Love is the interplay of the whole personality.  The relationship is personal, and the whole personality of man is the unit of body-soul-spirit.  The Bible teaches that there is such a thing as a continuation of the spirit, after the body dies.  But we must be careful not to be platonic here.   The emphasis in the Scripture is upon the unity of the whole man.  And with communication—substantial, though not perfect—the body is the instrument.  Actually there is no other way to have communication except through the body.  But in marriage this becomes a very special thing to understand.  Sexual love and romantic love are both equally out of place if they are extramarital and therefore outside of the proper legal circle.  Both are wrong, and equally wrong.  And if either is the ‘all’ even with the proper legal relationship, they must dwindle and end in an agony or a search for variety; but if the couple stand as personalities—personality facing personality—within that which is the proper legal circle, then both the romantic and the sexual has its fulfillment in the full circle of what we are, in thinking, acting, and feeling.   

God designed that there should be a ring of life within the legal circle of marriage.  There is to be joy and beauty in the interplay of the total personalities.  Achieving God’s design for the highest level of joy and beauty in marriage can only be achieved through the person of Jesus Christ, being ‘in’, the center of, the life of the marriage.  Only God, through the person of Jesus Christ, provides/infuses the necessary life ingredients that create the moment-by-moment environment for love and communication to grow and flourish. 

Sin (the Fall) has brought a division between man and woman, and thus their bodies tend to be separated from their personalities.  To the extent that we live thus, we are less than man was meant to be.  If we as Christians live with this separation, we are saying that the twenty -first century man is right when he says, ‘we are only animals or machines.’  In the animal world the sexual relationship at its proper moment is enough, but it is never so with man.  The personal (the whole man as he was created) is needed.  The thing must be seen as a whole, as a unit, whole man, body-soul-spirit, within the legal circle, as personal, with personality, joined to Christ, with the reality of communication and love.   (We conclude this study with the next post)

Thoughts developed or used directly from the work of Schaeffer, Francis. True Spirituality . Tyndale House Publishers, Inc