What Is Love?
Wedding Counseling Part One
By Dr. Jerry Lloyd
Love Song
Don Francisco wrote a very applicable song about love and marriage. It tells us “Love is not a feeling. It’s an act of the will.” Nothing could be truer or more Biblical. There is one very odd thing that he says in that song, however. He says, “You’ll never forget the words you promised that day.” However, in truth, by the time we get to the church door, we probably have forgotten those vows. It’s not that we do not intend to keep them. It’s just that they are simply something we say during the wedding ceremony. Oh, in the back of our minds we intend to keep them, but we rarely memorize those vows, and if we do memorize them, we quickly forget them.
The Exchange
A wedding is the exchanging of vows before God and witnesses. We vow to the ones giving the couple to be married, which is actually God and usually the parents. We vow to the witnesses and to each other. A vow is a very serious thing, so we need to know what we should do to fulfill them in our marriage, and what we need to be doing since this also relates to the Christian life. The things we will learn relate to everybody, not just married couples and are, therefore, important to everybody.
Why Should a Couple Get Married?
Why should a couple get married? We are going to answer that. There are three motives that people usually give.
The couple will come and sit in my office, and I will ask them, “Why do you want to get married?” They will usually say something about love. “We’re in love!” they say. That’s good. Love is a good thing to have in marriage. That is very good, but in view of the fact that most of the world bases marriage on love, let me ask you a few questions about love. How do you know you are in love? A better way to ask that question might be: “How do you know you are loving?”
How Do You Know You Are in Love?
Kids will often go to their parents or they will go to the old people and ask, “How do you know when you are in love? How I can know when I am in love?”
What will the old people usually tell them? “Oh. You’ll just know.” Well, apparently, in the Christian realm over 50% do not know, because over 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce. That’s right. Over fifty percent of Christian marriages end in divorce. If they are basing their marriage on love, then they really did not know that they were in love, because so many marriages end up in divorce
What is love? One guy said “It’s a misunderstanding between two fools.”
Another fellow said, “Here’s how you know you are in love. When you go to cross the street and you trip over a bus, you must be in love.”
I don’t think so.
What Is Love?
So what is love? If we do not know what love is, how can we base anything on it? We need to know what love is.
How long is love? How do you know that the other person is loving you? There ought to be a way to tell. Can you tell if you are in love? Have you ever heard someone say that the reason they love someone is because they make them laugh? Maybe it is because they do not laugh at you? Can you know that you are in love by whether they do or do not laugh at you?
Can you choose who to love or whether to love? Can you choose or is it something you fall into? Maybe it’s some kind of ring of fire that you fall into.
For Love or Money
Here is another reason that some people get married. It’s called money. Some people get married because of love. That’s good. Others get married for money. That’s better. What? Who said that? Man, that’s terrible that anybody would even suggest getting married for money. Yet in one respect getting married for money is better.
I taught this in one place and a lady went out and got married for money. Get the whole picture here. It is not good to get married for money, but it is not good to get married for love either. Why do I say getting married for money is better than getting married for love? Because we do not know what love is, but we do know what money is. When you apply the same questions to money as you do to love, you can give an answer in a hurry.
What Is Money?
How do you know you have money? Look in your wallet. If you have it, you have it. We do not know what love is, but what is money? It is a medium of exchange. We know what money is.
How do you get money or use money? These questions are silly when it comes to money.
How long do you have it? You have money until you spend it, or if you put it in savings as long as the bank does not fail.
How do you know that someone else has money? Check their bank account. Check their tax returns. You can find out whether or not they have money.
So if you are going to base a lifelong relationship on love or money, it is a lot more logical to base it on something you know about. Since we are in a complete fog when comes to love, either we need to learn about love, or we need to base the decision with whom to spend the rest of our life on something we do know.
The main consideration in getting married is the will of God. That is the only qualification that will be satisfying. That is the only condition that will work. Many marriages last a long time, but they do not really work. The couple just exists together. They are simply sharing misery in a house, but they are not really loving. They are not really enjoying life. They do not have love, joy, and peace. In some marriages there is anything but peace, but they live together for sixty years. Others have no joy or happiness, but the marriage lasts, because they feel that it is the right thing to stay together. Many have no love, but they still stay together. So we are not talking about longevity here. We are talking about a successful, joyous, peaceful, loving relationship. That comes only one way. That comes by the will of God. We are going to see, therefore, what the will of God is in relation to marriage.
