12 Ready, Willing, and Waiting
Ted thought he was ready, willing, and waiting to love Katie, and because of this he was excited to get married. People around them told them not to rush, that there was wisdom in waiting, but Ted didn’t want to wait, and neither did Katie. They were both convinced they were ready. Ted was persuaded that there was no way he could love Katie more than he already did. He was convinced that there was nothing he would not be willing to do for her. And anyway, he told himself, Katie was easy to love.
Ted told himself that he was ready, willing, and waiting, but he really wasn’t. As he looked forward to marriage he thought of it as an extended date. I am afraid that many people do. He had found Katie easy to be with on the many evenings they had spent together. He had found going to church and spending Sunday together to be comfortably enjoyable. The Christmas vacations Katie and he had spent together and the week they had spent at the shore with her family had left little behind but a pile of fond memories.
Sure, Ted knew Katie wasn’t perfect. She was a bit of a perfectionist, and there were times she could be pretty stubborn. And he knew that he wasn’t always the most patient guy on the block. But he loved Katie so much, and they had managed to get along pretty well so far, so he didn’t think that being married would be that much of a struggle.
Ted told himself that he was ready, willing, and waiting to love his future wife forever, but he wasn’t. It wasn’t long after their wedding that he began to be driven crazy by Katie’s tendency to follow behind him and clean up after him as he went. He struggled with her digging in and refusing to admit that she was wrong, even when it was clear that she was. He struggled with the reality that he had no independence left.
He resented having to discuss everything with Katie. He felt that he had fallen in love with his girlfriend and ended up marrying his mother.
Ted loved being around Katie, but he felt smothered. When they were dating, their relationship didn’t seem like work. Sure, there were times when they did or said dumb things and would have to work through their hurt and seek one another’s forgiveness, but those times were rare. Ted began to feel that his marriage was more work than love, more struggle than companionship, and more something to face than something to enjoy.
A breakthrough came one morning, when in a burst of frustration Ted said, “If this is love, then I don’t have any idea of what love is.”
Katie was devastated. She had never questioned Ted’s love and had minimized the evidence she had encountered of his struggle. She too had told herself that they would be all right because they really did love one another. The problem was that neither Ted nor Katie knew what love is and what love does. They confused the enjoyment of shared experiences as love. They had confused physical attraction and romantic affection with love. They had confused brief moments of patience with love’s long-term commitment to sacrifice. They thought it would be easy because they were in love and failed to understand that love wouldn’t protect them from disappointment and struggles but would provide what they needed in the middle of it.
What was devastating to Katie was really a bright moment of turning for Ted. He was right. He didn’t know what love is, and he was tired and needy—just the things he needed to be. Ted needed help, but he had to come to the place where he admitted that he needed help. He was about to reach out for help and find out what love is and what love does, and it would change him and his marriage forever.
WHAT IN THE WORLD IS LOVE ANYWAY?
Ted learned quickly that you don’t get your best definition from a Web article on love. You don’t get it from Wikipedia or from Dictionary.com.
You don’t get your best definition of love from Webster or Shakespeare.
The reality is that love is not best defined by a set of abstract concepts.
Love is best defined by an event. Let me explain.
There are few discussions in Scripture of what love is that are more helpful and more practical than the words found in 1 John 4:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. . . .
God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:7–12, 16b–21)
This passage tells us where we get our best definition of love. You get your best definition of love from an event, the most important event in human history. You get your best definition of love from the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ’s sacrifice of love is the ultimate definition of what love is and what love does. In this passage John is calling us to cruciform love, that is, love that shapes itself to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ (cruci = “cross” and form = “in the shape of”).
Look at the words of verses 10 and 11: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” When it comes to love, the cross of Jesus Christ is our ultimate example. John says it clearly: if Jesus loved us in this way, in the same way we ought to love one another.
So what does cruciform love look like? Let me give you a definition and then unpack it. Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving.
Love is willing. Jesus said, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). The decisions, words, and actions of love always grow in the soil of a willing heart. You cannot force a person to love. If you are forcing someone to love, by the very nature of the act you are demonstrating that this person doesn’t in fact love.
Love is willing self-sacrifice. There is no such thing as love without sacrifice. Love calls you beyond the borders of your own wants, needs, and feelings. Love calls you to be willing to invest time, energy, money, resources, personal ability, and gifts for the good of another. Love calls you to lay down your life in ways that are concrete and specific. Love calls you to serve, to wait, to give, to suffer, to forgive, and to do all these things again and again.
