We are told that our biggest challenge in this life is to try our best to live the way that Christ lived. And if we are going to get anywhere near this way of life, we are going to have to make 'love' the predominant factor in everything; in all of our thinking and in all of our actions. 

 

The old adage that 'love is what makes the world go round' is perfectly true; for God, who controls all things, created the world so that He could love us and so that we could love each other. We are to be imitators of Christ - and our imitation of God in this life - I mean the one that is distinct from any likeness which He has impressed upon the world - must be an imitation of God incarnate; not just of the cross, but of His teaching methods and His pure will to obey the Father. 

 

This is what we mean when we say that the divine is fully operational in each of us who is able to appreciate our God living under human conditions. He humbled Himself and became man and that is the image in which Christ confers upon us every opportunity to share in the divine love. In fact, the times when we most resemble God are the times when we are most God-like - the times when generosity and compassion came through in our own minds with very little artifice or evasion - or if you prefer - the times when our giving felt as boundless as that of a divine figure. 

 

The love God has for us is gift-love. The Father gives everything He is to the Son; the Son gives Himself back to the Father and gives Himself to us. In doing so He offers us up to the Father - and the love we give to Christ is given by Him back to the Father; but the person offering the love cannot be imbued with the ineffable sense of the divine unless he or she recognises His becoming man and dying for us on the cross. Therefore, any attempt that we make to offer our love to our beloved must emanate directly from our love for Christ. There is no part of our love for the beloved that is distinct from the love given to God; and equally, there is no part of our love offered that does not come from the Christ that is in us. That is, our love for our beloved and our love for Christ are inextricable; for in Christian marriages, the first does not exist without the second. 

 

Having established this, we should now look at the first stages of courtship, for straight away we see that the one who Christ has chosen for us will be the one (above all others) with whom we can identify some kind of consonance between the pleasures we feel from knowing Christ and the pleasures we feel from knowing him or her. In other words, we will start to appreciate the pleasure of knowing Christ not just through our own knowledge and feelings but through the feelings of another. This is the stage when both affection and intimacy are beginning to create pleasures of which the divine wholly approves, for we all know, on a continual basis, what it is like to feel pleasures and have feelings that we know should not be in us. 

 

Pleasures can be separated into two kinds; those which are only pleasures because they were preceded by desire, and those which needed no such anticipation. An example of the first kind is a drink of water. It is a pleasure to be relieved of your thirst, but only in obedience to thirst or good health would one drink a glass of water, never just for the pure enjoyment of it. An example of the second kind would be if a song came on the radio that you really liked but had not previously heard. Here the pleasure was totally unanticipated - it was an unsolicited pleasure. I am just using two very simple examples - obviously there are far more complex examples, and equally, the two examples I gave you have certain variables; for example, if you are given a cup of tea when you were actually expecting water you would get both kinds of pleasure simultaneously. Again, an addiction can turn the second kind of pleasure into the first kind. 

 

Now when we come to know God, we get all the pleasures that we first anticipated but we also find out about many other pleasures that can only be known through the divine. And they are distinct from non-Christian pleasure by something very significant; all the pleasures that one experiences from knowing God are pleasures not just of intrinsic joy but also pleasures attached to real progression, of which Christian marriage is one. 

 

There are five hierarchies of pleasure; the fifth kind (the weakest kind) is the simplest of all - it is found in most everyday things. The fourth kind is the pleasure enjoyed from keen interests. The third kind is the pleasure enjoyed from friendships. The second kind is the pleasure enjoyed from love, in which our family and our beloved are included. The ultimate, primary kind of pleasure is that which comes from knowing God. 

 

Now marriage, when God is put first, always begins with courtship, and courtship always begins (or always should begin) with the third kind of pleasure - it begins with friendship. And already we can see that friendship is the first thing that reflects part of the divine through the reflection of another. Affection is often seen as the first reflection, but it is not so. Friendship does not usually come from affection - the affection comes because of the friendship. But the first and essential part of the inceptive Christian relationship is that friendship and affection are stimulating both him and her. That is why so many non-Christian relationships fail so quickly; they have attempted to bypass both friendship and affection. The same goes for eroticism - if affection is not stimulating the interest, you are left with the most tawdry kind - as in animalistic coveting in nightclubs, or worse, in prostitution.