Showers of Blessings
In Malachi where God talks about bringing your tithes and offerings into the storehouse, God says that, if you do, He is going to pour showers of blessings on you. He is going to open up the windows of heaven and pour out showers blessings. The problem with many of these blessings is whenever you turn on the shower the water comes out of the showerhead, but in order to receive God’s blessings you have to be under the showerhead. People get out from under the showerhead-in other words out of the will of the Lord. Therefore, they do not receive the blessing that God is pouring out, because it is being poured out somewhere else. They are not where they need to be, spiritually, to receive God’s blessing. So, you need to get under the showerhead. Where is that? That is in the will of God.
What Blessings Are We Talking About?
What are the greatest blessings? Love, joy, and peace are the greatest blessings. God wants to pour these out on all of us, but we keep moving out of the way into a place where we cannot receive them.
The first thing to consider in the will of the Lord and marriage is salvation. The first thing in everything is salvation. Look at II Corinthians chapter six. If you are going to determine who you are going to marry, or if you want to be the right kind of spouse, or the right kind of person in any relationship for that matter; what we are going to read about in these verses is the first consideration. It is not necessarily talking about marriage in these verses. It is just that marriage is the most applicable. It also refers to friendships. It refers to business relations and business partners. It refers to everything, but it does refer to marriage primarily, because it is the most obvious in marriage.
This Is No Yoke
In II Corinthians 6:14 God says, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”
Any time you are going to be yoked make sure it is with a believer. Marriage is definitely a yoke.
Now, what is a yoke? You know what they look like. They usually have two places for two animals’ heads in them. They stick their heads in them to work together for a common goal and a common good. A yoke is something that causes you to work together. However, you have got to be going in the same direction. You stick one head in one way and the other head in the other way, and you are not going to go very far. You are just going to go round and round.
Some marriages are that way. They just go round and round, because the people involved are going to two different places. One is going to heaven and the other one is going to hell. They have different goals. One should want to serve the Lord, and the other wants to serve himself. So, they just go round and round. They are not making any progress. They are not going in the same direction. Logically, that is why we should not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. Any yoke with an unbeliever is unequal, because you are going to different places, and you should have different goals. You are working against one another.
“For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? and what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel (or an unbeliever)? and what agreement hath the temple of God with idols?”
Serving yourself is a form of idol worship. “The temple of God” would refer to trying to serve God. “For ye are the temple of the living God: and God hath said, ‘I will dwell in them. and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Wherefore, come out from among them, and be ye separate,’ saith the Lord.”
Marrying Your Sister
In The Song of Solomon 4:9 God says “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse.” God calls the spouse a sister. What is this talking about? He was not referring to a biological sister. That would be too weird. So, she must be a spiritual sister. What is a spiritual sister? That would be someone who is a child of God. You must have the same spiritual Father. This verse is either talking about a physical sister, which would be gross and against God’s law, or it is talking about a spiritual sister. So, our spouse must be a child of God, just as we saw in II Corinthians.
I used to listen to one preacher on the radio who said this verse meant that our spouse should be an economic sister. He said we are to marry somebody with the same economic status. He also said this meant a social sister. We should marry someone in the same social class. He went on to say she must be an ethnic sister. He taught that an ethnic sister would be someone of the same race. He taught that we must marry someone of the same race. All of these are physical things. That might sound reasonable to some except for the fact that the lady in this story said, “I am black.” Solomon married a black lady, and Moses married a black (Ethiopian) lady as well. So it is not talking about race here. God is talking about a spiritual sister here. It would appear that this verse has been used to excuse racial segregation, prejudice, and bigotry rather than its true purpose. It is talking about a spiritual sister.
The Most Important Thing in Choosing a Spouse
If you want lasting fulfilling love in your marriage, you must be saved. If you are not saved, you need to get saved. If you are already married and your spouse or friends are not saved, you need to get them saved, or find another friend or spouse. Wait a minute…not another spouse. That would be a sin. So if you are already married, it should be your primary goal in your marriage to get them saved.
