Love is not romantic. Romance may involve love, but love does not require romance. Neither is love sexual. Sex sometimes has to do with love, but love has nothing to do with sex. Love is not passive. That is to say, love is not a feeling that you have for someone, or when you are with someone, or at a given time. You may feel tenderness or warmth or affection or longing or safety or exhilaration or desire or comfort or compassion or a number of similar emotions. And if you wish, you can call a certain mixture of those emotions 'being in love,' but ultimately, people aren't "in love" because that is passive. People love. People do not fall in love by accident, they choose to walk in love on purpose.
If love is an action, what does someone do when they love someone? Spend time together? Sometimes. Sleep together? Not usually. Make them happy? Now we're a little bit closer...
Love is a choice to do what is best for someone else at your own expense. Sometimes, that means spending time together. Sometimes that means making them happy, sometimes it means making them sad or angry. Sometimes it means never seeing them again.
For example, loving a crack addict does not mean giving them money for drugs. Loving a crack addict means cutting off their supply and getting them into rehab, even though they hate you for it at the time, and it kills you to make them suffer, you do what is best for them, because you love them.
So love is not always romantic. There is love between brothers and sister, parents and children, and friends. What about when it is? Romantic love seeks to build the other person into a stronger person. It encourages them to both stand on their own and trust in their friends and family. It helps them grow in maturity. Do right, sex is a powerful tool in this goal. Done wrong, sex destroys.
People who don't think sex can be destructive have no comprehension of what sex is or what it does. Sex connects, and it bonds, and it creates. It opens vulnerability in people. Done right, this builds people up. Done wrong, it builds like calcite in water pipes or tumors on organs. Rapid growth, physically, can be good when correctly organized by the endocrine system, but it can be dangerous unchecked, spreading malignant tumors through the body. Sex is the same on an emotional/spiritual level.
So when is sex destructive? When the relationship is not deep enough to support such a bond. When the relationship is not certain enough to continue that the participants can trust in the bond. When it objectifies. When it forces. When self-gratifies.
This is why marriage exists, to manage the raw power of sex through the consensus of the community and the agreement of the participants. Sex can still be destructive within a marriage, but sex outside of marriage is emotionally dangerous at best. A loving boyfriend wants to help his girlfriend mature and grow into a better person, his desire is not to get her into bed with him, because, on some level, he understands that this desire is self-gratifying. It will consume her (or him, or both) like an object, like a commodity. Rather than being a tool for creative purposes, it becomes a hunger that eats and is never full.
You may have noticed that I have not tried to support any of my statements. I am not proposing a logical argument, or even an argument at all. I am offering the small amount of wisdom I have obtained from a few sources I have found credible. You are welcome to disagree. I will not judge you, I will not argue with you. I offer these words as a suggestion of wisdom, which you are free to reject if you find them lacking in insight.
The teacher John, in one of his letters, said to to his followers:
"Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.
And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. All who confess that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love.
God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world.
Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first.
If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their Christian brothers and sisters." (1 John 4, NLT.)So Jesus demonstrates perfect love, because though people rejected him, he died to take away the penalty for their sins, so that if they trusted in his death to save them, they would be cleansed from all kinds of wrong, and they could experience a new, joyful life on Earth, as well as hope in an everlasting life with God in heaven. This provides a perfect example for love for us. Jesus himself said:
Posts