 

So long as objects are familiar then one can feel affection for them.  We sometimes know the day we fell in love with someone, but we never really see affection beginning. By the time we notice it, it has been going on for a while. There is one special beauty attached to affection. Affection, when it is causing positive actions only goes to show us how much more we depend on things stronger than mere affection. And I am sure you know, I am talking about affection that is distinct from other subsidiary feelings. Affection is God's way of revealing to each person, qualities in the beloved which are able to unite two souls in situations that are distinct from love. 

 

I have said that all good Christian loves start with friendship, and that is partly because we have already gotten used to forming a friendship with Christ; that is, we have already seen friendship at its highest level. But there is one significant difference - lovers need friendship first, whereas Christ needs your love before the divine friendship can reveal its true power. Some people think that friendship with Christ sounds easier than loving Him, but this can be misleading. Friendship is probably the most unnatural of all relationships, it is the one to which we are least drawn - for there are very few hedonistic connections, no biological connections, and nothing about friendship is necessary for the human race to survive. And just as you know that coitus and the need to be loved are often seen as primitiveness, you know equally well that friendship is chosen because of its transcendent qualities; it seems far more rational. Friendship always has been, in a sense, the pleasure most similar to knowing God - if not fully, it is certainly the first thing that directs us towards real, non-constricting pleasures. That is why the most natural and most successful relationships always begin with friendship.

 

The golden rule of love - of all love - is that Christ has to be the primary part of it. Those who think that human love without Christ is going to be enough will end up very dissatisfied. You can see this, even in those homes in which love seems to be spreading glorious colour throughout the place. This is usually love at its most ambivalent; but it is in no way surprising that this type of thought is prevalent in so many minds, for they have been taught fallacious things about love for nearly two centuries now. Symptomatic of this, perhaps, is all those contemporary impracticable romantic films which show affection as the sole vehicle for a successful love. They are impracticable because of their falsity. They represent as an already existent model for success what is in fact only a constituent precursor. They intimate an unrealistic premise of affection serving as a panacea, instead of real and genuine growth in unity.

 

Love without Christ sometimes comes from the false notion that to love God we need to love our earthly beloved less. This is not so. The love that God demands is not the same as the love which is going to be necessary to sustain a happy marriage. God's love, both given and received, shows itself to be grace beyond our level of competence; that is, the love given by you to your beloved cannot itself achieve its full strength (and all its growing parts) without God's help, assistance and direction. Earthly love, without God, cannot hope to fulfil a man's desire for God, but with God stimulating and sustaining the earthly love, it can grow as God fully intended. That is why there is no rivalry - it would be like Romeo trying to claim that his love for Juliet could rival his connection with Shakespeare.

 

Love is wonderful, but it must come through God first. And that, I'm afraid, is one of the worst things that non-Christians do - they let their happiness depend on something that is transitory, on something that will be lost in the end. But if they let their happiness depend on God they will see that all those things that they hope will last forever will be the things that last forever. In their togetherness lies their true individuality. When God is ruler over their relationship, He is able to remove things from their minds that would otherwise cause unsettlement.

 

God invests in us in truly wonderful way - He wants us to grow with Him. It is not very easy to understand His love if we have to resort to comparing it to human love. His love is one that wants to give us gifts for our betterment. God created us, not out of necessity, but out of grace. He gives us the requisite gifts that we need to find Him, then He leaves us the freedom to choose our earthly beloved, who is (unbeknown to us when friendship is occurring) the one that He has chosen for us. All things done in love are reflections of Him, proximities which bear resemblance to His awesome nature. 

 

That is when we are most blessed, when we learn to receive and then offer our love back to God, just as Christ offered Himself to the Father. That is why God tells Christians to abstain from sex until marriage; He wants the love they have for each other to be offered to Him by way of growing in Him. When they have grown enough to commit to marriage He then shows them the sexual side, which is, or course, a further growth. All the time He is present in the relationship, fine-tuning the love that He receives and offering it back to them so that they can grow as one in Christ. And just as eternity is most tangible when it is intimated in other things, your feelings of love can only inherit the kingdom of God when they are feelings that allow you to be taken into the eternity of divinity; that is, when they have allowed you to embrace something wholly life changing, something bigger than yourself - bigger than the universe. All the things that you love, all the things that are precious to you, are the things which you need to work hard to save, for only the things that have been transformed by Christ will see eternity.

