True Love on Valentine’s Day

A holiday best known for chocolate and Hallmark cards can remind us of the relationships that really matter.

By J. Heinrich Arnold

Why celebrate Valentine’s Day? According to tradition, the fourteenth of February is named for a third-century Roman martyr beheaded for performing illegal Christian weddings. Whether or not this legend has a basis in history, this day should remind us that love is the most important creation. It is the heart and joy of God. The apostle John sums it up in his first letter where he says, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God” (1 Jn. 4:16). We're made to live in love.

Love requires relationship. Such relationships are the most important part of life, starting with our relationship with God the Father, maker of heaven and earth, and with his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Extending out from this core relationship, life consists of a widening circle of relationships of family, community, neighbors, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and even enemies. A good relationship is a gift, involving two-way communication, friendship, and sometimes the kind of blunt honesty that Jesus calls “salt.”

Valentine’s Day is a good chance to reflect on the significance of love and relationships. What is our relationship to God? How are our relationships in our families, between husband and wife, parents and children? How are our relationships to each other in our church, and going outwards to friends, acquaintances, and strangers? How do we as parents and mentors show examples of good relationship to teenagers and youth as they navigate sexual attraction and seek to discover the meaning of friendships, marriage, and commitment? Are we teaching and staying true to God’s design and commandments for all our relationships?

As the Book of Genesis recounts, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). He gave humankind, bearers of his image, a task to work and live on the earth, including exciting challenges like naming all the animals and being fruitful and multiplying. He also gave them a simple commandment – not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life – that unfortunately the first man and woman did not manage to obey. This led to our ancestors being chased out of Paradise. However, the story doesn’t end there. Amazingly, God forgives and faithfully keeps his relationship with humankind as a loving Father. Righteous leaders called people back to God and to obedience to his commandments like Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses, who wrote, “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations” (Deuteronomy 7:9).

When God sent Jesus to earth, he told us how to keep our relationship with Him and God the Father: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love” (John 15:10). What does that really mean: to abide, to live in his love?

Part of the answer involves sustaining our souls with daily food from God by prayer, reading God’s word, and seeking together in families and small groups for the bread and water of life. This is the truth and faith that comes into our hearts when we connect with God and Jesus and the Spirit, a mystery and a miracle how that can and does happen if we believe and thirst and hunger for it. “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). We should discover and rediscover the joy and importance of gathering to seek and pray as individuals, families, small groups, and together as church communities.

If we are married, another part of the answer involves our relationship to our spouse and to any children we’ve been given. God created marriage and family to reflect his image and relationship with us. The relationship between husband and wife, parents and children is crucial to a happy and godly home and family. If love and obedience to God is living in our families, children will learn the most important lessons about life before they enter kindergarten. That is why Moses spoke these words to his people: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut. 6:4-9).

Husbands and fathers, it starts with us. Paul writes in Ephesians 5 that the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Do we get that? A love so deep and self-sacrificing, like Jesus, who was slandered, spit on, crucified and died for us. Do we love our wives better than ourselves? We should be ready to die for our wives, our children, our families, and our bigger family, which stretches around the world. This includes taking into our homes the single people, widows, orphans, and anybody else who may be lonely and doesn’t have the gift of marriage or immediate family.

The Fifth Commandment points to one especially important aspect of the relationships of parents and children. As the apostle Paul writes, this is the only one of the Ten Commandments accompanied by a promise: “’Honor your father and mother’ – this is the first commandment with a promise – ‘that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land’” (Ephesians 6:2-3). “That it may go well with you” describes the real-life effects of family relationships, both for bad and for good. Parents should think about this and point it out to our children. Marriage, family, and the formation of our children is the very future of this world.

This brings us to the exciting part, the aspect of relationships we tend to associate most with Valentine’s Day: falling in love. How does that fit with God’s plan for relationships? In what follows, I’m especially addressing teenagers and young adults. But it may be relevant to older people as well.

Love is a big word. That is no wonder because God is love. Countless philosophers, theologians, poets, and artists have tried their best to capture what love is, but for now I’ll keep it short and simple. There is Love Divine – God’s love – so mighty and pure that we can only catch and reflect glimpses of it. This Great Love is the fire of life and drives our every heartbeat and breath. It creates and sustains all relationships: the ties of God to man, man to God, person to person; love to family, tribe, nation, and humanity as a whole; and love toward all life, the environment, and creation. All other loves – the ancient Greeks talk of seven or eight distinct forms – are refractions of this Great Love like the colors of the rainbow from Light.

Romantic love – the kind represented by Valentine’s Day hearts and kisses, the experience of sexual attraction and emotion – is a powerful and beautiful creation of God. However, it is just a small part of the greatness of God’s love, similar to the way that the color red, the fastest-moving wavelength of light, is just one of the colors of the spectrum. By nature, we humans are wired for this kind of love. It has been both the majesty and the destruction of humanity since the dawn of time.

The gift of sex is a wonderful part of what it means to be human. But God created it for the purpose of marriage – the faithful, lifelong bond between one man and one woman. He ties it to the potential for bringing new life into the world, a mystery that science cannot fully explain or capture, however much we may learn about the processes of conception and pregnancy. Each new life has a unique soul and body, and to help create another human being is an awe-inspiring responsibility. That is why we should have such great reverence for this amazing pinnacle of God’s creation.

God hates it when we separate sex from his design and casually abuse it for pleasure outside the commitment of marriage. This is a serious sin. It has been the downfall of society and culture throughout history, in recent decades especially since the “sexual revolution” beginning in the 1960s. Belonging to this sin is the rebellion against God’s design – revealed at the very beginning of creation! – of a clear distinction between male and female. This is not an arbitrary personal choice or identity. My father, a pastor who counseled hundreds of families over decades, used to remark that one of the most important gifts parents can give their children is to teach boys to be true men and girls to be true women.

Some people struggle with attraction to someone of the same sex. This is not uncommon and shouldn’t worry us any more than struggling with sinful opposite-sex fantasies. In either case, experiencing temptation is not a sin, but it is wrong to act on our temptations. For anyone, the main thing is to put our sexuality under God’s will.

When adolescents start to awaken to sexual attractions and then fall in love it is a completely natural and wonderful thing. But the right way to handle it is to keep these feelings deep in one’s heart. A young person should never be ashamed to tell their parents about such feelings. It’s important in such situations to pray that God helps us to keep our sexual urges and feelings submitted to what is good – that is, waiting for marriage to the right person in God’s time. Passionate romantic feelings are fickle, and often come and go like brushfires that burn fast and furious but die out quickly when they run out of fuel. True love from God needs to grow slowly and be watered and fed by the test of time and faith and commitment. That’s why in my church, we discourage those too young to be seriously considering marriage from pairing off in exclusive relationships, but rather to enjoy friendships and camaraderie with all their peers.

The Christian approach to love that I’ve sketched out here runs directly counter to what today’s mainstream culture considers normal. Some may claim that it’s repressed, prudish, or legalistic – the opposite of the kind of romantic love most people celebrate on Valentine’s Day. Yet as the original Saint Valentine knew, true love – love grounded in one’s relationship to God and to one’s fellow human beings as bearers of God’s image – is the only kind worth having. It’s both liberating and joy-giving. As he showed, it’s literally worth dying for. Happy Valentine’s Day! 

J. Heinrich Arnold serves as a senior pastor for the Bruderhof in the United States and abroad.