LILR

Of course, even with my new-found desire to honor God, I was still attracted to girls. There was one in particular I liked for years and I think she liked me. But about the time I started liking her, I listened to another teaching by a YWAM leader named Lynn Green. It was called Live in Loving Relationships (LILR) and it helped form the way I handled relationships with girls for the rest of my life. 

The main lesson from Live in Loving Relationships was that it is wrong to be controlled by your emotions and feelings over your will. Evolutionists believe that emotions are just natural impulses of the way we have developed and we can’t help but be controlled by them. Christianity is the belief that if God made us, then He designed us with certain guidelines, given in the Bible, which will help us to live our lives in the best way possible.

Often our feelings and emotions, guided by a sinful nature, draw us to act in a way contrary to those guidelines. But if we want to live the way He designed us and to glorify Him, then we will resist those contrary emotions and feelings and instead be led by our will. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have emotions and feelings. They are also God-designed to be fully embraced in the right context but not to the detriment of His guidelines.

In Live in Loving Relationships, Lynn Green taught that until that one person that we are going to marry comes along, we should not get involved physically with anyone else. First Corinthians 6 discusses how being sexual with someone makes us ”one” with them. It is a metaphysical/spiritual union that unites two people in an inextricable bond. Once you make this bond with someone, separating from him or her actually tears away part of your soul. As Genesis 2:24 reads, “the two…become one flesh”. So sexual union should be reserved exclusively for the person you make a lifelong commitment to to marry. 

Lynn taught that you should not be physical in any way with someone until you are married because when we start down that road it’s hard to stop. Hand-holding leads to hugging, leads to petting, leads to…. Lynn also discussed the futility of teenagers getting into boyfriend/girlfriend relationships. Teenagers are typically too young to get married and if you’re too young to get married, you should not get into a relationship that usually leads to getting physical, which leads to….

Actually he disparaged the whole dating scene in general because of the way it draws people into getting physical and the heartbreak it causes and the selfish lifestyle it engenders. Instead, he advocated developing friendships in group contexts. Then when there is one that you are particularly interested in, someone who attracts you, then you can explore (without getting physical) whether this is a mutual attraction that may lead to marriage. If not, then you both move on without your souls being torn apart. 

I embraced this teaching. Of course, this still didn’t mean that I didn’t like girls anymore. I liked a lot of girls through the years. The difference was in how I handled the relationships, beginning with this girl on the ship. We never discussed liking each other until years later when we were old enough for the possibility of marriage.

In his teaching, Lynn Green also talked about the fact that Christians should love everyone. We all know people we tend to just not like because of what they do or who they are. But that’s just wrong. Mr. Green gave a method for correcting that. He taught that, as difficult as it may be, we should just start praying for people that we don’t like. Then, as we start to invest time and thought towards that person, God will slowly but surely change our hearts. There was a girl on the ship that I absolutely could not stand being around. So I tried it…and it worked! We ended up becoming friends.


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