Loveology: God. Love. Marriage. Sex. And the Never-Ending Story of Male and Female. - Hardcover

Comer, John Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0310337267 ISBN 13: 9780310337263

Publisher: Thomas Nelson, 2014

Synopsis

Discover wisdom from Scripture that will help you navigate the confusing waters of love and relationships in today’s world.

In Loveology, pastor and New York Times bestselling author John Mark Comer helps you understand what the Bible has to say about sexuality, romance, singleness, and what it means to be male and female.

In the beginning, God created Adam. Then he made Eve. And ever since we've been picking up the pieces. Love and hate. Marriage and divorce. Sexuality and adultery. Romance and heartache. Love is the source of our highest highs and lowest lows. We see the messiness of love all around us and are left with so many questions about what love really is.

Amid all this confusion and pain, Loveology offers you a fresh, hopeful, biblical perspective on love that starts with marriage and works backward. Comer helps you understand what is right in male/female relationships—what God intended in the Garden. And about what is wrong—the fallout in a post-Eden world. Comer shows how when you let Scripture transform your understanding of love it will transform your relationships and your life.

This book brings honesty, wit, and compassion to one of life’s most beautiful and challenging areas and ends with a raw, uncut, anything-goes Q and A dealing with the most asked questions about sexuality and relationships.

Loveology is for singles, engaged couples, and the newly married—both inside and outside the church—who want to learn what the Bible has to say about sexuality and relationships. If you want to ask the why questions and get intelligent, nuanced answers that are rooted in the Scriptures, this book is for you.

About this title

About the Author

John Mark Comer is the New York Times bestselling author of Practicing the Way, Live No Lies, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, God Has a Name, and three previous books. He's also the founder and teacher of Practicing the Way, a simple, beautiful way to integrate spiritual formation into your church or small group. Prior to starting Practicing the Way, he spent almost twenty years pastoring Bridgetown Church in Portland, OR, and working out discipleship to Jesus in the post-Christian West.

From the Inside Flap

In a time when people are drowning in a sea of definitions, my friend John Mark Comer has brilliantly defined love, marriage, and sexuality in ways that find rescue in the ways of the kingdom and teachings of Jesus. This is a much-needed tool in a culture where so many lack clarity.
Chuck Bomar, pastor of Colossae Church and author of Better Off without Jesus

My concept of sexuality has been greatly renewed through John Mark's thorough explanation of God's heart for it. I cannot begin to express the impeccable timing of Loveology for my generation.
Michael, 25

Finally. Someone who will talk about love, marriage, and sexuality in a way that doesn't sound like a textbook or an awkward conversation with your parents or a "just say no" campaign. Loveology wakes up a conversation I didn't know I needed to have, and it will leave a lasting impression for years to come.
Allison Vesterfelt, author of Packing Light

It is so refreshing to have a real and honest study about love, sexuality, and relationships for what they are. Gifts from the Lord.
Tim, 25

Loveology is a compassionate and courageous manifesto for the most sexually confused generation in human history. With grace and truth, John Mark shows how the revolutionary good news of Jesus intersects with our sexuality and relationships. Highly recommended.
Mike Erre, senior pastor of First Evangelical Free Church, Fullerton, California, and author of The Jesus of Suburbia

John Mark's lifelong propensity to question everything has led him to flip upside down the current Christian cultural thinking about dating and marriage. My brother has shaped the way I approach love.
John Mark's little brother, Matthew, 21

In a culture where marriage is optional and sex is cheap, people need to know how to navigate the deep issues of love, marriage, and sex, all while following Jesus. Loveology is a great resource to do just that.
Rick McKinley, lead pastor of Imago Dei Community, Portland, Oregon, and author of This Beautiful Mess

My husband and I heard "loveology" at the beginning of our relationship, and it changed our entire view on love and dating. It exposed and shattered all the "Hollywood movie" lies that were embedded in our minds and replaced them with God's original design. Following the Loveology principles gave our relationship a sense of direction, saved us from making a lot of painful mistakes many couples make, and answered a ton of questions.
Naomi and Isaiah, 22 and 24, married for seven months