Love Is a Command
In I John 4:7 God tells us why salvation should be the first thing we look for in our relationships. It says, “Beloved let us love one another.” This is an imperative. An imperative means it is a command or a request, but in God’s case it is always a command, because He does not make suggestions. Does God ever say, “Could you please do this for Me?” Does God ever make requests? No. What He says goes. So, it is a command. That means it is an imperative. So he is commanding us to do something. If love is a command then it is something we can choose to do, but if love is a feeling or something you fall into, then God could not command you to do it. However, He says in II John 3, “I wrote a new commandment unto thee… that we love one another.” So love is a command. It is not something you feel. It is something you do.
Nancy Honeytree sang the song with the lyrics:
“Teach them what love is, Jesus. I’m sure that they want to know.
They’re beginning to doubt the things they’ve heard on the TV and the radio.
Teach them what love is, Jesus. How does it really feel,
or could it be that feelings are not so important when love is really real.”
Don Francisco sang: “Love is not a feeling. It’s an act of the will.”
So when God says, “Let us love one another.” He’s commanding us to love one another. It’s an instruction.
What Is Love?
What in the world is love? It says, in verse II John 6, “And this is love that we walk after his commandments. This is the commandment that you have heard from the beginning you should walk in it.” Love is a command. What is love? It is Doing what God says. God gives us some commands when it comes to relationships, and if we do them, we are loving as long as we do them.
Why Should We marry a Believer
Let us look back at I John 4:7. “Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God and every one that loveth…” Everyone! That does not leave anybody out. Everyone! Every person that loves is born of God. What does that tell me? Is everybody born of God? No, only those that trust Christ are born of God. So, a lost person does not have the capacity to love with agape love. It is impossible, because it is of God, and everyone that does loves this way is born of God. The reason God wants us to marry a believer is so we can experience a loving relationship.
Four Greek Words for Love
To be sure the lost can experience love, but not the same kind. We only have one word for love in English, but in the Greek there are four words for love.
Eros is physical attraction, and the lost can experience that. That is a good thing to have in marriage.
Stergo is a companionship. When two people live together for sixty years and are at each other’s throats for the whole sixty years, yet when one dies the other one is devastated, that is stergo love.
Then there is the phileo love. Some weddings have on their invitations and programs, “Today I marry my best friend.” Phileo love is friendship.
So, the lost can experience those. Lost people can have friends. The lost can have sexual attraction. The lost can have companionship, but the lost cannot have agape. That is the word used in I John. Agape is godlike and completely selfless. It is thinking only of the other person. It is the only one that can last forever and it is the only one that is completely satisfying. What is it? It is obedience to God. Since it is obedience to God, then you are loving as long as you are obeying God, but if you stop obeying are you still loving? No.
Love Is a Law of Nature
The feeling that we call love is a result of our actions of love. If we are loving by doing those actions, the feeling will come. However, if we stop doing the actions, the feelings will go away. That is a law of nature. That is the law of action and reaction. That is the law of cause and effect. It is a law of nature. The world has it backwards. The world will say, “I’m going to quit doing this stuff for you, because I don’t feel love anymore.” You know why you don’t feel love? It is because you already stopped doing something. You quit obeying what God said you need to do. We need to understand the necessity of being in a relationship with a fellow believer if we want to experience love both in ourselves and from them and, of course, for God.
You Must Love to Know God
Verse seven says, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.” Here we see there is a second thing. Do all believers know God? No, they do not. In fact most believers do not know God. Now, they know Him as Savior, but they do not have a personal relationship with God. They are not communing with God. They do not know him. They have only accepted his love for them. Remember, you must obey Him in order to love, and, if you love, you know him but if you are not obeying him you are not loving. Therefore, you do not know God. Do you have to obey God to be a believer? No, you do not. Do you have to obey God to go to heaven? In salvation you have to obey his command to “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ thou shalt be saved.” You must be saved his way and that is not by your works.
So, not all believers know God. In fact very few believers know God, because they are not obeying God. That is the reason it is so important that we marry and develop friendships with believers.
