Last Night: Learning to Love, Loving to Learn

Bud & Bert, circa 1976-77

We had a rule when we first started going together. Either of us could ask any question and the other had to answer. No ducking topics. No avoiding sharing the truth.

We were trying to get to know each other. As she said, "You lived nineteen years of life before I ever met you. How am I supposed to know you if I don't know everything about those 19 years?"

So the Q&A sessions became our dates. We'd sit out by the fake well on the front lawn, or on the steps of the dorm, or in the library, or wherever we could get some sort of privacy on the campus of Central Christian College. And we'd learn to love everything about each other.

It was in those sessions I learned she loves Tom Sawyer and yellow flowers and pigs. She learned I don't like lima beans, but I do like baseball and Superman.

Somewhere along the process, we learned to go beyond liking each other and actually begin to be like each other. We've spent a lifetime doing that.

It took me a long time to write those two short sentences listing some of what we learned about each other because we've long since become so blended in our interests and tastes as to make it hard to remember the beginning of it all. Learning to love what you learn about the one you love - it changes you.

Every couple goes through this process. If they don't, the relationship neither thrives nor survives. We've counseled a long list of couples over the years, and one of the fatal flaws to any relationship is a failure to continue to learn what the other love. Loving to learn about the other is part and parcel of learning to love for the long haul. Otherwise they settle into being two people inhabiting the same house, sleeping in the same bed, going about separate lives. And, for many, going their separate ways.

A believer's relationship with Jesus follows a similar path.

Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.  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.  These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.  John 15:9-11

Under the Law, as practiced by the keepers of the Jewish religion, keeping His commandments was the requirement that stood on its own as the centerpiece of the covenant relationship. Jesus turned that perspective inside out. Learning to love Him and loving to learn what He loves is the core of the relationship. Keeping His commandments is what will happen naturally when I move beyond learning to like Him and begin to be like Him.

People whose faith is on the rocks share a common problem: a failure to sustain the effort to get to know Him better. The more I abide in Him, the more I blend my character, my loves, my hates into His character, loves, and hates, the more obedience becomes a way of life.

But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first! Revelation 2:4, NLT