Could It Be I'm Falling In Love

Could It Be I’m Falling In Love

6/27/99 Proverbs 4:18-27 Colossians 3:1-4 Text Thessalonians 4:1-8

How many of us remember the days when we use to have crushes on someone as a junior or senior higher. As young as age 12, I can remember being on my knees praying that God would let me marry so and so. I just knew I was in love.

What happens when we fall in love. We can stay on the phone for hours talking about nothing. We find it hard to think about anything else. We can forget friends and family in order to be with this person. We feel tingling and nervous when this other person comes into the room.

We just can’t wait to get a letter in the mail from the other person when he or she is away. People tell us, we have lost our minds and gone crazy over that person

We still live in a dream world in which society tells us that this state of falling in love is the natural state for a couple to remain in forever. The ability to be romantically attracted to someone is a gift from God. Romance is like the fire of a match. It burns brightly and quickly, but its purpose is to set on fire something else which will last much longer. God gives us romance to burn the fires in a marriage. The purpose of romance is to develop a more deeper understanding of love in the marriage relationship. A love based not simply on feelings but on commitment as well.

God created marriage to be a lifetime relationship between two individuals who were committed to each other no matter what the stresses of life might be. As they overcome the stresses, they can celebrate with romance to once again strengthen their relationship.

But then as the number of divorces increased, somebody came up with the idea that something was wrong with the institution of marriage. Somebody thought, well God even though you might call it sin, we can stop the number of divorces by practicing living together first. So now we have a whole lot of people who are living together outside of marriage, who are going to make marriage a more lasting relationship.

If you had a 97 Lexus and something went wrong with it and you took it to a repair shop. What would you think if the mechanic came to you with a repair manual for a 73 Dodge, saying, “I’ve looked all through this book, and I can’t seem to find the problem.” You probably would want to say, well do you have a manual on how to fix a 97 Lexus. Suppose he said, “if you seen one car, you’ve seen them all. I’ll just experiment until I find the problem.” You know the best person to fix the car is someone who follows the procedures in a Lexus automobile manual.

Marriage was not a human idea. It came from God. Therefore God should have the best instructional manual on marriage. God said in marriage, commit to each other right from the beginning. Those who have decided to throw God to the side would say, “no have a little trial marriage first by living together to make sure you will be ready for marriage.”

Living together before marriage prepares one for divorce far better than it prepares one for marriage. For instance only 26% of the women who live together will eventually marry the man they are living with. Of men, only 19% will marry the woman they are with. 40% of couples who live together will never get married. Of those who do, 75% of those marriages will fail. So in reality, to play like you married will end up with 85% of the couples falling by the way side.

To put this in easily understood numbers, of one hundred couples who decide to go against the plan of God for their lives concerning relationships by living together before marriage, forty of them will never marry. Sixty of them will marry, but forty five of them will divorce. Only 15 of the one hundred couples will stay married. Even with a high divorce rate, of 100 couples who begin living together after marriage, 57 first time married couples stay married.

Now all these people probably knew the joy of falling in love with each other and were sexually attracted to each other. But falling in love is not a guarantee for a successful marriage. A marriage is a whole lot more than sex and romance. It’s commitment, self denial, sacrifice, determination, love and a lot of hard work. One must fight to have and to keep a good marriage.

One way to begin to cut down on the number of divorces is to take the word of God seriously before we “fall in love.” The Bible tells us, above all else guard your heart. Watch who and what you are falling in love with at all times. Every person and everything which comes into our lives comes with the potential of being a great blessing or a great disaster for our us. Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to us falling in love.