Guard Your Heart & Home: Pursuing Peace in Your Living SpaceSample

True Love

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Philippians 2:3 ESV

Can I be perfectly transparent for just a moment? One of the hardest things about bringing two independent, self-reliant, self-sufficient people together to become one flesh is quite literally the independent, self-reliant, self-sufficient natures that come with them. Trust me, I know firsthand!

Often, we just grow tired of always being the one to give, this is usually false thinking, but it still gets stuck in our brains anyway: I’m always doing the dishes. She never takes out the trash. I always have to take care of the baby. In reality, we aren’t the only one who does all those things.

True love is work. In a perfect world, the feelings of love could carry us through any difficult day or hard time, but the feelings don’t last forever. The work lasts forever: even if our independent natures don’t want to do the work or put in the effort sometimes. We have been led to believe that marriage shouldn’t be this much work; however, it really takes work to build a new life together. It doesn’t matter if you are bringing a past experience into a new relationship or if you are building from square one for the first time, true love requires diligent attention to removing selfishness from the equation. Practice putting down the game controller, the laptop, or the cellphone and give your spouse the attention he deserves when he is talking. Let him know he’s more important than the other things you have going on. True love calls us to treat each other with humility and gentleness.

Father, lead us into gentleness and humility as we learn to love each other well. Thank you for enabling us to do this work together.