Love calls you to be silent when you want to speak, and to speak when you would like to be silent. Love calls you to act when you would really like to wait, and to wait when you would really like to act. Love calls you to stop when you really want to continue, and it calls you to continue when you feel like stopping. Love requires you to lead when you really would like to follow, and to follow when you really want to lead. Love again and again calls you away from your instincts and your comfort. Love always requires personal sacrifice. Love calls you to give up your life.
Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another. Love always has the good of another in view. Love is motivated by the interests and needs of others. Love is excited at the prospect of alleviating burdens and meeting needs. Love feels poor when the loved one is poor. Love suffers when the loved one suffers. Love wants the best for the loved one and works to deliver it.
Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation. The Bible says that Jesus died for us while we were still sinners. If he had waited until we were able to reciprocate, there would be no hope for us. Love isn’t a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” bargain. Love isn’t about placing people in our debt and waiting for them to pay off their debts. Love isn’t a negotiation for mutual good. Real love does not demand reciprocation, because real love isn’t motivated by the return on the investment. No, real love is motivated by the good that will result in the life of the person being loved.
Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving. Christ was willing to go to the cross and carry our sin precisely because there was nothing that we could ever do to earn, achieve, or deserve the love of God. If you are interested only in loving people who are deserving, the reality is that you are not motivated by love for them but by love for yourself. Love does its best work when the other person is undeserving. It is in these moments that love is most needed. It is in these moments that love is protective and preventative. It stays the course while refusing to quit or to get down and get dirty and give way to things that are anything but love.
There is never a day in your marriage when you aren’t called to be willing. There is never a day in your marriage when some personal sacrifice is not needed. There is never a day when you are free from the need to consider the good of your husband or wife. There is never a day when you aren’t called to do what is not reciprocated and to offer what has not been deserved. There is never a day when your marriage can coast along without being infused by this kind of love.
Now, maybe you’re thinking, “Paul, where in the world do I get this kind of love?” John answers the question for us. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). These words carry a rich content of many things, but one of the things surely meant by these words is that true love doesn’t best grow out of the soil of duty. No, true love grows out of the nutrient soil of gratitude.
Imagine me plopping down on the couch next to my wife and with a stern, unexcited, sadly flat, and monotone voice saying to her, “Luella, I have come to the understanding that it is my responsibility to love you. So I am going to do my duty. I am going to love you because that is what I am supposed to do.” Do you think Luella would throw her arms around me and say, “Thank you, thank you for loving me so!” No, she would be heartbroken because she would instinctively know that what I have expressed is not love.
Love is not born through begrudgingly succumbing to duty. No, love is born out of remembering and celebrating. When I remember the lavish, faithful, patient, forgiving, and empowering love that has been poured on me—that I could never have earned and will never be able to fully reciprocate—I will want to give that love away to someone else. When I wake up in the morning and—although my bills are not all paid, and my house needs work, and my children are a bit of a mess, and my husband or wife is less than perfect—I am filled with gratefulness that love has been poured down on me that has changed me and my life forever, then I am motivated to look for opportunities to be a tool of that kind of love in the life of the person whom God has given me as my lifelong companion.
Perhaps one of the most unrecognized sins in marriage is the sin of forgetfulness. When we forget how we have been loved, it becomes even easier to be comfortable with a failure to love others. No one loves better than the person who knows that he desperately needs it himself.
John says one more thing that is very powerful while being ground-level practical, as well: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (v. 20). John is saying that if you want to know the true character and quality of your love for God, examine the quality of your relationship with the person near to you. Your love for your husband or wife is a very accurate barometer of your true love for God.
But these words mean something more. These words call us to face the fact that we must fix our marriages vertically before we ever fix them horizontally. Why? Consider my own marriage. My core problem is not that I don’t love Luella enough. No, my problem is that I don’t love God enough, and because I don’t love God enough, I don’t love Luella as I should.
When I fail to love God as I should, I insert myself into his position, desiring to be sovereign over my little kingdom of one and demanding that those around me do my bidding. If I am not loving God as my king, I will set up my own kingdom and live for myself.
I would ask you, right here in this place in the book, “Is your marriage fueled, moved, and motivated by real God-worshiping, other-focused, self-giving, willing love? Have you made and are you living out this commitment? Where do you need to seek forgiveness and commit yourself to a new and better way?” Perhaps what comes next will help you to answer.
