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The deepest desire of the human heart is to know genuine love. Children first encounter love in relationship with parents. Sometimes the quality of the parental love establishes a good foundation that allows them to recognize and practice genuine love.

But parents are human too. All too often even parental love falls short of the quality of love children long for. Parents can only give to their children what has already been given to them. A child who has never known genuine love, as an adult, may struggle with love for the rest of life.

Because the human heart longs to know love, a false love fi lls the void in the absence of genuine love. False love wears many masks. Consider one representative, though incomplete list of false loves:

Exploitive Love: Do for me.

Indulgent Love: Make me feel good.

Avoidant Love: Help me dodge my responsibility.

Controlling Love: I want to feel powerful.

Possessive Love: Help me feel safe.

A false love hopes to fi nd satisfaction for something broken. But it always results in hurt and harm.

Most everyone has encountered a false love at one time or another. During the High School years young people experiment with love, sometimes with disastrous consequences. During the young adult years people often begin to build a life on a false love because they know no other alternative. Adults must taste the bitter fruit of the false love that has matured with tragic consequences.

The Lord gave the Ten Commandments to Israel at Mt. Sinai in order to give a world awash in false love a guide to what genuine love can be.

At Mt. Sinai, God entered into Covenant with Israel. A covenant brings people together into a quality of association that is higher than friendship, even higher than the parental bond.

A covenant relationship is the highest bond because it is freely chosen. Marriage is a covenant relationship. A man and woman leave their parents, and cleave to one another. They hold tightly to one another in a bond that is constituted by choice.

The Ten Commandments provide guidance for people who have been broken by false loves. When taken seriously, the Ten Commandments plant seeds of genuine love that can grow to bear wholesome fruit bathed in goodness.

A covenant relationship is not dependent on feelings, or expedience, or convenience. It gives expression to genuine love because it is grounded in freedom, and it continues to live in liberty through the choices we make every day.