Remix

Tonight we continued our look at teenage love and relationships with our series called Baby.

In the Old Testament, there are over a dozen different types of love. Each indicates a different emotion or feeling. The challenge is that in our world today, we only use one word to describe love. We say I love pizza; just the same as we would say we love our parents.  However, both have a very different meaning.

Tonight we took a closer look at the three specific types of love that God created a love relationship to run on. The first is Raya, this is friendship love, the second is ahava, love that commits, and the third is the Dod, the love of physical affection. We challenged the students to realize that love is something so great, and powerful that God does not want us to mess it up by playing around with it.

In their group time, students, with the help of their life group leaders, discussed how each of these different types of love build on each other, and how when they are all present, create the type of love God designed us to experience. For our 6th graders we did not talk about the third type of love, DOD because many of them may not be ready to jump into this subject. We felt it best to not get in to it with them at this time. We do however encourage you as parents to discuss physical affection with your student and help them understand when it is appropriate and not appropriate. If you need help with these please don’t hesitate to contact our student office, and we will be more than happy to help you work through this.

Listed below are some questions that you can use to spark conversation with your students and connect with what we talked about this week:

• Are there different meaning behind the word love?
• When it comes to a “love relationship” between a guy and a girl, why is developing a healthy friendship important?
• When it comes to a “love relationship” between a guy and a girl, why is commitment important?
• What does it mean to commit to somebody?
• What are some appropriate signs of physical affection as a teenager? (Let this be a dialogue between the two of you. If they suggest something you are uncomfortable with, have discussion about why it is or isn’t a good thing to do.)