Love is at the forefront of the experience of what it means to be human. We can choose to try to figure it out on our own, or we can choose to see how the designer of love intended us to experience all this. Loveology guides us straight into the heart of God, who created this wondrous, powerful experience of love, romance, sex, marriage, masculinity, and femininity.
Dan Kimball, teaching pastor at Vintage Faith Church, Santa Cruz, California

John Mark's Loveology material provided my wife and me a generationally relevant framework from which to discuss (during our long-distance relationship) the complex topics of romance, dating, sex, and family. His teachings unashamedly address the awkward and messy world of romance in a biblical and countercultural way. Read this book if you are single, dating, engaged, or married. And then read it again.
Benjamin, 22

Loveology brings clarity to the "why" behind our questions about love, sex and marriage. (You know, those topics we rarely talk about ...) Instead of giving a formula, John Mark Comer relays what he has learned from extensive study and transforms it into clear and humble teachings that will bring us to our own illumination moments and to a deeper understanding of God's love for us.
Joy Eggerichs, director of Love and Respect NOW

Loveology challenges our thinking about the purpose and plan for sex in marriage and provides insight into what Scripture actually says about it. John Mark married us, and we have front-row seats as a part of his community to see him work this out in his own marriage. Read this book and start putting into practice the things you learn here.
Matt and Anna, John Mark's newly married neighbors

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Loveology

God, love, sex, marriage, and the never-ending story of male and female

By John Mark Comer

ZONDERVAN

Copyright © 2013 John Mark Comer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-310-33726-3

Contents

Genesis 2, 013, 
The beginning, 017, 
Part 1 / Love, 
Ahava, 029, 
Part 2 / Marriage, 
What's it for?, 047, 
Cuatro, 055, 
Reverse engineering, "the one," and other things—like unicorns, 067, 
Part 3 / Sex, 
Very good, 081, 
Echad, 097, 
Tree of life, 109, 
Part 4 / Romance, 
The Song, 127, 
Isaac and Rebekah, 145, 
A form of torture called waiting, 159, 
Part 5 / Male and female, 
X and Y, 173, 
War, peace, and why marriage is really about Jesus, 187, 
The gift that nobody wants, 195, 
Gay, 211, 
Epilogue, 231, 
Proverbs 8, 243, 
Q and A (with Tammy Comer and Dr. Gerry Breshears), 253, 
Notes, 283, 
Thanks, 299, 
About the author, 301, 

CHAPTER 1

Love

Ahava

I believe in love at first sight. Well, kind of.

It was the sixteenth of September, 1998. I was at a party withfriends, outdoors on a hot summer evening. In the Northwest weget an Indian summer, and September is my favorite time of theyear. It was a perfect day—high 70s, but with a soft breeze. Thetrees over my head were making that swishing sound they do whenthey flirt with the wind.

In the middle of a conversation, I saw her out of the corner of myeye. She was a vision of long, curly black hair and deep, almond-shapedeyes, and she was walking toward me.

You know those guys who are suave with the ladies?

I am not one of them.

Girls make me nervous. I'm clumsy and awkward on a good day.And this girl—well, let's just say all my fine motor skills went outthe window.

I'm sure I was staring. Heck, I was probably drooling. I dropped apen I'd been fiddling with. "Shoot. I'm such a klutz." Before I couldreach down, she walked over and picked it up off the ground. "Hereya go," she said—and all I could do was stare at two of the brownesteyes I'd ever seen.

She might as well have said, "Will you marry me?"

I was hooked. There was something about her smile. It was warmand disarming. She was calm. Relaxed. Soothing. Everything I'm not.

And she was beautiful. I mean, crazy, over-the-top, don't-even-try-or-you-will-make-a-fool-of-yourselfbeautiful.

Everything after the pen is hazy. I'm sure I muddled through a shortdialogue and embarrassed myself. But I remember I didn't sleepthat night.

Or the next.

Or the next.

She took over my mind. Her troops marched in and colonized myimagination. All I could think about was seeing her again.