You have got to have relationships with the lost people in order to lead them to the Lord. You need to be friendly with them and befriend them, but those are not the ones you choose for companions or yoke fellows.
The Love of God
In verses eight and nine God says, “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.”
That sounds a little bit like John 3:16, where God says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Romans 5:8 says, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Look at what God says in I John 4:10. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” That tells us a lot about love. Love is not requiring anything of the other person.
God wants something from us. There is no question about that. He wants more than just our faith. There is no question about that either. For Him to love us and to demonstrate His love for us He had to die for us. John 15:13 tells us: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” He laid down his life for us, his friends; but he did not require anything of us for Him to love us. Romans 5:8 says, “But God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” God says in verse ten that He died “When we were enemies of God.” You see, there are no requirements or prerequisites for Him to love us.
Godlike love
It should be the same thing with our love for others. We should not be looking for what the other person can do for us. We should not looking for any necessary response from them. We should be looking at what we can do for them. This is godlike love. This is the kind of love that is fulfilling. Why aren’t the other kinds of love fulfilling? The other person is never going to do enough for you. They are never going to fulfill what you expect of them. This is what the other three forms of love desires, but agape is only thinking about what you can do for the other person.
God’s Action of Love for Us
That is what God did. What did He do for us? Look at verse ten. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
What Is Propitiation?
Do we have to love God to get this? No. God says, “NOT that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the Propitiation for sins.”
What is a propitiation? A propitiation is a satisfactory payment. We are talking about satisfaction here. God had a problem with us. We sinned. We rebelled against Him. No sin can be allowed into heaven, because God cannot have fellowship with sin. So we have a problem, and since He is a holy, righteous, just God, He requires something, and He will not be satisfied with anything less. The wages He requires for sin is death. We cannot make that payment, because the death required is an eternal separation from God. We cannot pay for our sin, so we are in trouble.
It would be like my trying to buy a huge castle in Europe. I could not make the payment.
But there is a mansion in heaven, and I did not pay anything for it, but I still get it, because somebody else paid for it. I cannot even make payments on a Castle. However, Jesus made a satisfactory payment or complete payment for my heavenly home. That is what the Bible calls a propitiatory payment. That means a payment that is complete.
If I went down to buy a car, I would have to charge it. I cannot pay for the car outright. However, when Jesus paid for our sins, it was a propitiatory payment. That would be like going down to the car lot and paying cash money. Would I have to make any payments on a car for which had made a complete cash payment? Absolutely not! Could anyone repossess it? No, because it is paid for. I would get a free and clear title. It is the same thing with salvation. God made the complete payment. He did not make the down payment, and I have to make the monthly installments. The hymn does not say, “Jesus paid part. I’ll make payments myself.” No, Jesus paid it all. Jesus made the complete payment. He paid it all, and, consequently, all to Him I owe.
So we understand here that God loves us, and He does not require us to do anything to get to heaven. All we have to do is receive His love by believing it. That is the way the love that we are looking at is.
The first condition that God requires in marriage is salvation.
The Second Things for Which to Look
The next condition is dedication to God. Dedication is obedience.
In conclusion, if we want to love and be loved we must to first accept God’s love gift of eternal life in heaven for us by trusting Jesus to get us to heaven. If you trust His death, burial, and resurrection as the complete payment for sin, then you go to heaven. If you have trusted Him and received the free gift of life in heaven, then you must obey His instructions. You do not obey to get to heaven or to stay saved. You obey so that you may have the satisfying lasting love.
If you have never accepted that free gift of eternal life, why not trust Jesus right now to get you to heaven?
1-Is love an action or a feeling? _______________
2-According to II John 6, what is love? “That we _________________________________________”
3-How many words does the Greek have for love? __
4-What is the only kind of love that is lasting and satisfying?_______________________
5-Can anyone enjoy the love spoken of in #4? ______
6-Do all believers know God? ______________
7-Do all believers love God? _____________
8-What do you have to do for God to love you? _____________________________________
9-What do you have to do to know God? __________
10-What are the two requirements to enjoy the lasting satisfying love?
A- ____________________________
B- ____________________________