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October 8, 2021 - February 25, 2022
Some will ask, “If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs—then what do I get out of it?” The answer is—happiness.
It is the joy that comes from giving joy, from loving another person in a costly way.
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.
Lose your life and you will save it. . . . Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. . . . 7
Many people come to marriage having been seriously hurt by parents, lovers, or former spouses. I am not talking about parents who physically or sexually abuse their children. I’m talking of the more widespread experiences of cold and indifferent parents or of verbally abusive parents who know how to punish children emotionally.
“OK, I shouldn’t do that—but you don’t understand me.”
If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.
“Cain, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it.”
God asks that you deny yourself, that you lose yourself to find yourself.
The Christian principle that needs to be at work is Spirit-generated selflessness—not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself but thinking of yourself less.
What is it that most motivates and moves you? Is it the desire for success? The pursuit of some achievement? The need to prove yourself to your parents? The need for respect from your peers? Are you largely driven by anger against someone or some people who have wronged you? Paul says that if any of these things is a greater controlling influence on you than the reality of God’s love for you, you will not be in a position to serve others unselfishly. Only out of the fear of the Lord Jesus will we be liberated to serve one another.
Louie Zamperini had been literally tortured, and his inner shame, anger, and fear had eaten up his ability to love and serve others. But each of us comes to marriage with a disordered inner being. Many of us have sought to overcome self-doubts by giving ourselves to our careers. That will mean we will choose our work over our spouse and family to the detriment of our marriage.
Others of us hope that unending affection and affirmation from a beautiful, brilliant romantic partner will finally make us feel good about ourselves. That turns the relationship into a form of salvation, and no relationship can live up to that.
Only God can fill a God-sized hole. Until God has the proper place in my life, I will always be complaining that my spouse is not loving me well enough, not respecting me enough, not supporting me enough.
Paul says in Romans 15 that we should not please ourselves because, on the cross, Christ did not please himself.
The question is, then, how can we actually be filled with the Spirit? How can we grow in the fear of the Lord, so we are not controlled by other fears?
What, then, would the effect be if we were to dive even more deeply into Jesus’s teaching and life and work? What if we were to be so immersed in his promises and summonses, his counsels and encouragements, that they dominated our inner life, capturing our imagination, and simply bubbled out spontaneously when we faced some challenge?
How would we live if we instinctively, almost unconsciously, knew Jesus’s mind and heart regarding things that confronted us?
“What does Jesus have to say about this?”
The only way to avoid sacrificing your partner’s joy and freedom on the altar of your need is to turn to the ultimate lover of your soul.
He voluntarily sacrificed himself on the cross, taking what you deserved for your sins against God and others.
On the cross he was forsaken and experienced the lostness of hell, but he did it all for us. Because of the loving sacrifice of the Son, you can know the heaven of the Father’s love through the work of the Spirit. Jesus truly “built a heaven in hell’s despair.” And fortified with the love of God in ...
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“We love—because he first loved us” (...
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But when the Bible speaks of love, it measures it primarily not by how much you want to receive but by how much you are willing to give of yourself to someone.
To say, “I don’t need a piece of paper to love you” is basically to say, “My love for you has not reached the marriage level.”
If we think of love primarily as emotional desire and not as active, committed service, we end up pitting duty and desire against each other in a way that is unrealistic and destructive.
Will you have this woman to be your wife? And will you make your promise to her in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and tenderness—to live with her, and cherish her, according to the ordinance of God, in the holy bond of marriage? Each spouse answers “I will” or “I do”—but notice they are not speaking to each other. They are looking forward and technically answering the minister, who asks them the questions. What they are really doing is making a vow to God before they turn and make vows to one another.
As we observed before, longitudinal studies reveal that two-thirds of unhappy marriages will become happy within five years if people stay married and do not get divorced.
In The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn falls in love with Aragorn, but he cannot return the love. He says to her brother, Eomer, “She loves you more truly than me; for
you she loves and knows; but in me she loves only a shadow and a thought: a hope of glory and great deeds, and lands far. . . .”11 Aragorn understood that romantic flings are so intoxicating largely because the person is actually in love with a fantasy rather than a real human being.
it’s nothing like the profound satisfaction of being known and loved.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything.
Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking
another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less. . .
proposing that you deliberately marry a person you don’t like.17 But I can guarantee that, whoever you marry, you will fall “out of like” with them.
“Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn’t think, ‘I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.’ No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us—denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him—and in the greatest act of love in history, he stayed.
He said, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’
The female speaker in Song of Solomon echoes Adam when she says, “This is my lover, this is my friend” (5:16).
Another of the essential characteristics of friendship is transparency and candor.
It means that any two Christians, with nothing else but a common faith in Christ, can have a robust friendship, helping each other on their journey toward the new creation, as well as doing ministry together in the world.
They do it through spiritual transparency. Christian friends are not only to honestly confess their own sins to each other (James 5:16), but they are to lovingly point out their friend’s sins if he or she is blind to them (Romans 15:14).
They are to identify and call out one another’s gifts, strengths, and abilities. They are to build up each other’s faith through study and common worship (Colossians 3:16; Ephesians 5:19).
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
Husband and wife are to be both lovers and friends to one another as Jesus is to us.
that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend—is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse.
What they’re saying is that someday they are going to be standing not before the minister but before the Lord. And they will turn to see each other without spot and blemish. And they hope to hear God say, “Well done, good and faithful servants. Over the years you have lifted one another up to me. You sacrificed for one another. You held one another up with prayer and with thanksgiving. You confronted each other. You rebuked each other. You hugged and you loved each other and continually pushed each other toward me. And now look at you. You’re radiant.”
What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness. You’re committed to his or her beauty. You’re committed to his greatness and perfection. You’re committed to her honesty and passion for the things of God. That’s your job as a spouse.
The simple fact is that only if I love Jesus more than my wife will I be able to serve her needs ahead of my own. Only if my emotional tank is filled with love from God will I be able to be patient, faithful, tender, and open with my wife when things are
Your spouse has got to be your best friend, or be on the way to becoming your best friend, or you won’t have a strong, rich marriage that endures and that makes you both vastly better persons for having been in it.
