"Are We Loving God More?" The Wrong Question for Christian Dating Couples
Having grown up in the Christian circle of Cincinnati--complete with I Kissed Dating Goodbye advocates, "go on a couple dates for fun" practitioners, and every other dating view in between--I've heard my fair share of "the Lord really lead us together" and "the Lord was leading us apart."
The reasons for break ups, make ups, and new relationships are widespread and dizzying. So I don't want to talk about when God is telling you to date someone or to end with someone.
I want to talk about when you're doing things right within a healthy relationship.
Yes, I am very aware that I have already written some posts about dating relationships. I am also very aware of the vast, virtual ocean of similar "Christian dating" articles and books (I've read them).
But I am even more keenly aware and immensely grieved by the lack of encouragement and godly direction that that literature holds.
It's very hard to find any writing that tells us when we are dating right.
All we hear are cautions, warnings, despair threats, how unstable emotions are, and how unwise dating can be.
As a God seeking woman who loves romance and the idea of being a lifelong companion who has read and read about "guarding your heart," "physical boundaries," "saving yourself," and "letting God write your love story," I just want to help my brothers and sisters out with their loves by offering some assurances instead of menacing warning signs.
This is post one in a three post series of Dating Assurances. My hope is that some comfort can be given, confidence passed around, and lies silenced as we remember Biblical truths instead of dwelling on practices birthed by fear.
A couple things to keep in mind as you read these posts:
1. I'm assuming that your relationship or desired relationship is healthy. And by healthy I mean that manipulation is absent, emotional, physical, and mental abuse is absent, and you each honor each other as individuals with independent lives and goals. (Basically you aren't clueless as to what being a good human involves.)
2. I'm assuming that you're striving to honor God and not trying to find dating-life-hacks to justify sinful behavior.
3. I'm assuming you're dating a Christian or are hoping to.
4. I'm assuming that your dating relationship is past the "getting to know each other stage" and has some level of commitment to it.
We all know that the topic of "Christian-dating" is convoluted. Let's do us each a favor and make this discussion a bit easier by remembering these contexts. Let's begin.
______________
For the one deemed a distraction.
For the one constantly cautioned against building an idol.
For the one who's lonely because someone thought they idolized you.
For the ones told to slow down.
For the one who couldn't measure up to unrealistic expectations and standards.
You are not distractions. You are treasures.
You are not an idols. You are beautiful creations woven by the Creator Himself.
You are not dangers. You are Beloved.
You are not below the mark. You are free from measuring up.
You are not worth less than someone's spiritual life.
For the one who claims to be distracted.
For the one who walked away from someone because you believed it was God's will.
For the one who felt cornered, lost, confused, and hopeless.
For the one who believed they built an idol.
For the ones who are scared that they love a person more than they love God.
You are capable of falling madly in love with a human without falling tragically out of love with God.
Ah yes, the seemingly inescapable struggle of loving God more than him or her.
If you're a Christian and have ever dated another Christian, I'm sure you've heard some version of "Make sure your relationship is Christ-centered" or "Remember to keep your love for God stronger than your love for him/her."
I've nodded my head to these statements for years. Yet, recently, I've discovered that these statements aren't worthy of attention.
These admonitions have cornered us into ways of thinking that we were never meant to be backed into and has also disoriented what love is.
It's not a question of loving God more and loving things less but a question of giving everything the love that it's due.
And while love may not only be a feeling, feelings come alongside true love.
Warnings and cautions don't point in the right direction. They just close something off. Because our Christian culture has only provided dating-teen couples with warnings and cautions, we are left to our own devices: distorting truth and creating boundaries out of fear.
Especially in the area of falling in love.
So, somehow we get it in our heads that if we fall madly in love with someone, we've fallen tragically out of love with God.
I want to explore why this isn't a reality and attempt to give some assuring insights.
First, asking the right question: are we giving God and people the love they are due?
Because God is love and because we are made in His image, we are creatures that need to be loved and need to love.
God has given us instructions in His Word about how to appropriately direct our natural flow of love in the world.
Matthew 22:37-39 shows us how to handle our love for Him and our love for others: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
God doesn't use "love more and love less" language like we do today. Instead, He uses the "love this like you should" language. We love God like we should and we love people like we should.
We love God like we should by letting His attitude and thoughts penetrate our whole heart, soul, and mind. By allowing ourselves to be transformed into His likeness. By serving, obeying, and worshipping Him.
We love people like we should by treating them how we treat ourselves. How do we love ourselves?
We respect.
We give grace.
We give care.
We relax.
We have fun.
We set goals.
We give pep talks.
We treat ourselves incredibly well and should do unto others.