MARITAL LOVE IN ACTION
Even with all my zeal to carefully define cruciform love in the context of a marriage, you may still be fuzzy as to what this kind of love looks like at ground level. Here are some concrete descriptions of how real, Christlike love thinks and acts. As you read, I invite you to use these words as a mirror to look into and examine the quality of your love for your husband or wife.
Love is being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of your husband or wife without impatience or anger. This should bring two things to mind. First, you should be reminded of Jesus, who was willing to face all the complications of life in this fallen world in order to meet our greatest need, new life. You should also be confronted with the fact that you don’t like your life to be complicated. You don’t want your plans interrupted, and you don’t enjoy having to deal with problems you have not anticipated. One of the great challenges of real love is the willingness to abandon your demand for a comfortable and predictable life, and one of the most important calls of love is to find greater joy in meeting the need of another than in getting your own way.
Love is actively fighting the temptation to be critical and judgmental toward your spouse, while looking for ways to encourage and praise. It is so easy to be picky and irritable. It is often easy to be better at catching your spouse doing what is wrong than it is to recognize the many places where they do what is right. When you forget who you are, failing to recognize your own weaknesses and failures, it is much easier to be critical of your spouse. Critical responses to others are always rooted in self-righteousness. It is when we are affirming our need of grace and celebrating the grace we have been given that we delight in giving grace to the person we live with.
Love is the daily commitment to resist the needless moments of conflict that come from pointing out and responding to minor offenses. You are a flawed person living with a flawed person, and if the paradigm of your relationship is to jump on every failure or offense, no matter how small, there will be no end to the hurt, conflict, and disappointment in your marriage. Love is sympathetic. Love is understanding. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love doesn’t delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. You have married a person in process. That means, by God’s grace, that your spouse is better than she was yesterday, but not what she will be tomorrow. Your husband or wife will fail in little ways every day, so it is important to recognize what is important and needs to be lovingly addressed and what is insignificant and needs to be lovingly overlooked. And in both instances it is important to give grace.
Love is being lovingly honest and humbly approachable in times of misunderstanding, and being more committed to unity and love than you are to winning, accusing, or being right. It doesn’t matter how unified you have become and how comfortable with and knowledgeable about one another; you will still face situations of misunderstanding. One of the benefits of marriage is that we don’t look at life the same way as our husband or wife does; but that can create misunderstanding in the marriage. It is also true that we don’t always communicate as clearly as we think we do. We also don’t always hear well. There are times when our mind is so engaged in thinking about how to communicate our perspective that we are not actually hearing what our spouse is saying. Along with these things, you and I are quite prone to changing our minds. We learn, grow, and reconsider, but we often don’t communicate those changes as they happen along the way. So, the unity of a marriage is not the result of absence of misunderstanding, but rather the unity of a marriage is formed as you work through inevitable misunderstandings with patience, kindness, and grace.
Love is a daily commitment to admit your sin, weakness, and failure and to resist the temptation to offer an excuse or shift the blame. It is so tempting to believe you are more righteous than you actually are. It is so tempting to erect excuses and defenses for the wrong you have done. It is so easy to point out the sin of your husband or wife while being blind to your own. Self-righteousness is a daily spiritual war that all of us must face and be willing to fight. It is only when we are doing this that we will be owning and saying no to patterns of thought, desire, word, and action that get in the way of what God has called us to, and so fall below the level of the love that is the daily calling and protection of a marriage.
Love means being willing, when confronted by your spouse, to examine your heart rather than rising to your defense or shifting the focus. As long as there is sin remaining in us, we all carry around inside ourselves that inner lawyer, ready at any moment of challenge, rebuke, or confrontation to rise to our own defense and present arguments in support of what we have done. Love means being willing to fight with these defensive instincts of your heart. It means refusing to be closed and defensive. It means being unwilling to turn the tables and work to convince your spouse that you are not the only sinner in the room. Love means admitting that you need your spouse to help you see yourself with accuracy. Love means being willing to own your wrongs, to examine them in the light of God’s Word, and to confess them to God and to your husband or wife.
Love is a daily commitment to grow in love so that the love you offer to your husband or wife is increasingly selfless, mature, and patient. Love means not living with your feelings of “arrival.” Love is not lazy and self-assured. Love means accepting the reality that God is still calling you to grow and change. To love another person means you are willing to admit that there are places where your love needs to grow and mature. When you love your husband or wife, you will be committed to personal honesty and personal growth so that you can increasingly love your spouse in a way that is more consistent and more mature. Love doesn’t coast but always carries a personal-growth agenda.
