't misunderstand. This doesn't mean that we put up with abuse or refuse to deal with problems in a relationship. It doesn't mean we should go looking for bad relationships. Not at all.
It does mean that, even in the most challenging relationships, we have opportunities to love and to serve even as Jesus has loved us.
How do we do this? It starts with acting loving toward someone even (especially) when we don't feel like it.
Before I got married, I took a course on marriage and family counseling. The professor got up and talked about marriage being a steel trap, that in marriage you would experience the lowest lows - also the highest highs, but definitely the lows as well. He described at length the challenges that every marriage will face, but he then started to talk about his marriage. His first wife died, and soon after he married his second wife, he discovered that he had made a big mistake. They were both miserable. They decided to stay together for a year to save face, but they planned to get a divorce.
A strange thing happened over that year. They decided to act cordially to each other. Over time, their actions began to turn into feelings. By the end of the year, they loved each other. They built a solid marriage that lasted until his death.
The love that Paul describes is possible for each of us, because we all can choose to become servants. It's not based on feelings, but when we choose to serve despite our feelings, the feelings often come. This love doesn't depend on our circumstances or the worthiness of the recipient. It comes from loving others as Christ has loved us.
3. Committed love lasts
Love will last forever, but prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will all disappear. Now we know only a little, and even the gift of prophecy reveals little! But when the end comes, these special gifts will all disappear.
It's like this: When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child does. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now.
There are three things that will endure-faith, hope, and love-and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:8-13)
Paul wrote this to a church in the context of how spiritual gifts are to be used. Here, he says that love is more important because love will outlast all the gifts. If he wrote in the context of a marriage relationship, he might say that love is more important than all the other things in our lives that won't last: our jobs, our houses, a lot of the other stuff that we worry about. Those things will disappear. The love that Paul describes will last forever.
I don't want to disparage romantic love. It's a gift from God, and we should enjoy it and cultivate it. It's a gift that many of us have experienced, and if we cultivate our relationships properly, it's a gift that we may be able to enjoy regularly in our lives.
But romance isn't everything. Some of us may never experience romance. Those of us who are in marriages will find that romance may fade. But all of us can love with this agape kind of love. Anyone can be great, because anyone can become a servant.
C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that many people believe...
...if you have married the right person you may expect to go on 'being in love' forever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change-not realizing that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. ... Let the thrill go-let it die away-go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow-and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.
Let the thrill go, pass into agape love, and discover the richness of loving the way that God calls us to love.