Fruitful Marriages Are Rooted In Love

Introduction

I recently saw an article that highlighted the most googled relationship question in each state. It was a bit ridiculous. Do you want to know the overall most googled question by state? It was some variation of “How do I kiss someone?” I didn’t realize you needed directions for this, however did we get along before the internet?

In California the most googled question was, “Does He like me?” as if Google is a fortune telling device or has become the old Magic 8 Ball. Anyone want to take a stab at the most googled question in North Carolina was? “When should you say I love you?” There you have it.

I found it interesting that the most googled question is when to say it, not something along the lines of “How do I know if I love this person?” Or even, to quote Haddaway, “What is Love?…baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.”

Well, whatever your response is to the question what is love or when you should tell someone you love them, allow me to welcome you to Cornerstone Church. If you are just joining us, we are just getting started on a new series called, “A Fruitful Marriage.”

I started this series last week with the thought that needs to undergird all of this, which is that our marriage represents the gospel. In other words, when people look at, talk about or even think about marriage, it has to be in the context that Marriage is to be a picture of the gospel lived out. This is why the Bible says things like Husbands, love your wives, like Christ loves the Church and gave himself up for her. That’s the gospel in a nutshell and it should describe marriage in a nutshell.

So before we get started today on our sermon, which is entitled, “Fruitful Marriages Are Rooted In Love”, let me reiterate that this series is intended for married, divorced, singles who are looking and people who are just saying, “I can’t even think about a relationship” right now. What I’m talking about are universal truths that can be applied to relationships in general, but I’m going to keep the focus on marriage as that is the ultimate friendship as we said last week.

Marriage is not meant to be primarily a sexual thing or a tax break thing, but a friendship thing. We are to be friends with our spouse and we are to find the ultimate friendship with them and this is because again, marriage represents the gospel, which is about us find our ultimate friendship in God.

So today, I want us to look at the topic of love and there are a ton of verses in the Bible that talk about love. In fact, it’s one of the predominant themes of the entire Bible. God is love, declares the Apostle John. So if that’s the case, if we are building a home, a family, the foundation of that house has to be love. Our marriages need to be rooted in, resting on, founded upon…love.

The problem in this is that we tend to root our marriages in lots of other things, like sex, money, convenience, fear, low self-worth and many other things, but we hardly choose love, if we are honest. Love is one of the most wonderful things in life, but for many of us we avoid it in our marriage, mostly due to the issue we talked about last week, which is self-centeredness. It’s impossible to be self-centered and loving at the same time. That’s a house divided if ever there was one.

Today we are going to look again at our passage in Ephesians and today, I want us to specifically look at love. We are going back to the basics if you will and I want us to focus in on that word and concept today. Let’s read together.

Ephesians 5:21–33 ESV

submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

This passage is a beautiful passage because not only does it talk about marriage but it gives us a look at what is love? Now, we know how the world defines love. Love is a gushy feeling that makes you all warm and fuzzy on the inside. Love is the goosebumps on the back of your neck when she walks into the room. I still get those sometimes when I see my wife, but that’s not love. That’s the cold breeze from the ceiling fan giving me chills.

Love is probably one of the most misunderstood topics in our society. A culture most certainly seeks to define it in its own terms. From TV shows to movies to romance novels, everyone and everything has an opinion on what is love?

My job though is to point you to the true authority on love, God himself. What does the Bible say? The apostle Paul, who wrote Ephesians, also gives us one of the best definitions of love possible when discussing the spiritual gifts to the church in Corinth. And you may know this by heart because its read at weddings every year. But listen again with fresh ears.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7 ESV

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This is how God defines love…Love endures all things. What a beautiful picture. If marriages were rooted in love, there would never be a need for divorce. Now the New Testament is written in Greek and in the Greek language there are four different words that we translate love. They are:

Eros - Romantic Love, not used in Scripture

Stergo - Affection, Familial love

Phileo - Affection of Friendship

Agape - Unconditional affection

The word in our passage is Agape. Which most of us know this is the love that God has for us, but it’s also the love he expects for us to have for one another. It’s an unconditional, always forgiving, steadfast type of love.

Now one of the problems we face when defining love is this, it’s not typically used as a noun. This is because of my first point…

Love Requires Action

Or to quote the great 90s theologians DC Talk, Haven’t you heard, love is a verb. If you want to have a fruitful marriage, or a fruitful relationship with friends, it’s going to be rooted in an active love. Love in motion. Love that does something.

This is not love that is only in speech, but love that demonstrates itself to others. Our society is all about love in speech. We will talk about love and proclaim love, but to show love is much harder and that is the love that God is calling us to be about.

Love is not a sentiment; it is the most active, vital thing in the world.

Life in God, 30

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

This type of love, an active love, has to be present in Christian marriages. It has to be. We cannot say we love our spouse and but then do nothing to demonstrate that love toward them.

This is important, so hear me, we need to not only love them with our actions…the WAY that we love them should be demonstrated in the WAY that they want to receive that love. In other words, when we love someone, it’s not about how WE WANT to love them, but its about HOW THEY want to be loved.

I’m a fan of the Love Languages by Gary Chapman, so I’ll use that idea to explain what I mean in relation to my family. For instance, my wife’s love language is words of affirmation. She loves for me to tell her she is doing great or that she looks great or that she has beautiful eyes. It’s not good enough for me to just think those things, I have to say it! That’s the way that she feels loved by me. Now, that may not be the way that I perfer to love her. I might prefer to love her by taking care of her, by acts of service. Look, honey, you know I love you, I’m working 60 hours a week to support our family!

