Sex, Love, and Marriage- I Cant Help Falling In Love

Is it right for a believer to fall in love? This depends on what is meant by the term - "falling in love". The world considers love to be an irresistible power that suddenly grips a man and begins to rule him. If, by some chance, the person who has thus "fallen in love" cannot marry his beloved, he has no alternative but to pine away in sorrow all his days - or at least until he "falls in love" again. A large number of songs and films are based on this theme of the disappointed lover. All this is due to the fact that the world can conceive of love only on the philia and eros level. Such a "falling in love" is wrong for a Christian.

For the child of God, love should commence on the agape level and should be based primarily on spiritual attraction.

Only in this way should he "fall in love". He should live so totally under the control of the Holy Spirit that he is able to rule his emotions, and not allow them to run away with him. The Christian must be directed by the Spirit of God in his love as much as in any other area of his life. The Holy Spirit alone can lead you to the person God has chosen to be your life-partner - and that is the only person you should ever fall in love with.

How careful we should be then! We cannot afford to be like the unbeliever who falls in love with a person and then after some months or years changes his mind and falls in love with someone else. A Christian should never be the plaything of his emotions. His love should originate in his will and not in his emotions - for emotions can be very deceptive. Feelings of love need not be absent but should follow the willing of love. But this is possible only when we allow the Cross to operate constantly in our lives, putting to death the desires of our “the body of sin” (Romans 6:6) that is our own self, our own flesh, and making us accept only the will of God.

Whenever you meet a person of the opposite sex towards whom you feel attracted, you must let the Cross operate without pity or compassion on your natural affection, and thus keep yourself from any emotional involvement (even secretly) with her/him. In this way alone will you be in a fit state to understand what the will of God is for your relationship. You must hold back the emotional involvement until after you find God's will in the matter. Otherwise you will find that your emotions dull your rational thinking and you will eventually be misguided.

You must be careful that your emotions don't lead you into situations which you may later regret. It can be devastating to discover after you have given your love to someone that that person is not God's choice for you. To detach yourself emotionally from him/her will then be extremely difficult. An experience of this kind causes many problems and is not easily removed from the mind. Memory has a way of bringing it up again and again even after you are married to someone else. Guilt and regret can then plague your mind, injuring your personality and ruining your marriage.

Young men especially have to be careful that they do not get carried away by physical beauty or charm alone. Where there is no true love, physical attraction must be kept down. Where true love does exist, physical attraction will not be the main thing anyway.

In this matter of love, as in other matters, the Scriptural command is,
"And be not conformed to this world
....but be reformed (transformed, changed) by the (entire) in the renewal of your mind - (that is by its new ideals and its new attitudes - that you may prove (to yourself) what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God. " (Romans 12:2).