A few weeks later I said to a friend, "I think she's it."

He was annoyed, understandably. "What? You barely know her!"

And he was right. It was an impetuous thing to say. I barely knewher. But that didn't matter for one simple reason: I was in love.

I had no clue what was coming around the bend. No idea that ourpicture-perfect romance would be followed by a less-than-idealmarriage. That my entire paradigm for our relationship was seriouslyoff-kilter. That hard stuff was brewing on the horizon.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

At this point in my story, I was awash in feelings of romantic love—attraction,tension, mystery, allure. I was in love, deeper than I'd everbeen. Drowning, and loving every minute of it.

Time for a definition

In love. What does that even mean?

"Love" is a junk drawer we dump all sorts of ideas into, just becausewe don't have anywhere else to put them.

I "love" God, and I "love" fish tacos. See the problem?

The way we use the word is so broad, so generic, that I'm not surewe understand it anymore. How should we define love?

To some, love is tolerance. I hear this all the time in my city. Theidea is that rather than judge people, we should "love" them. Andwhat people mean is that we shouldn't call out something as wrong.After all, as long as it's not hurting anybody, who are we to judge?And while this sounds nice, and forward, and progressive, it doesn'twork for me. The opposite of love isn't hate. It's apathy. And there'sa fine line between tolerance and apathy.

To many of us, love is passion for a thing. It's the word we call on toconjure up all our feelings of affection. We love hiking, or we lovethat new record by the band you've never heard of, or we love chipsand guac.

When we aim the word at people, we usually mean the exact samething. When we say we love someone, we mean we have deep feelingsof affection because they make us feel alive all over again—adventurous,brave, happy.

Love, by this definition, is pure, unfiltered emotion. And your rolein love is passive. It's something that happens to you. Think of thephrase "fall in love." It's like tripping over a rock or a curb. Andit's fantastic. But there's a dark underbelly to feeling this kind ofromantic love. If we can fall into it, then we can fall out of it.

What happens when the emotions fade or disappear? What happenswhen someone else makes you feel even more alive? Thenyou have a serious problem on your hands.

If you're dating, it's not the end of the world. You break up andmove on.

But what if you're engaged? Married? Do you stay together, eventhough you're not "in love" anymore? Or do you go the way of the50 percent?

I believe that marriage is for life. Remember what Jesus said?"What God has joined together, let no one separate." I stand withJesus , which is why I think we need a redefinition of love that willstand up to the frontal assault of life. And we find that redefinitionin the Scriptures.

There's a letter in the New Testament called 1 John. It was writtenby a guy named—well, I'm sure you figured that part out. John wasone of Jesus' disciples. He spent three years with Love-incarnate,and he was known as "the disciple whom Jesus loved." That prettymuch makes him an expert on the subject.

John's definition of love is blatant and clear-cut—"This is love: notthat we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as anatoning sacrifice for our sins."

Love = Jesus on the cross.

There you have it, in black-and-white.

If you want to know what love looks like, don't look at a dictionary.Look at a Jewish prophet crucified outside Jerusalem. Look at Godin the flesh, giving his life away for the world.

Does that sound anything like "deep feelings of affection"?

Don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that Jesus was feelingsomething in that moment. It was "for the joy set before him" that"he endured the cross." Love is emotion, but it's gotta be morethan that.

Notice that John uses the word love as both a noun and a verb."This is love ... that he loved us ..."

Love is a noun and a verb.

Put another way, love is a feeling and an action.

When it comes to the feeling of love, you're in the passenger seat.As I said before, your role is passive. It's something that happensto you. But with the action of love, you're at the wheel. Your role isactive. It's something you do.

And the feeling of love isn't bad. There's nothing wrong with romanticfeelings. The first song (Adam's poem in Genesis 2), and the longestsong (Song of Songs) are both celebrations of romantic love. Ifyou are "in love"—enjoy it. We are emotional creatures. God madeus that way. Romantic feelings are a gift from the Creator God.

