Andy begins by saying that the only thing required for falling in love is a pulse! Sooo true and with tons of organizations out there today it has never been easier to fall in love. I mean it is not so hard to find someone who you connect with…both physically and emotionally , right? However, he states that it has never been more difficult to stay in love either, yet that is what we all strive for.
There are several reasons why it is so difficult to stay in love with someone. First, very few people have actually ever been around a healthy marriage or have been able to track one over the years. We might have seen certain qualities in marriages that are great, but our likelihood of observing a true Christ like union is rare. What has been modeled for us and the rule we have been given on relationships is all wrong and therefore it is impossible to know what is right. Think about it….the divorce rate is super high now days and the relationships we have tracked like our parents, friends’ parents…..Consequently, what we see leaves us with a false illusion of how relationships are supposed to be.
It takes a list of certain qualities for a child to grow up and be equipped for a healthy relationship with others. In other words, this is what we need to have received as a child to be prepared for a long term relationship. A child should have received…respect, encouragement, comfort, security, support, acceptance, approval, appreciation and affection. But here lies the problem; most of us don’t grow up receiving all of these. Either our dad didn’t come to all our games, our mom didn’t comfort us when we needed it, etc….you get the point. The second part is that most of us meet people who come from the same background. So, the odds to obtaining a long-term relationship become very slim. We tend to look for the qualities we didn’t receive as children from our partners, instead of looking for them from God (will get to this later). We as humans are equipped to fall in love, just not equipped to stay in love.
It is important to point out that our culture also has a really low threshold of relational pain…this means it doesn’t have to hurt or be too bad and we will decide to get out of the relationship. The days of “I do” and keep doing are long gone. This is because our culture sends us this horrible message that if we aren’t happy; we aren’t with the right person and need to re-choose, therefore sending us from relationship to relationship. But, if you talk to anyone who has been married 2o years they will tell you that they once wondered if they had the right person as well. They just made the decision that the person they chose would be the right person. Choosing the right person is easy, but staying with the person we choose is what we don’t get help with.
Jesus spoke and gave us the foundation for enduring relationships. His words were so simple yet so powerful! The problem is that both people must accept this basic teaching of Jesus. He said “A new command I give you, Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love another.” John 13:34 You might be saying well that is simple…love one another. Yet, we must look much deeper. Jesus took a word we normally use as a noun and turned it into a verb. He is telling us to go and “love” one another….actively love. Many people will say “I used to love X, or we were in love at one point but we aren’t in love anymore”. See …they are using love as a noun. Love starts off as a feeling and when we don’t feel it anymore, we decide not to love each other and instead think we need a new person to get that feeling back. This is the problem with our society today. If we look to the Bible, we can maintain love, stop treating it like a noun and treat it like a verb. The foundation for staying in love is to make love a verb!Don’t take your love cue from our culture or even your parents. Jesus says you when you think about what it means to love, take your cue from Him. Not how to be in love, but how to stay in love.Apostle Paul uses a different word than love that relates to what Jesus meant. Ephesians 5:21 says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Mutual submission is the absolute starting block for people who will stay in love. Submission is basically making the other person your priority and placing yourself under them. Both people must do this in order for it to be effective, regardless of what each one brings to the relationship. People who mutually submit to one another place their faith in Christ and learn to accept and adopt Jesus’ way of thinking about love and what it means to receive and give love.
Instead of looking for the qualities we didn’t receive as children in our partners, we need to look for these things from God. He needs to be the rock we lean on! So learn to love each other the way God through Christ loves us, NOT the way we have seen things modeled. Take your submission cues from our savior! When you choose to actively love the other person and put them first every single day, love can be maintained. If you have already picked someone to fall in love with, now just chose to love them every day! If you haven’t found that person yet, my hope is that you can use this information so that you don’t go from one relationship to another, making you just another statistic in our non-Christian society(so sad but true)! Look for Part 2 soon:)
If you would like to listen to the full sermon…
http://www2.northpointministries.org/player/player.jsp?occurrenceID=3888
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