Love Renewal in the Marriage -2 (continued)
Love is the preeminent characteristic of the emotionally mature person, because as 1 Corinthians 13 says, love seeketh not its own. Therefore the wise husband who truly loves his wife will maturely shoulder his responsibilities. The wise wife who truly loves her husband will not demand her rights when he asks something of her. If she maturely loves her husband, she will not need to try to defend her self-image. She will seek to please. In fact she will try to please her husband creatively and do his will, even before he asks—just as the husband will look for creative ways to express his love to her, even before she shows any obvious need for reassurance.
If you choose to love according to God’s way of loving, you will find yourself watching for needs you can meet in your mate. God will show you specific needs, actual needs, which you can rejoice in meeting. And what you sow you will reap. (See Gala-tians 6:7-10.) What you give will be returned to you. These divine principles will prove themselves again and again in the realm of your marriage.
Although this can begin with either partner, I want to address the husbands with some specific applications of these principles.
Husband, if you want to learn how to love your wife all over again, start by giving to her, knowing that the agape love of God is energizing you. As you give yourself (your time, your attention, your caring), your feelings of love for her will grow. You have been instructed in Ephesians 5 to give yourself sacrificially to your wife, in the same way that Christ gave Himself to the Church. In other words, He loved the Church enough to die for her. How often does a husband affirm that he would give his life to save the life of his wife in a moment of danger and yet he does not have time to give himself daily to her emotional, physical, and spiritual needs! You must give—give first, give generously, and continue to give— if you hope to experience the expanding joys of love. If you are not giving, you are merely taking. There is no natural momentum to keep a marriage going, apart from the powerful force of giving to one another. Keep in mind that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
Now, husband, how do you initiate love? Coming home from work you can either be grumpy from the day’s pressures or you can come into the house cheerfully and with an attitude of concern and respect for what your wife has experienced during the day. A wise friend says he has picked a certain stoplight between his office and home where he dumps his office problems and tensions and refuses to pick them up again until the next day. To bring problems home with you and try to escape behind a newspaper or the television set does not demonstrate love for your wife.
Conveying the attitude of concern for her builds the right atmosphere for satisfaction in sex. After all, most men can begin sexual intercourse after a bad day, a family argument, with worries galore, or with supper burning on the stove! But your wife will respond much more readily when motivated by respect and consideration on your part. She needs an introductory period of sensitive consideration and without that, she cannot fully respond in a satisfying physical relationship. Building an atmosphere of caring and romance is a sign of true love on the part of the husband.
Beginning of article: here Love Renewal in the Marriage -3 (continued) and here Love Renewal in the Marriage
Posted in Choosing to Love
To Ed Wheat Sr. and Gladys Gibson Wheat, whose commitment, devotion, warmth, generosity, and integrity stood for fifty years as a beautiful picture of genuine agape love.