Love Renewal in the Marriage
The couple who assume their marriage is over, because they no longer love each other, need to know that no matter what has occurred in the past, agape love, which God makes available to the believer, can renew and transform their marriage in every area, touching the smallest practical details of daily life and improving the physical relationship to an amazing degree.
Renewal of love takes place in three areas: choice of the will, action, and feeling. Note that feeling comes last, because the feeling of love is not the most crucial ingredient of the marriage. The fact of love, based on an unchanging commitment to the other person, is the most crucial.
Renewal of love begins in your mind, where your will exercises the choice and makes the decision to love no matter what—and never to stop loving. Here the wounds you and your partner have suffered must be dealt with first. Where the feelings of love have departed, all the unhappy emotions—anger, guilt, hurt, resentment, or bitterness—are sure to be lurking in the shadows. Find them and send them packing! They deserve nothing but dismissal, for they will give you nothing but grief. You and your partner need to realize that there must be open communication, which is healing in nature when it springs from total forgiveness. Let it begin with you. Start by admitting that your loss of love is a result of wanting to receive rather than wanting to give. Recognize that you can be the instrument through whom God will communicate His love to your partner. Pray and commit yourself to this. Thank God in advance for the supernatural agape love that will flow through you as He promised.
This love, which must be learned, which starts in the mind, which is subject to the will, not the emotions, always results in notion. Love becomes something we do, before it is something we feel. Thus we choose to demonstrate and initiate love.
How we show our love is vitally important. God has given certain specific guidelines on the parts the husband and wife each are to have in the marriage relationship. The husband, according to Scripture, is the leader and the lover, while the wife is the helper and the responder. This intertwining nature of love and response or submission, which is so crucial, may become obscured during times of culturally mandated change. God has designed the relationship of husband and wife with an understanding of their unique strengths and differences, so that the husband delights in loving a wife who is submissive and responsive; a wife gladly submits to a husband who loves in God’s way. But neither can demand the appropriate response from the other. It must be a gift. The wonderful thing is, it can start with either partner. The wife wants to obey a truly loving, caring, protective husband. Her resulting submission makes him love her all the more, and he will want to reciprocate with whatever will make her happy. Her quick response causes him to love her more, and the cycle goes on and on—gloriously.
The husband must be 100 percent committed to loving his wife. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph. 5:25). The wife must be 100 percent committed to being submissive to her husband. “Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing” (Eph. 5:24).
Some people talk of marriage as ideally a fifty-fifty proposition. The problem with this idea is that each partner is always waiting for the other to do something first. With a one hundred-one hundred partnership, either partner acting with a 100 percent giving attitude will contribute to the total marriage, so that there will be a reciprocating love from the other partner.
The submissive role of the wife implies that whether the husband acts like it or not, he is responsible for the important decisions in the home. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church” (Eph. 5:23). This is not to demote or put down the wife. Rather, it takes an unnecessary load from her. If the wife assumes the responsibilities the husband has neglected, she takes on pressures she was never created to handle. The husband is allowed to escape his responsibilities, and the family structure deteriorates. This has occurred in many American homes today.
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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.