Love is being unwilling to do what is wrong when you have been wronged but to look for concrete and specific ways to overcome evil with good. You see it in the behavior of little children; you see it in the anger of the elderly and in everyone in between. It is very tempting for all of us to hurt another when we have been hurt. It is tempting to speak unkindly when we have been spoken to harshly. It is very tempting to act in anger when we have been the object of the anger of another. It is very tempting to treat our husband or wife with disrespect when we feel we have been disrespected. It is not naturally our response to look to do good when we have been wronged. It is not natural to look for ways to love a person who has hurt us. It is natural for sinners to push back when they have been shoved. So, if we are ever to concretely overcome evil with good, we need the intervention and strengthening of God’s grace, and we must admit that we find it hard to do good in the face of wrong, not because of what is inside the person we live with, but because of what is inside us.
Love is being a good student of your spouse, looking for his physical, emotional, and spiritual needs so that in some way you can remove the burden, support him as he carries it, or encourage him along the way. Love is not only reactive; it is willingly self-starting and active. It is good when your husband or wife communicates a need and you willingly respond, but real love is more active and aggressive than this. It finds joy in studying her—her opportunities, responsibilities, temptations, gifts, weaknesses, strengths, family, friends, schedule, etc.—so that it may anticipate her needs and move quickly to meet those needs or support her in the middle of them in whatever way is possible. Love doesn’t wait around to be told what is needed and what to do. Love never sees her needs as an interruption. Love is burdened when she is burdened and finds joy in her relief. If you really love your husband or wife you will be willing to increase your load in order to lighten his or hers.
Love means being willing to invest the time necessary to discuss, examine, and understand the problems that you face as a couple, staying on task until the problem is removed or you have agreed upon a strategy of response. You live in a broken world; problems will come, and they won’t always go away with the passing of time. You will face relational problems, personal problems that impact your relationship, and problems that come from outside your marriage. As much as you would like to, you will never exercise the kind of control over people, locations, and situations that would be necessary to keep your marriage problem-free. In fact, these problems are often a good thing, in that God uses them to take you beyond your own strength and wisdom to learn what it really means to live together in dependency on him. A good marriage is the result of two people who have learned together to be active problem-solvers and have learned to celebrate the growth and change that results.
Love is always being willing to ask for forgiveness and always being committed to grant forgiveness when it is requested. You are not yet perfect and neither is your husband or wife, so forgiveness is an essential calling. You will say some wrong at some time. There will be a moment when you desire what is wrong. You will act, react, or respond in a way that is wrong. You will be selfish, unloving, unkind, irritable, or impatient at some time. There is probably never a day when we don’t sin against one another in some way. So, it is vital to recognize that your spouse has to live with a person like you—still struggling with temptation and sin and still failing in some way. And you should find joy in relieving the burden of living with you by seeking your spouse’s forgiveness whenever he or she has been impacted by your failure. It is also important that you are ready and willing to forgive your spouse, as well. You can’t be in a marriage without being sinned against in some way. So, you must say no to keeping a record of wrongs; you must say no to vengeance of any kind; you must say no to bitterness; and you must always be willing to grant forgiveness whenever there has been an offense and your spouse is seeking to make things right by asking for your forgiveness.
Love is recognizing the high value of trust in a marriage and being faithful to your promises and true to your word. We have already examined the importance of trust to a healthy marriage, so not much needs to be said here. But it is worth connecting love and trust in this way: love loves, trusts, and works in whatever way possible to strengthen it. Because you love your spouse, you want her to know that she can depend on you. You want her to be free of the need of following you around and checking up on you. You want her to rest assured that whatever you promise, to the best of your ability you will do, and whatever you say to her will be reliable and true. Love also means living with your spouse in such a way that he never has to wonder who you are with or what you are doing when you are apart. Love means your spouse can rest, knowing that there are no secrets in your life or subtexts in your words about which he needs to be concerned.