But at its root, feelings can be selfish. Behind all the flowers andpoetry and twitterpation, there's a narcissist hiding in the closet.

When we say "I love you," what we often mean is, "When I'm aroundyou, I feel happy. You make me feel better about myself. Comfortablein my own skin." Now, that's not all bad, but you don't have tobe a psychologist to figure out where that road leads.

Love, the action, the verb, is a whole other story. At its core, love—asdefined by Jesus on the cross—is self-giving.

Over and over again, the authors of the New Testament point toJesus' death on the cross as the ultimate act of self-giving love.

In another place, John writes, "For God so loved the world that hegave his one and only Son ..."

The prolific author Paul writes that God "did not spare his own Son,but gave him up for us all ..."

And in Paul's mind, Jesus' death is the model for how a man is tolove a woman. Later he writes, "Husbands, love your wives, just asChrist loved the church and gave himself up for her ..." Husbandor wife, male or female, we can all take a lesson from that.

Why love is about washing feet

This idea of Jesus as the model for how we are to love each othersounds docile and tame and cliché, but when we actually readabout the life of Jesus, it's stunning.

I love the story in The Gospel of John where Jesus washes thedisciples' feet. In the first century, foot washing was the job of aservant or, worse, a slave. The streets were unpaved. Filled with dirtand muck and animal droppings. People walked around in sandals,not shoes, and by the end of the day, their feet were ... well, useyour imagination. But Jesus, the embodiment of the creator God,the God who made humans from the dust on the street right outsidethe door, picks up a towel and starts to clean the grime frombetween John's toes.

Imagine the mayor of a city pulling up a manhole cover, droppingdown into the sewer, and starting to shovel crap. Now dial that upby a factor of a gillion, and you're starting to see what's going onin the story.

When Jesus finished with the disciples' feet, he asked, "Do youunderstand what I have done for you?" Almost as if to point outthe staggering implications of what just happened. "You call me'Teacher' and 'Lord,' and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now thatI, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also shouldwash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you shoulddo as I have done for you."

Jesus' life is the example for how to love.

It's that easy.

And that difficult.

Because to Jesus, love is serving. It's cleaning garbage off his feet.It's wiping grime from between her toes. It's choosing—choosing ofyour own free will—to play the role of the servant, the least importantperson in the room.

And that is not easy to do.

That's why love is commanded by God in the Scriptures. Jesus said,"A new command I give you: Love one another." In fact, Jesus saidthe greatest command in all of the Torah (the Bible of his day) wasto "love the Lord your God ... love your neighbor as yourself."

Remember how we talked about the difference between the feelingof love and the action of love? You cannot command feelings.You can only command actions. God does not command you to likeyour neighbor or to have deep feelings of affection for your neighbor.He commands you to love your neighbor.

But what kind of love?

The Jesus kind of love. Cross-shaped love. The down-on-your-knees-with-a-smelly-towel-in-your-handssort of love.

When you strip love down to its essence—its core—it's self-giving.Yes, it's romantic feelings, but we have to understand that it's somuch more.

Ahava

In Hebrew, there's this word ahava, and it's a godsend as we learnabout love. In English, we have just the one word—love—to denotea wide range of positive emotion, but in Hebrew, there's a handful,and each one draws out a specific nuance.

You can rayah somebody. That's the love you feel for a friend. Infact, it can be translated "friend" or "companion." In one ancientHebrew story, a man says to his girlfriend, "Arise, my rayah, mybeautiful one, come with me." Rayah is when you want to get outof town, spend time together, talk, play, goof off, and just do lifeshoulder to shoulder. We all need a good rayah.

Then there's dod. This word is used in the opening line of Song ofSongs. The woman says, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of hismouth—for your dod is more delightful than wine." Dod is whenyou see a woman and you instantly want to make babies with her,when you see a guy and all you can think about is what his skinwould feel like up against yours. Dod is when keeping your handsin your pockets takes every ounce of strength in your being.

We'll get to dod later ...