 

We should always remember that good acts, positive as they are - only become wonderfully good when they are seen as divine. Some good qualities, if detached from the divine, can be only self-serving, and I think we see this happening in many non-Christian relationships. Even in human terms, generosity, if it is separated from love, cares more about each act itself than about any positive improvements in the subject. God has bestowed upon us wonderful blessings; He has loved us into existence and continually wishes that our betterment is betterment that will bring us closer to Him. God is gradually moulding His disciples into characters that He wants them to be.

 

God created things that were not part of Himself, so that they could learn to love Him at the same time as drawing closer to that which is presently distinct from Him. The divine love is begotten though the Son so that God can create for us a real pleasure in the distinction between creature and Creator. The love can be reciprocated in a way that transcends any of the other loves. Even before the world was created, God had humbled Himself with a plan, so that man could know Him though Christ. From the very beginning of creation, we were made to relinquish and to surrender; but we were made in a way that our surrender would be, not only a pleasure, but an epiphany - a revelation - a pathway to paradise. He loves us as much as it is possible to love, because He is love*. His love is so great and unchanging that He loves us perfectly through our ultimate failures and ultimate successes. 

 

* This is not to be confused with the spurious statement, often propounded as 'love is God'. Love is no more God than Romeo is Shakespeare. We are talking about something rather different. You can say that an apple is delicious without saying that delicious is an apple. 

 

Love at its best involves giving far more than receiving, and, of course, one that needs to give therefore needs to be needed. The proper aim of giving is to achieve a situation where the recipient distils continual pleasure from our gifts while at the same knowing how best to give in a way that will give continual happiness for the beloved.  

 

Furthermore, all good lovers must learn how to receive in the right way too. The goal must never be to learn solely to give without learning how to receive. The need to give, by itself, has no power to reach its point or crux. The instinct to give should desire the well-being and blessings of its object, but not simply only the well-being and blessings it can give itself, but the blessings that the beloved can receive from learning how to reciprocate. That is why the imbalance between couples whose giving and receiving are not coterminous is easily noticeable from the outside. If Christ is the central part of the relationship, He can come in and help both parties to finely balance the parity between giving and receiving - for without Him, too much of one causes resentment and too much of the other causes selfishness. 

 

Some people object strongly to all this talk of 'Christian marriages' - they enquire as to why Christians think that they have access to all the right methods of a successful marriage; thus implying that all non-Christians have no such access. It should be admitted that Christians make no concession to any point of view which claims that marriages from which Christ is absent can lead to anything other than transient and unsatisfactory transpirations. There are no two ways about it; if Christianity is true, then only through Christ can a marriage be fully blessed. And there is, I think, one primary reason why this is true. Relationships that try to survive without Christ usually consist of both parties taking the 'need' factor of love and trying to forge for themselves something to which mere 'need' itself does not belong. The unfulfilled need to be needed will satiate itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing them for imaginary needs. It will do this all the more relentlessly because it thinks the very nature of giving is unselfish; thus both parties, in the purview of self-delusion, will become self-congratulatory individuals, all the time failing to see the real needs of the beloved. 

 

Christ had to point out to us that He is the 'Bread of Life', and only through Him can that hunger be fed. If one tries to feed that hunger with love alone, I'm afraid, in the long run, one will be feeding on derisory portions. For those who are ready to state that 'There is nothing anybody else could do, including Christ, to make my relationship with so and so any better', you will have no objection from me if that is what you truly feel right now. But if you do feel it, make sure that you are feeling it because you actually believe it to be true, and not because it is something that, in the comfort bubble of your relationship, you desire to be true. If it is the former, then all well and good, but if it is the latter, it is an enemy to your rational thought, because our experiences often tell us that what we desire is not always in accordance with what is true.

