Let me start off by sharing the two quotes at the beginning.
Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouse as they are, while longing for them to become what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another's glory or toward degrading each other.
--- Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III
If you treat a man as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become the bigger and better man.
---Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Points to ponder:
---We show our love for God in part by loving our spouse well.
---We can never love somebody "too much". Our problem is that typically love God "too little".
--- It is far less of a leap for a man to love a woman or for a woman to love a man than it is for either of us to love God
---The beauty of Christianity is in learning to love, and few life situations test that so radically as does a marriage.
---By learning to love our wives, we get a better grip on how we could love our God.
---Christian love is displayed in loving the most difficult ones to love.
--- If we can't love our wives, how can we love the homeless person at the library? How about the drug addict and alcoholic? Our spouses may be difficult to love at times, but that is what marriage is for—to teach us HOW TO LOVE.
A lot of the time women love quietly; they speak, as it were, in whispers, and we have to listen carefully, attentively, to hear their words of love and to know them. Isn't God the same way? Doesn't he intervene in most of our lives in whispers, which we miss if we fail to consistently strive to hear those whispers of divine love?
The virtues of listening, patience, humility, service, and faithful love, are the very virtues necessary for us to love God and to feel his love returned.
Remember that it is not enough to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. If we really want to please God, Jesus said, you must love others.
With all the links of scripture to marriage and its relationship to God, could it mean that ............ If my spouse is unhappy, I'm failing God?
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3 comments:
Depends on why she's unhappy. It may be something that has nothing to do with her hubby.
The things you've said from these first three chapters make me think that there are more reasons than we know why Paul pointed out the comparisons between Christ and the church on one hand and a man and his wife on the other in Ephesians 5.
Another thought I had as I've cogitated over this post: The husband is not the final source of his wife's happiness or satisfaction (nor she of his). Only God can fulfill that role, and while He uses us as instruments to meet many of our spouse's needs, none of us must look to our spouses as THE source for our satisfaction and happiness.
Yes, I agree. I only hightlighted a few intersting points. The chapter was a large iceberg so to speak and that was just a little ice cube from it. He does not imply that our spouses are THE source.
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