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.
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