Since ours is a Judeo-Christian faith, on occasion I find opportunity to teach on the Jewish background of Biblical concepts. Such studies can bring an enrichment to the Christian’s moral and spiritual value system. This is especially true regarding the subject of marriage and the family.

One Hebrew concept that might be well worth our society’s embracing is the art of learning to love in contrast to falling in love. Falling in love is a very romantic idea, a concept of the Roman culture. Romantic experiences are characteristically mystical, enchanting, captivating, and often given to fantasy. In such a state, reality can become a victim of emotion. True love is not merely a state of mind or an emotional condition or a physical act, although love may produce all of these effects. Love is a spirit. The Apostle Paul writing to the young man Timothy indicates that true love is a spiritual experience of the heart accompanied by sound thinking: "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1: 7).

Have you ever noticed how many people who just "fall" in love tend to abandon rational thinking. In response to the occasional irrational behavior of young lovers, one may hear it said, "Oh! Just overlook them, they’re in love." Perhaps one of the reasons we see so many marriages "falling apart" today is because they just "fell together" in the first place. Dr. Marvin Wilson in his outstanding book Our Father Abraham—Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith states that opposed to the eastern thought of learning to love, in the modern West, "emphasis has been more on marrying the person that you love rather than learning to love the one that you marry."

Will our society continue to helplessly fall in love, or can we grasp the value of learning to love as well? So, how does one learn to love? For starters, we might live out the words of that old song, "Getting to know you, getting to know all about you." I have counseled many couples who were contemplating marriage. On several occasions, I have discovered to my surprise that too many of them, while ostensibly in love, did not really know each other in the cerebral sense and after some counseling were equally surprised to come to the same realization. They were speeding into marriage on high test emotion with no working knowledge of the mechanisms of marriage. They had no practical insight into the nature of the one with whom they would be involved for the rest of their lives. They knew virtually nothing of the regular maintenance procedures that should be followed.

Typically, these marriages would have been totally unsalvage-able should major repairs been required in case of a sudden breakdown. At the conclusion of one of my counseling sessions I asked the male candidate what he had been relying on to provide these inevitable necessities for marriage maintenance and he responded OJT—on the job training. What he would most likely experience is OJF—on the job failure. After getting to know each other a little better that evening they were not so sure they wanted to get married [to each other]. The end of the story is that they grasped the concept of "learning to love," got married and their marriage survives and thrives to this day.