We don't love something or someone less than something or someone else because love isn't something to be monitored but something to be lavished.
The traditional "Christian" way of testing if you love God more is therefore inherently flawed because it works within the "love more and love less" mindset:
"You know you love God more than him/her when you're not very physical, very distant emotionally, have a Bible study, never factor each other into decisions, and pray together at every date."
When we accept the "love things like you should" mindset, there's a freedom few of us have tasted because we begin working within the reality that God designed for us.
Second, getting both sides of the story: love is not only feelings but is very allowed to and designed to stir up feelings.
"Love is not a feeling. Faith is not a feeling. Prayer does not hinge on feeling. Your Bible reading doesn't hinge on feeling. Your belief is not rooted in feelings."
Countless Bible verses about being rooted in the intellectual and logical truths of The Word and passages guarding against being swayed by feelings of fear and earthly pleasure have been wrongly analyzed and thus have given us a horribly incorrect view of emotions.
And, specifically, in Christian-dating culture, we have no tools to maturely handle emotions of romantic attraction.
We often believe that all emotions are completely unreliable, that we can never pay attention to them or take them seriously, and we are to live like we don't have them.
We've forgotten that God has emotions and that He saw fit to create us with emotions so therefore they have a legitimate role in our life to be paid attention to.
When we don't allow ourselves to consider and explore our romantic emotions, we confuse ourselves with love and don't explore all of its manifestations.
And we freak out when we start to feel more strongly about a romantic partner than we do for the Lord.
When it comes to the kind of love we should have for the Lord and the kind of love we should have for people, it's desperately hard to capture and explain especially in how we should think and feel about God.
God has given us models of the feelings and thoughts we can attach to Him through the imagery of marriage and families. My little mind gets boggled about how these two models mesh together into how we love God. They are each different yet have some similarities and I just end up leaning on the Spirit all the more to guide my heart and mind.
And on top of thinking about how these models manifest practically, I believe that each person communicates and relates to God uniquely, according to how He designed them.
I'm just gonna go ahead and ask for a whopping dose of mercy as I try to explain this.
The best way that I've come to terms with how to differentiate my thoughts and feelings about God and people is to loosely put love into two categories.
One kind of love is selfless service: a heartfelt desire to willingly serve another despite your own inconvenience.
And another kind is romantic: a desired closeness and an exceptionally strong affinity for another. (Remember that dollop of mercy I asked for?)
Ideally, in regards to our significant others, these two loves are mingled and meshed.
But, I'm not so sure we are meant to be romantically in love with God the same we are romantically in love with people. So I most often think of a service-love in regards to God.
But, in all honesty, I don't think that we have the correct language to express what goes on between us and the Lord and so romance is the closest, most understandable thing.
God definitely captures our hearts and wins us over like a mighty warrior-poet and is crazy jealous for His bride the Church. That relational aspect is so essential and real and romantic language is definitely used to describe this relationship.
But it's not the same as those butterflies when he or she holds your hand for the first time or that passion and excitement at a wedding.
This doesn't mean that we don't ever "feel" anything for the Lord. The Spirit grows a unique connection and feeling in us for Him as we continue to walk with Him, but again, I don't think it's the same as human romance. We just can't talk about it any other way.
So, Falling into a romantic-love with a human does not mean that we somehow fall out of service-love or that special-Spirit-love with God.
Friends, there will be times that you feel more emotion for your significant other than for God. When you want to talk to them more than you want to talk to God. When you forget to pray because you fall asleep thinking of them. When you sleep through church because you were out late having a good time with them...
And that's ok.
Remember that love is very allowed to and designed to stir up feelings.
The pattern of our life that seeks God overrides those occassions where we don't feel so loyal to Him.
And here's the awesome thing--the freedom that so few of us have allowed ourselves to step into: when we are crazy out of our mind about someone we are actually loving God simultaneously.
Because that's how we were made to feel about our significant others. That's how He made us and that's what brings Him pleasure.
I hope that these thoughts have sparked something new in you.
A new freedom.
I hope that we can escape the many faulty ways we try to keep our love for God strongest in the face of an extremely attractive individual and are able to recognize that they are spurred on by confusion and fear instead of God's powerful grace.
So please, fall in love with people. And don't hold back joyfully lavishing love on them because you're afraid you may begin to love them more than God.
You're doing it right when you're crazy out of your mind about them.
It really has nothing to do with how often you read the Bible or pray together or how little you kiss.
We are meant to fall in love.
When we're doing it right, we feel free to touch and be touched, to know and to be known, to enjoy and to be enjoyed, to bless and to be blessed, and to accept a wonderous freedom that is feeling like we're falling in love.