True Love

I've posted this mainly becuase i want all my brothers & sisters to be attracted to Superior, Godly, and True Love and i want them to be repulsed by Cheap, Idolatrous, Immitations of that love.

To truly love something (anything that is not God) you must first lose that thing (hate it, count it as rubbish) and look to God as your all in all. Then, and only then can you ever truly love the thing (after you've lost it, after you've hated it, after you've died to it for God's sake). This is especially true in Marriage. In the following I first give a demonstration of what this would look like in my own heart. Then I attempt to describe the extreme and terrible dangers of any other view of marriage and likewise argue for the many and wonderful joys of this view. (Throughout I talk on a personal lever but it should be read in general thinking of a husband when I say "I" or "me" and thinking of a wife when I say "her" or "she")…

What it Looks like in the Heart:
My God, all I want is You. You are my Joy. You are, Yourself, Joy. All else is loss to me. To have anything together with You is not gain but loss, not addition but subtraction. You are my All in All. I want to have You & You alone with no distraction, with nothing else. You are my Sovereign Joy, my One Thing. You have done this, Lord. You alone have turned my sorrow into joy. You have fixed my heart on You alone and thereby caused me to walk in Your ways. Oh Your Faithfulness! And God, in this exclusive love for You which You have given to me there seems to have arisen within it –not apart from it (I pray)- a smaller love of the same essence. It is a love which (as far as I cant tell) is a love for You (as You are the only thing Loveable -even in my heart) but it encompasses another that is not You. It as though the love for You & joy in You which You have given me has breeched my capacities for such things, which You also have given to me, so that it has over-flown to bring in another. I have found in me the desire, the longing, to share this love for You (that is the overflow, not as though I'm splitting it in two) with another and to see this love and joy in You cultivated in the other and thereby to increase my love and joy in You. I think I see now more clearly Your aim in relationships and more so (or most so) in marriage.
It is not that I love her and love You. It is that I love her because I love You. I want to love her as You have loved me, that she would love You the way (and more so) that I have loved You- and that the love You have for me may become more manifest to me in my love for her that I may see more clearly and cherish more fully the love with which You've loved me.

The Downfalls of other types of love and the Wonders of this love:
Godly love is True love & Idolatrous love is a fake, twisted and dark imitation of that True love. Keeping this in mind, I think will go far in accomplishing the desired end of resisting idolatrous love & cultivating Godly love. I must remind myself that there is nothing truly lovely or loveable in the object itself and that the only loveliness or loveableness it possesses is that which it is given by God and has in relation to God's loveliness. To be with anything or anyone (including myself or my spouse) apart from God would be Hell. There is nothing in a thing, itself which can ever satisfy me. And there is nothing in me, myself which could ever satisfy anyone else. To be with her not in relation to God would lead to the heights of misery and sorrow for both of us. I would lead her nowhere but to frustration and to hell and provide nothing but darkness for her. She would drag me down to the pits of despair (where I rightly deserve to be).
But, if our love is grounded in, flowing from, directed toward and ultimately a participation in our respective love for God, oh how beautiful and happy our relation becomes! I don't need her and so I can give to her rather than try to take what is not there. I can lead rather than retreat. And what would I give to her but that which has filled my lack and overflown- I would give her God! I would lead her to God! With every word and every deed I would joyously labor to any extent and suffer any human pain in order to see her deeply, passionately, breath-takingly, beautifully, overwhelmingly happy in her Mighty & Lovely God Who loves her with an Everlasting Love to which my small acts of love are a feeble pointer. And she would rejoice with Joy unspeakable and full of glory as she took in the awesome vision of her God which He has graciously displayed through me and as she contemplated the immensities of her blessings & blessedness in Him, love and joy and adoration and a conglomerate of millions of unspeakably wonderful emotions would well up inside of her and overflow in a great and soft "I love You. I love you so much" which would be directed both at her God and also at the man through which God has displayed Himself in such a lovely way to her. And (ideally) neither she nor I would be tempted to love the other apart from God because the Joyous vision of God we have through each other would be exceedingly more lovely and satisfying than the poison we would have in each other apart from our Great God. Neither would our joy in each other ever grow dim or faint or stale or stagnant in any way because it is not only a joy in each other (each being finite) but rather it is mainly joy in God who is Infinite. Because I could never plumb the depths of joy in all that God is, therefore I could never plumb the depths of godly joy which I have in her and likewise her in me. And so the idea of marriage growing old is utterly done away with when in relation to joy in God. In this manner, there is continual newness in marriage for we will continually & forever be discovering new joyous thing of our Beautiful & Infinite God through each other.
And all this only being possible provided that the origin is Love for God at the exclusion of all else (including her at first).