The Essence of Marriage
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. How much are you willing to lose for the sake of this person? How much of your freedom are you willing to forsake?
In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion.
To break faith with your spouse is to break faith with God at the same time.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loves 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. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
The only way for you to be truly free is to link your feeling to an obligation. Only if you commit yourself to loving in action, day in and day out, even when feelings and circumstances are in flux, can you truly be a free individual and not a pawn of outside forces. Also, only if you maintain your love for someone when it is not thrilling can you be said to be actually loving a PERSON. the aesthete does not really love the person; he or she loves the feelings, thrills, ego rush, and experiences that the other person brings. The proof of that is that when those things are gone, the aesthete has no abiding care or concern for the other.
If, as our culture encourages us, we go so far as to define love as 'Liking"-if we only feel that actions of love are "authentic" if there are strong feelings of love present-we will inevitably be bad friends and even more terrible family members and spouses. IT is a mistake to think that you must feel love to give it.
Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. ....Whenever we do good to 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....The worldy man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes'them: The Christian, trying to treat everyone knidly, find himself liking more and more people as he goes on-including people he could not even have imagine himself liking at the beginning. C.S. Lewis
If you do not give up, but proceed to love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to you.
In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love seem to dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of a marriage is that is is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must BE tender, understanding, forgiving, and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.
He Stayed:
"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 on 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." He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse." Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
The Meaning of Marriage, Tim Keller ch. 2
I am SO loving this book. Came right at the perfect time for me.
ch. 2 The Power for Marriage
Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.
Self-centeredness is a havoc-wreaking problem in many marriages, and it is the ever-present enemy of EVERY marriage...
Self-centeredness is easily seen in the signs Paul lists: impatience, irritability, a lack of graciousness and kindness in speech, ...they responded to the self-centeredness of their partner with their own self-centeredness. WHy? Self-centeredness by its very character makes you blind to your own while being hypersensitive, offended, and angered by that of others. The result is always a downward spiral into self-pity, anger, and despair, as the relationship gets eaten away to nothing.
But the gospel, brought home to your heart by the Spirit, can make you HAPPY ENOUGH TO BE HUMBLE, giving you an INTERNAL FULLNESS that frees you to be generous with the other even when you are not getting the satisfaction you want out of the relationship. (emphasis mine)
If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs-then what do I get out if it? The answer is=happiness.
Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God's image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God's glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, "Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 16:15). He is saying, "If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have niether; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both."
The reason is that woundedness makes us self-absorbed.
There is the essence of sin, according to the Bible-living for ourselves, rather than for God and the people around us.
You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it's revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing.
God asks that you deny yourself, that you lose yourself to find yourself. If you try to do this without the work of the Spirit, and without belief in all Christ has done for you, then simply giving up your rights and desires will be galling and hardening. But in Christ and with the Spirit, it will be liberating.
It means taking your mind off yourself and realizing that in Christ your needs are going to be met and are, in fact, being met so that you don't look at your spouse as your savior.
ch. 2 The Power for Marriage
Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.
Self-centeredness is a havoc-wreaking problem in many marriages, and it is the ever-present enemy of EVERY marriage...
Self-centeredness is easily seen in the signs Paul lists: impatience, irritability, a lack of graciousness and kindness in speech, ...they responded to the self-centeredness of their partner with their own self-centeredness. WHy? Self-centeredness by its very character makes you blind to your own while being hypersensitive, offended, and angered by that of others. The result is always a downward spiral into self-pity, anger, and despair, as the relationship gets eaten away to nothing.
But the gospel, brought home to your heart by the Spirit, can make you HAPPY ENOUGH TO BE HUMBLE, giving you an INTERNAL FULLNESS that frees you to be generous with the other even when you are not getting the satisfaction you want out of the relationship. (emphasis mine)
If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs-then what do I get out if it? The answer is=happiness.
Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God's image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God's glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, "Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 16:15). He is saying, "If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have niether; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both."
The reason is that woundedness makes us self-absorbed.
There is the essence of sin, according to the Bible-living for ourselves, rather than for God and the people around us.
You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it's revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing.
God asks that you deny yourself, that you lose yourself to find yourself. If you try to do this without the work of the Spirit, and without belief in all Christ has done for you, then simply giving up your rights and desires will be galling and hardening. But in Christ and with the Spirit, it will be liberating.
It means taking your mind off yourself and realizing that in Christ your needs are going to be met and are, in fact, being met so that you don't look at your spouse as your savior.
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