While that’s all well and good, that may be a bit lost on her if the way that she feels loved is by me loving her with my words. Do you see the difference? This works among friends too. If you know that you have a friend that just wants to talk, talk to them, if they’d prefer to hang out, hang out with them. However they seek friendship and love, try to love them in that way.

Now, you might be saying…But…but, pastor, what if I do that, but my spouse doesn’t reciprocate. I’m loving her or him well, but they aren’t loving me well?

That leads me to my next point…

Love Requires Self-Sacrifice

Loving someone isn’t about what you get out of it. It’s not. You may not feel loved by them and that may be the truth, maybe they don’t love you. But love isn’t concerned about what you get, but what you give.

Paul tells husbands to love their wives like or in the same way that Christ loves the Church, and he did what? He GAVE himself up for her. Love requires self-sacrifice. If you want a fruitful marriage, a marriage rooted in love, it will require a lot of self-sacrifice. It’s going to require you to crucify your wants, will and desires.

If you aren’t ready to love like that? Then you aren’t ready for marriage. And I wasn’t ready for marriage, but I got married anyway. And God is steady trying to work that love into me for the sake of Autumn, because he loves her so much. Let me define this a little more with a quote from Oswald Chambers.

Our notion of sacrifice is the wringing out of us something we don’t want to give up, full of pain and agony and distress. The Bible’s idea of sacrifice is that I give as a love-gift the very best thing I have.

Oswald Chambers

When we marry someone, what we are saying is this, I am giving you everything and that first and foremost includes me. I am the sacrifice. I am yours. You can have every part of me. That’s what love is and its a beautiful thing because this is exactly the love that God has for us.

In the Gospel, God offers himself up for us. He gives himself to us and that’s how he demonstrates what love truly is, by his own sacrifice.

Romans 5:8 NIV

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Christ died for us, showing us the ultimate example of love. There is no greater example of love than to look at Christ. He forgives us of our sins, the ugly intentional sins that we have done to him and he offers his life in our place. That is the very definition of love and that’s the type of love that we should root our marriages in.

And the reason I say that is because this is a love without limits. This love…

Love Removes Conditions

I believe for our marriages to be truly fruitful we have to aim for the love that God has for us, an unconditional love.

Whenever I’ve sat down to do premarital counseling, I always ask the couple, what is the line that if your fiancee crosses it, you will say you are done? They almost always answer with unfaithfulness. I tell them then that they are not ready for marriage, because the love that you need for a lasting marriage cannot come with conditions.

Now, hear me on this, this does not mean that if you are in an abusive situation, that you stay in that. By no means. Get out. If you are unsafe, get out. That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I am talking about though, is that we have to rid ourselves of this idea that marriage is supposed to make us happy or that we can call this whole thing off because I’m not feeling the love anymore.

Now that we have defined love in a biblical sense, I want to know how can I possibly love someone like Jesus loves us. That’s the admonishment from Paul correct? He says husbands love your wives, like Christ loves the church.

Now, before you women wipe the sweat from your brow and say, I’m glad he said that to men and not to me, let me say this…not so fast. Before you get to excited, realize this, while Paul is addresses husbands in this passage in particular, a loving marriage is a two way street. You cannot have a truly loving marriage if only one of you is doing the loving. The expectation is that this goes both ways. I believe the reason Paul is addressing it to men in this passage is because this means more to women, this knowing that they are loved deep down in their bones, than what means the most to women. In general, men want to be respected, which is why Paul ends this passage with the admonishment to women to respect their husbands. This doesn’t mean men are allowed to disrespect their wives, but both of these concepts should be reciprocated for a healthy marriage.

With all of that said, I can see how you might be sitting there thinking, this is impossible. I can’t do this. I can’t love my spouse like Jesus. And I feel you. I feel the same way. So let me remind you, this is why God gives us grace. So here are my encouragements on how to love your spouse like Jesus:

This is a work of the Spirit. It’s a fruit. Love is one of the fruits of the spirit, so in one sense, like I mentioned last week, the context of this passage in Ephesians is to be filled with the Spirit. As you are filled with God’s spirit and are led by the Spirit, you will be empowered to love your spouse the way Christ loves the church.

Never stop trying. You will fail, but don’t give up. Your spouse may not reciprocate, but don’t give up. You might struggle through certain seasons in your life, but don’t give up. Never give up. Don’t stop trying.

Give grace and receive grace. When your spouse fails, give them grace like Jesus gives it to you. They will fail, give them grace. They aren’t perfect, so expect that they will fail and be prepared in your heart to give them grace. Also be prepared to receive grace or administer grace to yourself when you fail. Love covers a multitude of sins, so be prepared to allow the love of God to cover yours.

Focus On Your Spouse. If self-centeredness is the enemy of a great marriage, do your best to stop focusing on yourself and put your focus on your spouse. This is the essence of selfless love.

—-

Be Filled With The Spirit

Never Stop Trying

Give Grace And Receive Grace

Focus On Your Spouse

Conclusion

So to end today, I want to give you a chance to respond to this call. This is meant for married people specifically, but perhaps you are here and you are hearing God’s call that we should love all people without conditions. Whatever your place may be, the call is the same, which is to love others like Jesus loves the church. Here are your prayer prompts for this morning.

Prayer & Journaling Points

Father, where have I put unnecessary conditions on loving others?

Lord Jesus, how can I better love my spouse like you love me?

What one thing can I do to demonstrate my love for others this week?

Close with prayer.