Love is speaking kindly and gently, even in moments of disagreement, refusing to attack your spouse’s character or assault his or her intelligence. My brother, Tedd, says that the old saying, “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but names will never hurt me,” could not be further from the truth. Long after physical bruises have healed, the wounds of words still live in the heart. I have seen the peace and hope of a marriage destroyed by horrible words that should have never been spoken, but they are difficult to remove from the memory once they are said. When you are hurt or engaged in a high-stakes disagreement, it is very important to edit your words, not giving yourself permission to go on the verbal attack. If you want to have a marriage of unity, understanding, and love you cannot allow yourself to say whatever you think or go wherever your emotions are leading you. Love says no again and again, not to your husband or wife but to yourself, resisting the temptation to get your way by using words as weapons of warfare rather than as tools of love.
Love is being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt your spouse into giving you what you want or doing something your way. It is an act of love toward your spouse to keep yourself aware of the war that still rages in your heart between the kingdom of self and the kingdom of God. It is a commitment of humble love to daily acknowledge your struggle with the selfishness of sin. It is your calling to resist the temptation to use whatever tools are at your disposal to get your husband or wife to submit to the agenda and rules of your little kingdom of one. Love serves and gives. Love is not complaining or demanding. Love is being willing to sacrifice what you want in order to give your spouse what he or she needs. Love is never deceitful or manipulative in the pursuit of self-interest, because true love is other-centered and other-motivated.
Love is being unwilling to ask your spouse to be the source of your identity, meaning and purpose, or inner sense of well-being, while refusing to be the source of his or hers. If you really do love your spouse, you won’t try to turn him or her into your personal messiah, and you won’t want the power and buzz of being your spouse’s messiah. Your husband or wife is not capable of carrying your hopes or happiness. Your spouse cannot be the reason you get up in the morning or the thing that keeps you going during the day. To ask your spouse to do this is not only an act of spiritual selfishness, but it also places on him a burden he cannot bear. If you do this, he will fail and then have to deal with the consequences of his failure in your disappointment and the negative impact all this has on your marriage. Love means you never ask your spouse to do for you what only God can do. Love never demands from your spouse spiritually what God has already given you in Christ. Love seeks vertical fulfillment so it can horizontally serve.
Love is the willingness to have less free time, less sleep, and a busier schedule in order to be faithful to what God has called you to be and to do as a husband or a wife. Marital love means you are willing to give up your individual control over your time, plans, and schedule in order to build real and lasting friendship, intimacy, and communion with the person you have committed your life to. You cannot think, choose, or decide as one and at the same time be committed to the unity and love of your marriage. Love is willing to give up your right to control your time, energy, and resources. Love is willing to add more duties to your living and more complication to your schedule. Love is willing to get up early and stay up late. And love is willing to do all these things because of the joy of serving your spouse and helping her experience what God says is best.
Love is a commitment to say no to selfish instincts and to do everything that is within your ability to promote real unity, functional understanding, and active love in your marriage. There is probably no more important commitment of love than the commitment to say no. Are you confused? Let me explain. If you are ever going to say yes to the moment-by-moment call to make personal sacrifices for the good of your husband or wife, you must first say no to yourself. Remember that the DNA of sin is selfishness. So as long as sin remains inside you, there will be a constant temptation to live, act, react, and respond to your spouse in a way that is self-focused and self-centered. If you are ever going to live a lifestyle of real love, you must first fight this battle of the heart. Like any other war, this battle can only be fought in the concrete, that is, in moments of specific temptation that greet you in specific locations and situations.
Perhaps you are tempted to start your day so consumed with your own desires and duties that you take little time to notice or respond to the needs of your husband or wife. Or maybe your struggle is with selfishness in your use of your free time. Maybe you are tempted to be selfish in your use of money. Or perhaps you struggle with selfishness when it comes to participating in the normal chores of the home. Or maybe, at the end of a long day, you just want to be left alone. The point is that if you are ever going to love your husband or wife, there are specific temptations to which you must say no.
Love is staying faithful to your commitment to treat your spouse with appreciation, respect, and grace, even in moments when he or she doesn’t seem to deserve it or is unwilling to reciprocate. No one reading this book has been or ever will be married to a perfect person. Marriage means that the sin, weakness, and failure of your husband or wife will be your firsthand, daily experience. It means loving your spouse when she is having a bad day or struggling with particular disappointment. Marriage means loving your spouse when he is irritable and impatient. It means loving your spouse when she has hurt you in some way. Marriage means loving your spouse when he is demanding and critical. It means continuing to love even when your spouse refuses to participate, cooperate, serve, give, or help. It means persevering through hard times and difficult days. It means refusing to use words as weapons or let the sun go down on your anger, even when your husband or wife is doing both.
