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Collegedale SDA Church

Alan Parker

Nicole Parker

A Life of Love

We just want to see how many of you are going on a date on Valentine's.

I heard of 1 lady who was going to get married and the pastor was trying to explain what she needed to do for her wedding.

You're gonna walk down the aisle, you're gonna stand at the altar, then you're gonna sing a hymn.

And really, that's what we're dealing with today, is what are our perceptions of marriage and of love, and how can we form a biblical perspective?

So, Once upon a time, my wife and I fell in love.

And when we fell in love, I asked her to marry me.

I was over in Africa, she was in the States.

She came over for a month, beautiful candlelit dinner.

And then I asked her to marry me, and she went back to the States and we started corresponding and she kept all of those emails.

So I thought I would share 1 with you because it describes what I was like back then.

I want to listen to music with you and watch a candle flicker.

I Want to read and pray and watch the stars I want to warm Myself in front of a roaring fire together in the middle of winter snuggled up to you and reading from our favorite book But how did we move from that picture to the picture of having intense and interesting discussions.

We never have arguments, but we've had quite a few intense discussions.

You know, I'm now a counselor, which I wasn't when we got married, but as a biblical counselor, I have quite a few people ask me for marriage counseling, and you know ahead of time, when somebody says, we'd like some marriage counseling, it ain't pretty, right?

Nobody says, we wanna come over and talk with you about how glorious marriage is for us and how we just wish everyone else was having such a wonderful time too.

So when I do marriage counseling, I know ahead of time what people are calling for is because they're in pain, right?

And it usually boils down to some version of how can I get this other person to meet my needs, to stop hurting me, and to start helping me instead?

It's easy to see that the Hollywood model has crept into the way that we think of marriage.

Now there's this picture of Kim Kardashian, who I wouldn't have even recognized, but people tell me that this person is very famous.

Seems like this marriage was very famous, at least.

This was not who she's married to now, but she was married to him for 72 days.

This model of marriage has become the quick fix for loneliness nowadays.

It's sort of the Hollywood marriage, isn't I like you, you like me, let's make a happy family kind of thing.

It's founded on feelings of attraction, but not on actual love.

It measures success based on happiness, and it is, bottom line, a contract and not a covenant, the way God intended.

See, and the difference between a contract and a covenant is that a contract has conditions, whereas a covenant is based on commitments.

And so it's, if you please me and I'm happy, then I'll love you back.

And we might be able to blame Cupid for this.

Cupid is this idea of a cute, fat little baby going around shooting arrows, and people succumb.

But where did this idea of Cupid come from?

See, Cupid actually came from the classical or the Latin god Eros.

And for the Greeks, this was the most powerful love.

This was the love that once it was your God, it became your master.

And it would either torture you or make you deliriously happy.

And some of you know about that in your roommates.

And when the arrows hit, you had no choice but to obey that God.

And today, that idea is follow your heart, follow your passions.

If you have something you desire, you've got to follow it until you achieve it and you find it.

But when Christians came along, they didn't put Eros as the highest love.

Instead in Ephesians 5, what we read in our scripture reading earlier, it says that we are to be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us.

And the word for love there that's used 3 times, beloved, love, as Christ loved, comes from the Greek word, guess what?

And agape love is different from eros, Because I went into the little study and I found Eros love is love that is about self-fulfillment It's about pursuing the object of my desire But agape love is more subject oriented It's a person making a decision to love somebody else to care for somebody else Eros love Self-fulfillment agape love is about Sacrifice And these are 2 very different ways of viewing love.

See, the Hollywood love version, When you're in love, according to Hollywood, you envision happily ever after being happy for you.

Nobody gets married because they think, well, this will probably help me to grow into the image of Christ.

You get married because you're happy with this person and you think, I'll be even happier if I can be with them forever.

And instead, it often goes exactly the opposite direction.

In fact, they did a study with 24, 000 people and they found that the level of happiness that you had before marriage did go up a little bit.

I think it was like a quarter of a percent after you were married.

But if you were unhappy before you got married, it actually became worse.

You can imagine 2 unhappy people marrying each other and the powerful effects of that.

So marriage does not add to your happiness.

It simply enhances the happiness you already have.

This is consistent with what you've seen, I'm sure, in other people's lives, even if you're not married.

Some people go, oh, it's Valentine's weekend, mental groan.

Yes, singles awareness weekend here, right?

But if you're married, they say marriage is like a revolving door.

Those who are on the outside are trying to get in, and those on the inside are trying to get out, right?

Except for us, we just wanna make note of this.

That's because Hollywood and just our general culture of seek whatever works for you and makes you happy has poisoned us with the idea that seeking happiness is the way to find it.

The book Education has this powerful quotation.

Education page 154 says, unselfishness, the principle of God's kingdom, is the principle that Satan hates.

The devil says there's no such thing as unselfishness in the whole universe.

Where God says unselfishness is the law of the universe.

Satan says there is no such thing as unselfishness.

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A Life of Love

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