Leading and Loving Sacrificially

One song that has been popular on mainstream radio since last October is “Mine” the first single off of Taylor Swift’s new album “Speak Now.” As I was listening to the song, I began to realize that while there are some aspects of the love story in this song that are in direct disagreement with the teachings of the Bible, there are other parts that speak some truth from Scripture about romance.

I assume that most of you readers have heard this tune, but if you have not or it has been a while I will review. This song is written in the first person as the story of a girl who appears to have had a difficult family life (she calls her father a ‘careless man’ in the chorus). She thus is very guarded about opening up to anyone, and doesn’t trust that any man’s love will ever last. However, she meets a young man who moved to her town to attend college and she falls for him immediately.

Swift then advances the story ahead a few years, where it appears they live together outside of the bounds of marriage, which certainly implies premarital sex that is prohibited in scripture (see 1 Corinthians 5 where Paul devotes an entire chapter talking about sexual immorality). However, we also learn that our protagonist had shared her secrets with this young man, thus dropping her guard, putting herself in a vulnerable position.

This is where things get interesting, as one night at 2am a fight breaks out between them finding our young woman running out of the house where she is surprised to find her boyfriend following after her. As she braces herself ‘for the goodbye’ since that is ‘all she’d ever known’ he completely surprises her by stating “I’ll never leave you alone” and then reminds her that he loves and her.

While I would be much happier if this song included marriage, there is still something we as Christians, particularly Christian men, can glean from this song. God has designed us as men to be the pursuer of the women. A whole book of the Old Testament is devoted to the Godly view of sexuality and romance, and the Apostle Paul wrote about how the husband needs to be the leader of his wife and children, by submitting to the authority of God (Ephesians 5:25-33). In this chapter Paul tells men that they are to ‘love their wives with the same love Christ showed the Church.’

Jesus gave up his life as a sacrifice to redeem the Church, therefore husbands need to sacrifice of themselves to lead and love their wives. Kind of like the young man in this story song. When they got into an argument and she stormed out, he followed her and brought her back, by reminding her of his love for her. He didn’t let her leave with a broken heart, and sought after her and led her back!