Love is never letting the failure of your spouse become a reason for changing the rules of the game. True love is respectful. True love looks for ways to express appreciation. True love finds joy in giving grace. True love wants to build and encourage. And true love does these things no matter what.
Love is the willingness to make regular and costly sacrifices for the sake of your marriage without asking anything in return or using your sacrifices to place your spouse in your debt. There are moments when love is fairly easy. On that romantic weekend when you are alone together and away from the normal responsibilities and pressures of everyday life, it is easy to love. When your husband or wife has anticipated a need and served you in some way, it is easy to love. When you have been given a special gift, it is easy to love. When your spouse has communicated how much she respects and appreciates you, it is easy to love.
But real love doesn’t live only in these grand, affectionate moments. No, real love lives at street level. It lives when no violin is playing or bird is singing. It lives when life is busy, boring, or hard. Real love doesn’t demand that life is easy or exciting. Real love loves as much in the dark of the night as it does in the warmth of the sun. Real love loves when love isn’t much fun and isn’t very fulfilling. Real love doesn’t quit when things are hard and doesn’t check out in the face of disappointment. So there is no such thing as real love that does not require real, willing, and daily sacrifices. There is no way to escape it—real love is costly. Real love calls each of us to be willing to suffer. It calls us to sacrifices of time, energy, and money. It calls us to be willing at times to be silent and at other times to have the courage to speak. It calls us at times to refuse to fight and at other times to fight for what is right. It calls us at times to act decisively and at other times to be willing to wait. It calls us to lead the way and at other times to be willing to follow. It calls us to follow a plan and at other times to be willing to give up our plans. Love doesn’t run in the face of sacrifice.
Love is being unwilling to make any personal decision or choice that would harm your marriage, hurt your husband or wife, or weaken the bond of trust between you. Love means giving up your autonomy. It means no longer living as if your life belongs to you. It is no longer treating your life as an investment you can individually make. It is approaching every desire, choice, decision, word, or action in the context of what is best for your husband or wife and best for your relationship to them. Love is surrendering my independence for the greater calling and greater joy of union and communion with you. Love is refusing to view myself as being separate from you. Love is understanding that now that we are together in a lifelong relationship, everything I do is an act of relationship; whether constructive or destructive. Love is understanding that in marriage it is impossible to act independently. In some way all of my choices, decisions, and actions will affect you.
So love means living relationally; that is, always choosing and acting with your marriage in view. It means never choosing what would seem to be good for you but would harm the relationship in some way. It means never indulging an emotion or desire that would end up hurting your husband or wife. It means never making a choice or acting in a way that would weaken the trust that is so important to your marriage.
Love is refusing to be self-focused or demanding but instead look- ing for specific ways to serve, support, and encourage, even when you are busy or tired. One of the things that harms marriage is entitlement. Sinners have great skill at turning blessings into needs. It is very easy for us to reason that we are deserving of something and therefore it is right for us to be demanding of it. It is very easy for us to load into our personal “need” category things that are not needs, and because we have, to be expectant and demanding. Here’s how it works: If I am convinced that something is a need, and you say you love me, it seems right to expect that you will meet this need. It seems right then to watch to see if you are committed to meeting it and to be demanding if you haven’t, because, after all, it is a need! Calling something a need that is not actually a need is one of the ways we tend to excuse self-focus and the demands that accompany it.
The biblical model of love provides rescue from this temptation. In Matthew 6:25–32, Jesus reminds us that we have a heavenly Father who knows precisely what we need. He is never confused by the question of what constitutes a need and what does not. It is best to let him define our needs. And he has promised that he will supply for us everything we need.
How can you know this for sure? Well, the cross of Jesus Christ is your guarantee. Paul says this in Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” If God went to the extent of sacrificing his Son so that we might have relationship with him, would it make any sense whatsoever for him to abandon us after we do? Paul says, “Absolutely not!” So you do not have to live fretfully, making sure that all your needs are met. You can humbly admit that you are often confused about what your real needs are, and you can rest assured that your true needs will be met by a loving heavenly Father, who paid a huge price so that you might be the object of his eternal favor. The cross of sacrifice on that ancient hill outside the city is your written guarantee.
Because you are loved in this way, you are free to take your eyes off yourself and to love your spouse. And you do not have to look over your shoulder to see if God is still there and still active, and you do not have to worry in your heart. You can know for sure that if he gave you his Son, there is no way he will abandon you in your time of need.
