How to Love Your Wife As Christ Loves Us

I was having trouble in my marriage.  I asked a wise man, “What do I do?”

“Do you really love her?”

“Yes, I do, but I don’t know how to live with her.  We are always getting into arguments, and we can’t see eye to eye on anything.”  I looked down and cradled my face in my hands.

“There’s no need for all this anxiety and frustration.  There is an answer, but it lies in you and the choice you will have to make.”

“What choice?”  I look up and he is smiling at me–a smile that hides a secret of the ages, a smile that shields a life-changing truth.  I feel it coming; the problem will be solved soon.

“The first thing that you must realize is that you are reaping a harvest of the seeds you have sown in your garden.  For, you see, your wife is your precious spiritual garden.  Whatever seeds you sow into her, whatever words you speak to her and around her, they shall come up and grow and come to harvest.

“I don’t get it.  She is my garden?”

“Even in the natural sense, do you not sow your earthly seed into the garden of her womb and in nine months you both reap a lovely child.  Is it a great wonder that your words are seeds that will be harvested in her, for good or bad?

“The Law of Harvest says that whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.  You are the husbandman of your very own Garden of Eden.  With God’s help, you can make it a garden of delight with joy and peace, or you can make it a garden of misery.”

“Why is it up to me?  She is the one who is so unreasonable.  She needs to change, doesn’t she?”

“Oh yes, she will change.  She already has changed, and she has become in your relationship what you have created in her.  When you express your selfish desires, she languishes and dries up inside for the lack of the water of love that you should supply.  Your sarcasm and cynicism brings forth noxious weeds of doubt in her thoughts toward you.  When you are fearful and anxious, she will be perplexed.  But if you sow selfless love into her heart, she will bear the peaceable fruit of harmony and love for you.

“Your words to her are seeds that fall literally into your wife’s ears and settle in her heart.  And like the Master tells us, the condition of the heart dictates the thoughts that enter her mind and later proceeds out of her mouth.

“If you want to see a wife who blooms in peaceful colors of the rainbow, whose smile draws the butterflies, whose song coos, so that songbirds thrill to hear her–then you have to take responsibility for what your garden is bearing right now and what it will bear in due season.”

“How do I take responsibility?”

“You can start by sincerely apologizing for an unkind word, a careless jab, a thoughtless snarl.  For it is humility that will melt her heart toward you.  Humble yourself and you will win her.  Remain prideful and strong in your own ways, and you will lose her heart, if not her body.

“For we husbands are to love our wives, even as Christ loved all of us.  And how did He love us?  He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death.  He gave Himself for us.  Had He not done this, we would all feel lost and hopeless–the way many wives feel in their marriages.

“I do not know how to do this,” I confessed.

“You must seek Him now.  Humble yourself and ask Him for help.  If you cannot express humility to your Creator, you cannot walk humbly toward others on earth.  He will give you the patience to not only reap what you have already sown, but also to replant the peace-yielding seeds of agape love from above.

“Your wife is your gift from God to help you get back to Him.  Embrace your gift and you embrace Him.”

And with that he went his way.  I didn’t get it all then.  But I sincerely tried to put it into practice, and it has made all the difference.         Kenneth Wayne Hancock

Obama Approves Gay Marriage–Uses Jesus’ Words in Error to Justify Stance–Christ Upholds Male Female Marriage ONLY

President Obama needs to stick to his socialist platitudes at his many fundraisers and not be invoking the name of Jesus to justify his approval of gay marriage.  For he has proven that he “neither knows the scriptures nor the power of God.”

He’s even got the audacity to say that if we don’t approve of gay marriage, we don’t love our neighbor (gays) as our selves.  He quotes the golden rule, from Jesus’ own lips:  “Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”  And then he stops there, taking it out of context. There is a colon with a clause coming after this, explaining it: “For this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7: 12).

But the great commandment before “love your neighbor as yourself” is this: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”  (Matt. 22: 37-40).

The first and great commandment is to love God  with all our heart, soul, and mind.  That means “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (II Cor. 10: 5).  How do we love God this way?  “For this is the love of God that we keep His commandments” (I John 5: 3).  Since Christ is the expressed image of the invisible God, what are His thoughts concerning marriage?

And so to love God and then love our neighbor, we must obey what He commands us to do.  Jesus Christ said that he always kept his Father’s commandments.  So let’s explore what the Word says about marriage, and let’s obey it.  In so doing we prove that we love God and then we can love our neighbor.

God’s thoughts on marriage

Jesus said, “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.  For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife;  and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.  What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mark 10-6-9).

Jesus is giving us in this teaching a definite direction to follow when it comes to marriage.  First, God made us humans “male and female.”  And a man shall “cleave to his wife” and be one flesh.  God created human beings with two genders for a specific purpose.  And it was not so that two men could get together, nor two women.  But “God has joined together” the male and the female to be one flesh.  And Jesus caps off this with this command: What God has “joined together, let not man put asunder,” or man better not separate what I have joined together.  When a man persists in mating with another man, is he not separating himself from a woman, which is contrary to what “God has joined together”?

Now those are Jesus’ own words in everyone’s Bible at home.  They are very clear and succinct.  They are easy to understand.  It is God’s purpose and plan to have male and female be joined together in marriage.  God has done this since the beginning, and Jesus says that God does not want man to separate what He has joined together.  When male joins together with male, and when female joins together with female, they are separating or putting asunder what God has joined together.