 

Relationships need a fine balance between giving and receiving, and the central parts of this are, of course, found in all of other components of love. Love needs many other things by which it can be stimulated - it requires honesty, decency, generosity, kindness, sincerity, faithfulness, trust, goodness, patience, empathy, and self-denial - all of which are, between Christian lovers, held together by the continual intervention of a more divine love than any of these individual things, by themselves, can ever be. All good relationships involve two people who want much more than the relationship itself; that is, they both passionately desire that Christ will be the central part - showing each of them the divine qualities in their beloved. 

 

The biggest joys are revealed to us when we stop coveting tangibles and look towards intangible things, for they are where the real beauty lies. You should, if you desire to get the best out of each other, live your life with the goal of putting your partner before yourself, considering his or her needs before your own, and your partner must reciprocate those principles.

 

Christ said to His disciples 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you', therefore Christ also intimates to Christians that 'You have not chosen your beloved for yourself but I have chosen you for one another'. This is not applicable outside the Christian faith, because non-Christians have chosen for the self a sole reliance on their own wisdom rather than reliance on God's. Those who have had several failed relationship will see the point, and those who have spent their life with the same partner cannot claim any knowledge of others aside from the one they are with. It is only through the Christian relationship that Christ will reveal the true beauty that both him and her posses, for it is because of Christ that such beauty exists. He can reveal to the husband the Christ that is in his wife, and to the wife, the Christ that is in her husband. Every part of the beloved that is going to be loved is derived from Him and then increased by Him through the relationship itself, so that growth in marriage produces true revelation and divine illumination through the beloved. Christ said you should love your husband or wife like He loved the church, i.e. die for him or her. If there is even a small part of us that believes this is what love is, then we do ourselves a disservice by settling for anything less. 

 

There is a big misconception from the outside - that Christian marriages are very serious, with very little jocularity or playfulness. Nothing should be further from the truth; for only those whose love goes beyond that of attending to hedonistic pleasure, cold sensuality, or phlegmatic comfort zones, can really experience the true delights of mockery, jocularity, playfulness, jesting and frivolity. True love is able to bring out in each person, qualities that no other person is able to bring out. We see our true selves deep within our beloved - we see that he or she is able to evoke feelings that reflect Christ Himself. That is why jealousy is so often absent in Christian relationships, for both parties are striving for the same thing. 

 

To the outsider, jealousy and love seem, at first sight, to be concomitant, but those who are jealous often mistake one for the other, that is, they presume the strength of one shows itself in the strength of the other. This is not true; in fact, they are almost incompatible, as jealousy hardly leaves room for love, and love, in its truest form, sees jealousy as an anti-God state. To be jealous of the beloved is to miss the whole quintessence of divine love, for true love is the discovery of ourselves in others (which is very often reciprocal), and the discovery of Christ in every part of love. 

 

Love is never worried by silence, because the beloved desires, not just to be loved, but also to be understood, and true understanding only usually comes in moments of silence. The silence may precede the right words that the beloved needs to hear, but it is the precursory silence that helped give you much of the understanding. The same can usually be said for happiness in its truest form. The truest happiness is the one which no words can describe, just as the truest feelings of Christ within us are the feelings which none of us could even begin to write down into words. 

 

All this is, of course, much easier if you are a Christian. If you are not a Christian - it is important to recognise love from something that is not love. It is not wise to presume that because a relationship has lasted for a while it is necessarily love; you are not the same person this year as last; nor is the one you are with. Longevity disguises itself as a god, a god who guarantees fortitude, but it is unreliable, as coincidence works in the same way. Coincidence - at its most powerful - if left to carry a relationship, is able to pull together two lovers, using mutuality and fragile commonalties as tools for endurance. Of course, these are the types of afflictions which are far more visible from the outside, for in those moments seemingly extricable from any divine supervision - removed from the true glories of love, it is then that we can recognise all that is missing. 

 

Love for the beloved and love for God have one commonality; that is, they are both part of the previously unknowable secret - they belong in the arcane corner of nature which God Himself has been saving for those who search for it. Love without God tells you that 'love' itself will be the thing that directs you, but love that seeks nothing but transitory satisfaction will eventuate in permanent dissatisfaction. But the love that God chooses for us, is one that makes us wiser, because we see something new every time we look at the beloved, drawing from her everything that God has given - both the things He has given her for her self and the parts of her that He has given her for your sake as well. You will love the beloved, not just for her total being, but for what you can become through her and what you can both become through Christ.