For now, let's drill down on this word ahava. This kind of love issomething more. Something deeper, wider, and stronger. It's both ofthe above—rayah and dod—plus some. It's a love that goes down tothe soul, the deepest part of your being. It's a love that is unbendingand unflinching, and that doesn't take no for an answer. It's relentlessand implacable.

At the climax of the poem called Song of Songs, there's a movingstanza ...

Place me like a seal over your heart,like a seal on your arm;for ahava is as strong as death,its jealousy unyielding as the grave.

It burns like blazing fire,like a mighty flame.Many waters cannot quench ahava;rivers cannot sweep it away.

Are you picking up on the imagery?

Ahava is like death, like the grave—an unstoppable force that weare powerless to fight off.

Ahava is like a fire out of control, engulfing forests and cities. Itcannot be quenched.

And ahava is like a tsunami, a tidal wave of fierce, unbridled powerbearing down on the world.

The point of the poetry is that ahava is strong. Feelings, no matterhow vivid, in the long run, are weak. They come and go. But ahavahas resolve. Staying power. It has that word we all tend to avoid—commitment.Over time, it builds up a head of steam, and it breaksthrough every obstacle. It's a love of the heart, and a love of the will.

My grandparents on my mother's side have been married for sixtyyears this summer, but a few months ago the doctor found a tumoron my grandma's brain. They rushed her into surgery, and right nowshe's in recovery. She can barely string together a sentence, but mygrandfather is right at her side, 24/7. And here's the crazy part—theyare more "in love" than ever before. That's ahava.

Ahava is the one and only kind of love that will carry a relationshippast the early "deep feelings of affection" and through the whole oflife—decades of highs and lows, marriage and family, a career andunemployment, suffering and celebration, sickness and health, andwell into the epilogue of life.

You can't build a marriage on deep feelings of affection alone,because they're unreliable. Flaky would be an understatement. Andyou can't build a relationship just on rayah. Friendship is vital, butyou need an extra spark, something more. Dod isn't enough either.No matter how beautiful he or she is, over time, the body will startto wrinkle and age and decay. What happens then? When you stillhave decades of life ahead of you? You need something more.

You need ahava.

The Via Dolorosa

I still think about that night so many Septembers ago when I firstsaw my wife. We were kids. I was a freshman in college, eighteenyears old. I had no clue what I was getting into. Nobody told me the"deep feelings of affection" fade after a few years. I guess I wasn'tlistening when the experts said that people who marry young havehigher divorce rates.

But even if I had known all that, it wouldn't have changed a thing.I still would have chased her to the world's end. It was feelingsthat started it all, but we needed something more to make ourmarriage stick.

Here we are today, with over a decade of marriage under our belts.Three kids, a mortgage, and—thank God—no minivan.

And we still love each other.

There are days when we're "in love"—when we feel love. When wefeel the déjà vu of that first night in the park. And then there aredays when we are tired, annoyed, and grouchy, and we feel—let'sjust say—"other" kinds of emotions for one another.

Through all of life, though, we are learning to love each other inJesus' way. Learning the genius of cross-shaped love.

A while back, I spent a month in Jerusalem. I wanted to learn moreabout the context for Jesus' life, and there's no better place to dothat than in the City of Peace. But a month is a long time to be awayfrom home, and the entire time my mind was turned to my wife.Absence was doing its thing, and I was realizing—all over again—whata gift Tammy is to my life. After endless hours together, I stillmissed her. I still craved her next to me when I nodded off to sleep.

One night I walked the Via Dolorosa—the road Jesus walked to thecross. It's a moving experience to imagine Jesus—the creator ofeverything—covered in blood and open wounds, tripping his way upthe hill to Golgotha. And that evening, walking in the Judean heat,the gravity of Jesus' love hit me all over again. That's what Jesusmeans by "love one another." It's a love that feels—deep, raw, andtrue emotions. And it's a love that does. A love that walks throughthe crowd of haunting spectators and up to a Roman guard waitingwith a hammer and a bag of nails.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Loveology by John Mark Comer. Copyright © 2013 John Mark Comer. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0310337267
• ISBN 13: 9780310337263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304