When I decided to start a blog about marriage, I had a handful of topics to consider, but is there a better place to start than to define the foundation of marriage: love? Upon this mere mortal falls a task that has befuddled the greatest minds known to have put pen to paper through the ages. On a serious note, the definitions from various bards of old do not matter as much as your view of love and how your view unconsciously informs your behaviour in marriage.
What is Love?
I used to idealise love in marriage as a river that quenches the thirst of one’s soul, not quite like the river of living water, but the next best thing. If you were fortunate enough to find that person who gets you: your soul mate, life would be perfect. Then I got married and found out, despite having read a tonne of books on love and marriage, that the theory of love felt miles apart from reality. Most of the books I read, were well-intentioned and mostly scriptural, yet I still felt one thing was consistent, love in marriage felt very transactional; let me explain. The common thread I observed in most tends to lay out the things we need to do to be a good spouse, the inference being – that if I do these things well I would be a great husband and the net result will be a great wife in response to me. This theory should work in a perfect world, unfortunately, we live in a fallen world where all of us are broken and laden with scars long before we say “I do”.
Before pressing on, I must stress these books on love and marriage are not wrong, rather we read them somewhat resting on the wrong foundation. To lay the burden of love purely on my actions is to misunderstand what love is. This brings us back to the question, what is love?
Love is…
From a biblical point of view, one definition of love is God, yup you heard right. According to 1 John 4 verse 7 God is love (God = Love).
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. – 1 John 4:7–8
Verse 9 – 12 goes on to say –
9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. – 1 John 4:9–12
Please read the whole of 1 John to get full context. God is love. His very essence is the definition of love, this essence (love) is manifest (in modern vernacular – revealed, shown) by His son and the expectation is that we (you and I) live through His son, and it is in living through His son that we love one another. TIME OUT! Let’s hold that thought and think about this critically – without Him, we cannot love, at least not love as expressed or revealed by God.
From time to time I hear the age-old comment about people who do not believe in God, yet seem to have great marriages and raise good kids. I do not doubt that, but God’s word says His love is revealed through His son, and “through” His son we ought to love the same way. Verse 19 of the same chapter says –
19 We love because he first loved us. – 1 John 4:18–19
Our ability to love rests on the foundation of His love revealed to us. I am intentionally stressing His love revealed to us. If I am not aware of a thing it is harder for me to benefit from it. If God’s love is manifest to me through Jesus the Messiah, how do I benefit from that love in my every day and how do I, in John’s words, have love perfected in me? I believe this is through the work of the Holy Spirit in us.
The One called Holy
In Paul’s epistle to the church at Ephesus, he exhorts them to about spiritual blessings to be found in Christ –
In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. – Ephesians 1:13–14.
The Spirit of God is our guarantee until full possession. Ephesians is a great book for the foundation of faith and walk in God, but for brevity, I will avoid the temptation to go full theology nerd and stick to the topic at hand. Please read through Ephesians, at least the whole of the first chapter.
If you belong to Christ, then His Spirit lives in you, and that is how God lives through you. What does this practically mean in loving others, particularly the “other” who lives with me? Let’s define love, another way –
13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. – 1 Corinthians 13:1–13.
This letter to the Corinthians reminds me of Galatians 5, from the same author –
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. – Galatians 5:22–26.
God is love, the very definition of it, and to love like Him is to allow Him bear fruit in us, through the Holy Spirit. To bear fruit of the Spirit is to crucify the flesh with its passions and desires. So “love” in God’s kingdom is not a cultural thing or a way to be a romantic husband: it boils down to who sits on the throne of my heart and what is the foundation of my actions? It’s easier to be romantic when caught in the emotion of love, but your marriage cannot be founded by this as emotions are fleeting. When the day to day of marriage gets tough I have to face my Father and decide whether to obey him (forgive, give up my interests, be firm on his word, lay down my life as the head) or not.
In my almost 25 years of marriage, I have found God and His Spirit to consistently hold me accountable to the word, to demand of me a constant dying to myself (and my way of being) and to follow Christ; and there’s no place more pertinent for me to wage this daily war against my flesh, than in marriage.
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