Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. - Ephesians 4:2

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

1 Corinthians 13:1

Do you really love your spouse?  Seriously.  Do you truly, sincerely, and genuinely love your spouse more than anyone or anything except for God?  More than your children, more than your job, more than sports or shopping or having all your needs and desires met?  Do you love your spouse more than you love yourself? How do you know that your true love, your first love, your everlasting love is focused on your spouse and not really yourself?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on love lately, and specifically the love that God designed to exist between a husband and wife.  I was prompted to do this after watching the movie, “Fireproof,” which I highly recommend that all dating, engaged, and married couples see!  The film’s message prompted me to evaluate my own relationship with my spouse and to do a gut-check on the motivations behind what I call love.   Am I loving my spouse for their sake or for my own?  Is the impetus behind my actions to show unconditional, unwavering, sacrificial love and care to my beloved or is it to get something in return from them?  Am I expecting my spouse to sacrifice for me on a grander scale than I’m willing to do for them?  These are difficult, yet very necessary questions for every husband and wife to ask themselves.  Who are you living for, you or your spouse?

Each of us yearns and longs to be loved.  Our hearts crave love as much as our lungs need oxygen.  Love is life’s most powerful motivator, and true love changes our motivation for living!  No life is complete without love, and no marriage is successful without it.

Two of the most significant ways we demonstrate love is through patience and kindness.  Almost every act of love stems from these two attributes and is an extension of them.  Genuine love for your spouse will move you to be patient and kind with them.  Offering your patience and kindness to someone is always a choice, and we are so often more prone to give that to the stranger on the street or the co-worker in the break room than we are to the one we pledged our lives to.  We’re more likely to be gracious and courteous to the one we share a cubicle with than the one we share a bed with.  And that is a choice that we make, rather consciously or unconsciously, and it is something that we do have control over.

As children of the living God, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit residing in us,  and we’re supposed to be reflecting the manifestation of His character in our lives through numerous attributes.  Among them are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22). Did you notice patience, kindness, and self-control in that list?  All three of those characteristics and more are at our disposal to exercise and infuse in our marriages (and everywhere else for that matter) if we’re yielding to the influence of the Holy Spirit upon our lives.   How’s that going for you?  Are you consistently and instinctively kind to your spouse?  Are you patient with them?  Do you reflexively choose to extend them the benefit of the doubt, or is your first course of action in interacting with them one of defense and suspicion and accusation?  Ask yourself again, “Do I really love my spouse?”  Your love for your spouse should inspire you to be patient with them and kind to them, always.  That’s what Jesus does as a result of His love for you, and you are to model the same love you’ve received from God to everyone,  first and foremost to your spouse.  You choose whether you spread poison into your marriage or medicine by how you treat your spouse.

All of us fail and all of us need to remember that not only is our spouse human, but so are we.  We said, “I do” to a flawed, insecure, and imperfect person, and so did our spouse.  We have to remember that we committed to loving our husband or our wife with all of their strengths as well as all of their weaknesses.  Neither of us is perfect, and there is no place for an air of superiority or condescension in marriage.  Both partners were born with a sin nature and both have fallen short of God’s standard.  No one has bragging rights when it comes to getting everything right.

Can your spouse count on having a patient husband to deal with?  Can they depend on having a kind wife through all the ups and downs of life?  Few people are as hard to live with as an impatient, unkind spouse.  Unfortunately, few of us do patience very well, and none of us do it naturally.  But in order to truly be able to say that we love our spouse, we must pursue patience and kindness as an essential ingredient to our marriage.

What would the climate of your home be like if you tried this biblical approach today: “See that no one repays another with evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another” (I Thessalonians 5:15)?  Who are you living for today?

*Some excerpts from today’s reading taken from “The Love Dare” book by Stephen and Alex Kendrick.