Gays are human beings–people with rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.   However, according to the Scriptures of Truth, “holy matrimony” or marriage is a spiritual and physical joining together by God of a male and female.  These two become one and are the only two human beings that “God hath joined together” scripturally.  God has not changed His position on this.  He did say, “I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; I change not.”

Marriage between male and female is a moral right granted by the Creator.  It was never granted to those of the same sex.  President Obama is trying to forge gay marriage into a civil right, erroneously basing it as a moral or inalienable right.  “That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  According to the Declaration of Independence, it is the Creator that gives the moral or unalienable rights to mankind.  The Creator ordained marriage to a male and female.

This male/female spiritual union is in the internal genetic fabric of human society with roots going back thousands of years, planted there by a purposeful Creator.  That is the reason that “gay marriage” was rejected, first by the Creator and now by the people thirty-two states.  It doesn’t set well in the human heart and psyche because it never was part of the divine plan, according to the scriptures.

I do say this in love: Because of His male/female plan for marriage, the God of the Bible rejects homosexuality in the strongest of terms [See Genesis 19 and Romans 1: 26-27.  I am not going to go on about these rather  obvious passages depicting God’s disgust of homosexuality.  People can read it for themselves, and come to their own decisions.  “Many shall be purified, and made white…But the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand” (Dan. 12: 10).]

But I do not condemn anyone.  I believe that loving our neighbor is telling him the truth of God–in this case, the truth concerning what God’s institution of marriage is.  Mankind did not create marriage, according to Jesus.  Marriage is a spiritual thing, a religious institution, created by God.  And we first need to keep His commandments concerning marriage, thereby showing our love for God.

For this gay marriage controversy is not a political thing, or a sociological thing, or a cultural thing.  It is a spiritual thing.  And it is this: Do we believe that the God of the Bible, the Creator, really exists?  If He does, then are we going to love and obey Him concerning marriage and other things?  Or are we going to act as if He does not exist, and thumb our noses at Him by approving homosexual marriage?  That’s the real spiritual issue before us.  Who will take God’s side in this issue?  Our choice will define us in His eyes.  For “the eyes of the LORD search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him” (II Chron. 16: 9).  KWH

Forgiveness–How to Love Your Wife As Christ Loved the Church

As men, we are admonished to “love our wives as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself for it.”  We are to love our wives in the same manner that Christ loves all of His followers.  How does He love us all?  He forgives.  No matter the faults that we have done–He  has a forgiving heart toward us.

We are also admonished “to be not bitter” against our wives.  Men become bitter toward their wives when they do not forgive them.

But some man will ask, Forgive them of what?  Forgive them for just being human.  Forgive them for not being perfect perfect.  But we men have a problem doing this.  We hold on to small grudges and little snide attitudes.  We puff up and become indignant towards them.  We expect them to make the first move toward reconciliation.

But the biblical love is a forgiving love and is unconditional.  We should not love our wives because they love us first.  That is not loving our wives the way Christ loved all of us.  He loved us when we were unlovable.

This kind of love is, of course, not the “love” born from our original carnal nature.  This love is the “love from above”–the agape love, and women are wired by their Creator to respond to it.  In fact, this is the only kind of love that will reach them.

The Divine Relationship in Husband and Wife

There is a divine ratio and proportion going on here.                                               Husbands :  Wives ::  Christ : the body of Christ (His church, us)          Husbands are to love their wives the way Christ loves us.

And so we must look to why we, the body of Christ (the church), love God.  “We love God because He first loved us.”  We didn’t wake up one morning and decide that we were going to love God.  No.  He loved us first and gave Himself for us.  Christ laid down His mortal life, thereby expressing the greatest love a man can show another.  It was only then that we could be changed from a selfish, non-loving individual into one who loves another.

In like manner, God demands that we love our wives unconditionally.  We love them first by forgiving them of any perceived shortcomings or wrongs towards us.  We forgive their imperfections, both outward and inward.

We are asked by God to love them as He loves us by using great patience in waiting and hoping for the harvest of reciprocal love, joy and peace.

Yes, this is difficult to do on our own strength.  It takes faith in God’s power, for we do not have it within ourselves to love our wives the way Christ loves us all.  Again, that love is from above and not from the earthly nature we are born with.

We can only get it from God.  This kind of forgiveness and love cannot be obtained through the usual means available to man.  It must be asked for from Him who is LOVE.  For “God is love.”  He, therefore, is the only One who has what He is asking us to dispense to another.

Man’s Problem in Forgiving and Loving

It takes humility to approach the altar of Divine Love and ask God to channel His Essence through us to our wives.  To say to Him, Please help me love her with the forgiveness that yields sweet acceptance–the way You have accepted us into Your Presence.  I cannot do this on my own; my heart is too small.  I know this now.  Help me.  Flow Love through me to her.  Thank You.      KWH

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Apples of Gold–Missing the Wife of My Youth

I am like an ancient apple tree

That knows innately April is nigh.

The sap still wants to rise,

But no white blossoms smile at passersby,

Enticing them to breathe our joy

And taste the promise of our love.

The sun still frowns, begrudging a ray or two.

So come back soon and with you bring the latter rain,

That the  storehouse of every heart

May overflow with  apples of gold.

Kenneth Wayne Hancock