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Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105
(262) 763-3021
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Pastor Scott Carson
Grace Church of Burlington
June 1, 2003
"Love is not blind. Love is the only thing that sees." Frank Crane
For a lost world love is a feeling. Thus, if you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling, then you can bail out of the marriage and move on with your life. As Bible-believers, though, we do not live by our feelings or circumstances. We are to live in obedience to God’s Word. That means to love is not just a choice, it is a command. How I feel does not eliminate God’s command that I am to love my mate. Feelings of love in a marriage can wane with the passing years or with adverse circumstances. For most of us, marriage is a bit of an eye-opener. There are traits about our spouse that we were totally unaware of prior to marriage. As we see these, we often lose our loving feelings for our spouse.
Just suppose love has drained from a marriage. Jay Adams talks about a counseling situation where the partners have already agreed that they will divorce. Neither one has committed a serious sin against the marriage. They just don’t feel in love any more. They go to the counselor hoping that he will confirm their decision that if there is no feeling left, the only recourse is divorce. The couple is shocked to find the counselor saying, "If you don’t love each other, there is only one thing to do: you will have to learn how to love one another." The couple is astounded. "How can you learn to love someone? You can t produce feelings out of thin air!" The counselor explains that in the Bible God commands us to love one another. When the husband is told that he is to love his wife as Christ loved the church, he gasps. He could never do that.
But the counselor is persistent. He explains that the husband will begin on a lesser level. The Bible also commands us to love our neighbor, and since his wife is his closest neighbor, he is to love her. But even so, the husband objects that he couldn’t love his wife that way. Then the counselor explains that the man is still not off the hook, for God has commanded us to love even our enemies!
Do you love your spouse? Are you obeying God? June is the traditional wedding month. Some of us need a marriage renewal month.
During the next several weeks we will be considering: Making Marriage Marvelous. The key to a successful marriage is applying God’s Truth to our marriages. After all, God originally created and designed marriage. It makes sense then, to return to His instruction Book, the Bible, on marriage.
Perhaps you’ve stopped loving your spouse. You need to ask God’s forgiveness and choose to love them again. Now someone is going to say, "You don’t know what they’ve done to me." That may be true but I do know that there is no wrong, no sin, that God’s love cannot forgive and cannot love through. If God’s love that is also available to us was limited, then we would all be doomed to eternity in Hell. The God who knows all about us (all the sins and failures) has chosen to love us and will love through us, if we will let Him.
Love begins with an attitude. It is internal before it is external. Do you have a kind, loving attitude toward your spouse? Do you mentally dwell on his/her good traits and what a blessing he/she is (usually the reason that you married him/her in the first place)? Or, do you mull over the ways that he/she has hurt you or how you resent him/her? How we think will affect our choice to love. Love begins in the mind and the will. If we rehearse mentally all the things that hurt or frustrate us about our mate, we are giving Satan ammunition to keep us from obeying God’s command to love our mate.
Then, love is an action. What are the behaviors that communicate love to your spouse? Gary Chapman in his book, The Five Love Languages, (which I heartily recommend reading) suggests that we experience love in one of five ways: quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Most of us tend to communicate love the way that we like to be communicated to. True love is communicating love the way that your spouse values.
To love our spouse is both a command from God and a choice. Are you obeying God in that choice? Plan to join us the next few weeks for Making Marriage Marvelous.