My husband and I have been married for twenty-three years. Our first few Valentine’s days together were very romantic as we each tried to show our love to each other with bigger gestures each year.
However, as the years went by, it became harder and harder to think about the upcoming Valentine’s Day or how to show love to each other in ways we hadn’t before.
Some years we felt like we were stuck in a rut in our marriage and just going through the motions. We did things just to please the other person, and not because we really felt it.
Although feelings are not the ultimate indicators of whether we should show love to each other, it does make a difference. Deep emotions create a sense of motivation and urgency. When we feel motivated by something, we are more apt to do it.
Because love matures, we had to really understand the meaning of the word love.
Love is love defined as“…in the New Testament, God’s paternal love for men, as well as man’s reciprocal love for God. In Scripture, the transcendent with open mouth love is the highest form of love and it contradicts itself Erosor romantic love, and friendshipor brotherly love’.
We often throw the word love around for different things, diminishing the meaning of the word. For example, we can say we love ice cream and we say we love our husband. However, we love our spouses differently than we love inanimate objects.
Love is not just something that makes us feel good. it is an action centered around the other person’s thoughts and feelings.
Here are 5 traits I’ve learned about true Love Love:
1. True Love Means Humility
True love cannot occur if both parties have their own ways and are too proud to acknowledge the other person’s thoughts and feelings.
It is difficult to find a balance between meeting your own needs and wanting to serve the other person. However, if we change our mindset to one that our lives serve the other, we will understand true love.
In love, we lay aside our pride and humble ourselves. We apologize when needed. We resolve our differences in kind, loving ways. We decide to end the conflict and not let it flare up.
When we lay down our pride and replace it with humility, we experience a love that is deeper than any other relationship we can experience here on earth.
2. True Love Means Forgiveness
Sometimes the hardest person to forgive is your spouse. This is because they see the best and worst of us. They know our strengths and weaknesses and sometimes use it for their own selfish gain, and sometimes we do the same to them.
However, this is not love. To love means to forgive the offenses of others, even when they have done so many times.
Forgiveness means putting the past behind us and choosing not to remember it anymore. God chooses to remember our sins no more. so he chooses to forgive. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember. he just chooses not to remember it.
It’s the same with us. We cannot forget the pain and suffering of the past. However, as we forgive others in the way they have forgiven us, the pain becomes less and less.
God, by his sovereignty, puts ointment on our wounds and heals them so that we forgive our spouses because we realize the grace that has been given to us.
3. True Love Means Repentance
Repentance makes it easier for our spouses to forgive us and vice versa. Simply saying sorry and asking someone to forgive, only to do the deed again, is not true repentance.
True repentance paves the way for intimacy, trust, and deeper bonds with both our spouses and God.
It is not easy to change old, sinful habits to new, healthier ones, but with God’s help everything is possible. Repentance requires that we go to God to acknowledge our sins and humbly ask for his forgiveness.
Once we live in the knowledge of this forgiveness, we choose not to do that behavior anymore, not only because it hurts us, but it also hurts our relationships with others.
Repentance means doing an “about face”. This means that we literally turn away from our selfish actions and turn to displaying the fruit of the spirit to others.
Repentance is a necessary component of the true love we can have for our spouses.
4. True Love Means Intimacy
Many relationships struggle because, although the physical intimacy is there, the emotional intimacy is not. Many wives may feel that a part of their relationship is missing because their husbands are not emotionally available to them.
While some men struggle with emotions, they are an important part of their overall well-being. It is important for men to get in touch with their emotions so that they can empathize and comfort their wives during difficult times. And it is important for women to be there for their husbands as they go against society to learn this skill.
When a woman’s emotional needs are met, she is more likely to reciprocate in a physical way.
While it is true that men and women may differ in how they feel most loved, whether through emotional or physical intimacy, both parties should be there for each other and seek to meet each other’s needs, not theirs.
5. True Love Means Exhibiting the Fruit of the Spirit
When the fruits of the spirit are evident in our lives, our relationships thrive. However, when these fruits are missing, relationships are reduced to both parties trying to fulfill their own selfish needs.
The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, goodness and self-control (Gal 5:22-23). When we seek to add them to our lives, we become better people. When we become better people, we want to be better people for our spouses whom we love the most.
We no longer look to others to meet our ultimate needs, but rather have our identity fixed in Christ. All these fruits have one thing in common: they seek to focus on others. We cannot be selfish in exhibiting these kinds of fruits in our lives.
A person who wants to develop more fruits of the spirit knows that in order to be the best person they can be, they must have their basic emotional needs met by God. They need to have their identity established in Him and understand that their value and worth was established on the cross, not in other people’s opinions of them.
When they can reconcile this in their minds and hearts, they will seek to be people who strive to be tangible representations of Christ.
Love is a word that gets thrown around a lot in our society. But few of us know what true love really is.
As Christians, we understand what true love is as we look at the testimony of Christ. However, we may feel like we are falling short because we are not Christlike and will not be in this life.
However, we can strive to imitate Christ’s example by being humble, forgiving others, repenting of our selfish behaviors, meeting the emotional needs of others, and exhibiting the fruit of the spirit in our lives.
When we can do these things, we will know what true love is. Once we understand this true love, we want to give it to others, including our spouses!
Photo: ©Getty Images/Sam Edwards
