Unfortunately, many people have a shallow, superficial idea of what marriage is. As a result, many marriages don’t last, and many more married couples are trudging along looking for something more.
Love Like You Mean It gives husbands and wives a biblical understanding of what real love looks like in marriage by unpacking the ten attributes of genuine love listed in 1 Corinthians 13. Bob Lepine, marriage and family expert and host of the nationally syndicated radio program FamilyLife Today, is on the show today helping husbands and wives discover that it’s not primarily emotions that define marital love, but actions and decisions that fuel emotions and cause marital love to grow.
Quotes:
“The success of our relationships horizontally is integrally tied to our relationships with Jesus vertically.”
“How do we apply this passage of Scripture in the context of marriage and love one another better and more biblically?”
“In our relationships we fail to anticipate what is most natural in relationships. What is natural is that we drift not together, but apart. We naturally move toward isolation. It takes couples by surprise.”
“We have to work to pursue oneness and closeness and intimacy.”
“The biggest misconception is that marriage will be easy. Because we love Jesus we think we won’t have problems. We forget we bring our sinful nature into marriage.”
“Just because it is hard doesn’t mean you married the wrong person.”
“1 Corinthians 13 is a rebuke against a church who was not living out the love priority. The apostle Paul was scolding the church.”
“Love is patient actually means to suffer long. When this gets hard, I will not go anywhere. I will endure it for a long time.”
“We think kindness and niceness are synonyms. They aren’t. They are cousins. To be kind is to be proactively invested in someone’s good. You can’t be kind and passive simultaneously. Kindness includes action.”
“For a healthy marriage, we need daily acts of kindness.”
“We can become envious of things that are going on in our spouse’s life.”
“Boasting is the opposite of humility. It is other-centered not self-centered.”
“I thought the gospel was I’m a mostly good person who has done a few bad things and Jesus had to die for those few bad things I’d done. When really, you’re a person who is infected with rebellion and you don’t naturally seek after God.”
“To honor someone is to acknowledge their worth, value, and giftedness. We all deserve honor for who we are and not just what we do.”
“God is on the throne of our marriage. What does God want for our relationship?”
“When we are irritated or angered it is often a defensive response to something we think will hurt us. What is the fear or hurt hiding behind the anger?”
“When it comes to conflict in a marriage we have two choices. One is to overlook an offense and most of the time we give each other grace. Sometimes we have to work to resolve, seek, and grant forgiveness for the way we have offended.”
“God chooses to no longer hold our sins against us. We have to grant that same kind of forgiveness to each other.”
“We got married to be deeply known and deeply loved.”
“When bad things go on in your relationship, you persevere in the midst of those things.”
“I’ll go through hardship with the right perspective that God can do work here and I’ll bear and endure it in the midst of these things.”
“My love will fail. It runs out. God’s love for me never runs out. There is an endless supply. When I am overflowing with the love of God, my love of others doesn’t run out.”
Corrie Ten Boom – “Am I going to withhold love from someone who God loves? It’s not my love that is central, it is God’s.”
“We can’t do this on our own.”
“Agape is a Christian invention.”
“What is too hard for me is not too hard for God.”
“We can be love offerings by realizing our biggest issue is our addiction to self. Today is not about me. It is about serving God and serving others. That is my mission. Not my agenda, but God’s agenda puts us into position to be a love offering.”
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