I preached the first of a four part series on romantic love last week called, “Love Me Tender.” Taken of course from the hit song by that name.  I’m appreciative of the good feedback and I’m also grateful I am allowed by a tolerant congregation to take a stab at a subject that has more than a few verbal land mines.  One person who was very complimentary added, “could you work on a way to explain the word “erotic” to the church?” They went on to explain that some felt my use of that word created an awkward moment for some.

Here’s the context, “I believe that in the church we have mostly tolerated romance between men and women. (For one thing…)  We encourage believers to walk by faith, not feelings, and erotic love is all about feelings.  Also we are on an urgent mission with ministries to build, lives to save, and devils to fight, we don’t have time for something as inefficient and time consuming as romance.”

The word erotic comes from the Greek word Eros, which comes from the myth of the Greek god by that same name.  He’s the little guy with the arrows of romantic passion which when targeted we have no choice but to fall in love with the object of Cupids choosing.  It is a Greek word used for love. Although it’s not in the bible, there are countless biblical examples of it.   Unfortunately for those of you  uncomfortable with hearing a word that reminds of sexual intimacy these examples affirm that there is a sexual side to romantic love.  Fortunately for all of us romantic love is about a whole lot more than sex.  Erotic love  is an ardent emotional attraction with a reasonable level of  physical attraction to another person.   Consider the following bible example.

Now Laban had two daughters. The older daughter was named Leah, and the younger one was Rachel. There was no sparkle in Leah’s eyes, but Rachel had a beautiful figure and a lovely face. Since Jacob was in love with Rachel, he told her father, “I’ll work for you for seven years if you’ll give me Rachel, your younger daughter, as my wife.” … So Jacob slept with Rachel … and he loved her much more than Leah. He then stayed and worked for Laban the additional seven years.    Genesis 29:16-18, 29:29-30.

C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece on the subject, “The Four Loves,” addressed the subject of erotic lovely beautifully and tastefully. Eros for Lewis was love in the sense of ‘being in love’ or ‘loving’ someone, as opposed to the raw sexuality of what he called Venus: the illustration Lewis uses was the distinction between ‘wanting a woman’ and wanting one particular woman – something that matched his view of man as a rational animal, a composite both of “reasoning angel” and “instinctual alley-cat.”

I believe that there is divine  glory in human romance.  In fact, biblically speaking you can only fully comprehend the image of God when you see a man and woman in a committed relationship, for the bible says “in the image of God he created them.”  In my opinion the church needs to reawaken to this fact. Stay tuned, in the next day or two I want to show you where some really unhealthy attitudes about sex , romance and even marriage within Christianity came from.  You might be surprised.