Reprise: How to Sing a Love
Song
We have been looking at three areas vital to any loving relationship. Furthermore, we have sought to explore these areas of passion, intimacy, and commitment from a Christian perspective to help us enrich our own marriage.
We have learned that marital passion is a strong desire to be close to our mate. Passion stirs us into loving action thereby affirming both the lover and the beloved. Passion brings energy for loving to a relationship because it is a mixture of desire and hope for loving and being loved.
Without marital passion, a relationship becomes passive, routine, and boring. Many passionless marriages stay together out of commitment, but a relationship without passion is like a sailboat without a breeze.
Passion alone, however, could never sustain a relationship. For passion thrives on the hope of fulfillment. Passion is unstable when it sees no hope of achieving intimacy with one's beloved.
Passion is brought to its fulfillment by marital intimacy, mutual familiarity with our mate. Intimacy is not a goal that is achieved once and forever. Intimacy can only survive in rhythmic alternation with passion. If we become terminally engrossed in our achievement of intimacy, we become dependent and fail
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to participate in keeping the relationship awake and alive. On the other hand, if we have passion without intimacy our fire will eventually burn out without the fuel of fulfillment. The life of a loving relationship throbs with the heartbeat of passion and intimacy.
Intimacy is also important because it reveals us to each other so that we can know how to love each other. We can only love someone to the extent that we know them. Intimacy provides us with details of each other's personal thoughts and feelings, giving us a means by which we can involve ourselves in a loving and supportive way with one another. The less intimate a relationship is, the less love can be shared.
Marital commitment is a promise to persist at maintaining the relationship. Commitment is strongest when based upon clear positive beliefs about love, marriage, and God. Strong beliefs can override impulsive actions or feelings of discontent and discouragement. When we know what we believe we have direction and purpose. When our purpose in life is to fulfill that for which we believe we were created—namely, to love—then we know that we have a powerful auxiliary engine in our love boat that can keep us on course when the winds of passion fail to fill our sails.
Commitment keeps the heartbeat of passion and intimacy going. A marriage built on commitment alone would be mechanical and cold. It might be admired for its stability, but without the excitement and warmth of passion and intimacy, committed love is not complete. We want all the right elements in our love songs.
The power to love our mate with passion, intimacy, and commitment comes from having a relationship with God. The God of the Universe, who created the earth and all of us who inhabit it, is the best love-song Composer of all. Far from being an inaccessible Supreme Being, he is love itself. With all love, he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to bridge the gap between our
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humaneness and his holiness. Now we can love, because he first loved us (1 Jn 4:19).
A man and a woman who become husband and wife can partake of his heavenly love; with God's help, they can sing their love songs on key.
We all know that a marriage can be a joy or a nightmare. Discord and disharmony enter in automatically if we don't follow God's precepts. Unless we know and follow him, our best efforts are quickly exhausted. If we cooperate with him, our individual lives in our marriages can become an unending symphony of joyful praise.
This joyful, God-inspired marriage symphony is one that includes these three essential themes: passion, intimacy, and commitment.