Love is daily admitting to yourself, your spouse, and God that you are not able to love this way without God’s protecting, providing, forgiving, rescuing, and delivering grace. After reading this chapter, there are two things you should be left with. First, you should be confronted with the fact that love is fundamentally deeper and more active than some warm, romantic feeling of affection toward someone to whom you are attracted. It is not some generalized response of happiness when you are with this particular person. No, love is a specific commitment of the heart to a specific person that causes you to give yourself to a specific lifestyle of care that requires you to be willing to make sacrifices that have that person’s good in view. Love is never general, and it never remains in the realm of feelings. Love desires, love thinks, love chooses, love decides, love acts, and love speaks in an ongoing, day-by-day commitment to the welfare of another. Real love is concrete, specific, and active.
But there is an even more powerful reality that should hit you after reading this chapter. This realization should give you pause and then spur you to action: it is impossible for any of us to love as has been described. The bar is simply too high. The requirements are simply too great. None of us has what it takes to reach this standard. This description of love in action has left me humbled and grieved. It has faced me once again with my tendency to name as love things that are not love. It has forced me to admit how self-focused and self-absorbed I actually am. It has reminded me that when it comes to love, I am not an expert. No, I am poor, weak, and needy. But I am not alone and because of this, the realization of failure should not defeat or paralyze you or me. No, it is meant to drive you to seek help. I am not talking about reading a good marriage book, attending a good marriage class, or getting good marriage counseling. All these can do is describe what is best. They do not have the power to help you to desire and do what is best. They can inform you as to what love is, but they can never transform you into a person who loves. But isn’t that what all of us need?
You see, God’s call to love confronts us with our weakness and inability. It makes us face how cold and fickle our hearts actually are. It helps us to see how weak our resolve is. It calls us to humbly admit how unwilling and impatient we are. Being faced with our weakness is one of God’s goals for marriage. This comprehensive, lifelong relationship is a tool in the hands of God to expose our delusions of wisdom, righteousness, and strength and to mobilize us to seek help. And there is help, wonderful and sufficient help, for all who seek it.
As John begins that long discussion of love that we have already considered in this passage, he says these words: “God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). John says that the purpose for Jesus’ coming to earth, suffering and dying, and rising from the dead is that through him we might have what we need to be able to live the life to which he has called us. And the life to which he has called us is fundamentally, comprehensively, and perseveringly a life of love. John is saying that Jesus died not only so that we would have forgiveness for not loving as we should, but also so that we would have the desire, wisdom, and power to love as we should.
Jesus shed his blood for the conversation that started out right but has now become angry and tense. Jesus died for the daily pressure of living with someone who is very different from you. Jesus died so that you would win your struggle with forgiveness and be able to resist the seductive call of bitterness and vengeance. Jesus died so that you would have what it takes to make the decision to get out of bed and do what you promised even though you are weary and discouraged. Jesus suffered so that you could face hurt and mistreatment with wisdom and grace. Jesus died so that you would resist the temptation to give in, give up, run away, or quit. Jesus shed his blood so that you would have the power to edit your words and say what is wholesome even when you have been spoken to in ways that are unkind. Jesus shed his blood so that in specific moments you would have the power to say no to irritation and impatience and respond in kindness and self-control. Jesus died so that in the face of the death of your dreams you would take up the better dream of what he has called you to. Jesus suffered so that you would have the wisdom you need to deal with things you did not expect and don’t fully understand. Jesus shed his blood so that you would have the power to grow and change.
Jesus suffered in love so that in your struggle to love you would never, ever be alone. As you give yourself to love, he showers you with his love, so that you would never be without what you need to love. He was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice of love because he knew that that was the only way that you would ever get what it takes to love as you have been called to love. Jesus knew that your struggle to love is so deep that a certain system of wisdom or a certain set of provisions wouldn’t be enough. He knew the only thing that would help you would be if he gave you himself. So that is exactly what he did. He gave himself so that right here, right now, you would have the resources you need to live a concrete and continuing life of love.
So don’t let regret paralyze you. Don’t be overwhelmed by love’s call. Don’t be discouraged by the size or number of the things you are facing. Don’t let the failures of the past rob you of hope for the future. No, left to yourself you don’t have what it takes, but he is with you, in you, and for you. Walk forward in hope and courage, and commit yourself to real, active, and specific cruciform love, knowing that his grace really does have the power to make you ready, willing, and waiting.