There is a difference between the love of the world and the love of God. We learn about God’s unchanging, unconditional love in His Word. This is what we call agape love. Though hurt, angered, saddened, disappointed, God’s love for us is permanent.
Jeremiah 31:3 says, “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting (never-ending) love.”
So He teaches us in marriage. You chose this person whether they are godly or a heathen and no matter where they are, where they go, what they do, you loved them anyway. That’s why love is not a feeling or passion. True love is a choice. A sacrificial choice, daily, for someone else. Their wrong actions or treatment towards you deems them undeserving, but true love does not always give because of what’s deserved. You shed grace, mercy and forgiveness in place of hate, anger, bitterness and condemnation.
Marriage between a man and a woman is the physical representation of the spiritual love that God has for us, despite our wrongs and failures. Oh, how we put God to shame because we say we love Him and then our actions show different. Yet He says “I love you anyway.” Yet He sheds His grace and mercy. Yet He forgives. Yet He spares and is ready to receive us back at any given moment. Even with all the nasty filth we obtained while away from Him.
“And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.” Luke 15:20.
Marriage is no joke because it is God’s masterpiece. Nothing that He makes isn’t good, but everything He makes is good and, even when we mess it up, He can still come back and use those messed up things to make it good. As husbands and wives, we must have God’s view.
Most of the time we go through tough things, I believe, to learn and understand the depths of His love. When we suffer in our marriage, it is as the sufferings of Jesus. We take up our cross and walk. Yet it is a choice. A daily choice.
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit. 1 Peter 3:18.
Most of us at some point have gone through something that gives us the right to put our cross down. Jesus had the right to drop His cross, yet He kept going. He saw God’s vision. He saw that the suffering was but for a moment and He saw victory at the end. Every hard thing that came, He took one step forward over and over again. Each day in our suffering we get up every day knowing the sufferings that we are facing are difficult but, for the victory, we take each step. The walk is a walk of victory because everything we encounter on that journey Jesus has already overcome. So we must keep walking until the physical manifestation of that victory is made plain.
Let your spouse see love in your eyes. Show him/her love that he/she cannot deny or resist.
