Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
A very wise writer once said, "Love is a precious gift, which we receive from Jesus." She was speaking of conjugal love, heterosexual love, the poet's "sweet mystery of life." The love that is a "gift from Jesus" of course is the love the Bible says is agape, the First Corinthians 13 "love." But it's a shock to many to discover that it is also sexual love, or we should say, it includes sexual love. And for sure, such love is a "gift from Jesus" because no one is born with agape. When Paul says, "Husbands, love your wives" (Eph. 5:25), he uses the verb for agape, which love he explains in greater detail in 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 as including sexual intimacy.
Is such love purely chemical in its character, something beyond rational choice? Eros is the Hellenistic idea of love, and it is chemical or emotional in its origin. And it makes people fall out of love as easily as fall in love. That's not "the precious gift which we receive from Jesus." Any gift which we receive from Him is miraculous in its nature. That is, it lives, even flourishes, whereeros dies. Agape is the love that yields to the rule of law. "But that kills love," someone objects. No, the "mystery" is that law establishes love. If "love is a precious gift which we receive from Jesus," it means that such love is a principle, not a mere passion. It has its Source in the cross of Christ.
Two people promise in marriage, before God, to be true until death do them part; agape says "No!" to any and every temptation to "fall in love" with someone else. Even if the allurement is powerful, even if the emotion is overwhelming, the constraining love of Christ is stronger. It's not motivated by fear of punishment in hell or hope of reward in heaven; agape is a love that will deny self, and will believe that what Satan says is dead will be resurrected. It will wait. It's a practical godliness translation of what Jesus said: "If any [person] come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and WIFE (!!), and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:26, 27). Sounds utterly impossible!
Here is where the "faith of Jesus" is always severely tried. Adam's first sin was putting a woman ahead of his Savior. No one wants to see a whiff of fanaticism develop in the church; celibacy is and has been wrong, wrong, wrong. But self-denying faithfulness to principle is something rare and precious that Heaven seeks the world over to find.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: July 2, 2003.
Copyright © 2012 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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