Lesson 5, Love One Another

A dear friend of mine, after many years of marriage decided that she wanted no more of her marriage. The love that she had for her husband was gone. She told me that there was no way that she could ever live with her husband again.

I sat down with her one afternoon and she told me as far as she was concerned the marriage was over. She had lived through many years of abuse with this man and she finally reached the breaking point. She has two children. What will become of them I asked? "They will be ok." This was not her only divorce, she was divorced from her first husband.

How can we as Christians love one another when we can not even continue loving the person to whom we are married? You would think that those that were in the body of Christ would have a lot lower divorce rate then those in the world, but the fact is the divorce rate in the body of Christ is no less than those that are in the world.

Countless couples are struggling in their marriages and many are on the brink of calling it quits. I recently read a statistic that one out of every two couples that get married today will in five years get a divorce. The marriage vows that were made do not seem to be very sacred after sometimes just a few months or a year or two. What was the cause of this breakdown in the marriage? It was the three little words, Love one another. The apostle Paul told husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and willingly died for it (Ephesians 5v25).

This is the love of sacrifice, protection and concern husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. And how did Christ love the Church? He gave His all for it. He went to the cross and suffered the most awful death one could suffer. He put the Church above Himself. Husbands what are we to do? Love our wives like Christ loved the Church. Loving your wife is much deeper then sex. There should be a desire within the husband's soul to be willing to give his absolute all for his wife. He should respect her as his equal, realizing that she too was created by God to have a very important part in the marriage. She is not our slave to do the servile chores in the household. Wives are to obey their husbands; someone has got to be in charge, to make the final decisions. But these decisions should always be discussed by the husband with his wife. He should always want her input. After all the decision that will be made will effect both the husband and his wife. Too many times the husband wants to decide without consulting with his wife. This will mostly always result in bitter feelings.

Something more is required of a man. A husband also has to love his wife as an equal human being - just for her being her. This is the love of acceptance, of active tolerance. He has to be concerned for her as another human being. Not solely in the way he thinks she could be or the way he would like her to be, but in the way she is in her activities, hopes and dreams. Certainly not just as an extension of himself. The same principle applies to the wife.

A happy successful marriage does not just happen. There will be disagreements along the way. In the end the key to the successful marriage is our relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ. We Christians have invited Christ into our lives but have we invited Him into our marriages? Jesus is Lord of every aspect of our lives and that includes our marriages. My wife and I have been married for 47 years. There is not a day in my life that I have ever regretted our marriage. My wife and I do just about every thing together. I love watching football and guess what? My wife made a concerted effort to like it too. We both have our differences though and we both allow for it. We both have our strengths and our weaknesses, that's what makes us a team. We need each other because of those weaknesses. My wife loves gardening. I, unfortunately, dislike it! My involvement is, at best, gathering leaves for compost. I recognize my attitude has not been right, but being human gives one the power to change and improve. I should be making more of an effort to share her interest in gardening. I can do better and so can you - whatever your case.

We must both, husbands and wives, love each other. We are supposed to be examples of Jesus Christ to the world around us. How can we be an example of Jesus Christ who is Love if we can not even love one another? Next to the Lord our spouse is the most important person in our lives, we must treat them that way. We can do that by simply loving one another. Don't wait to say I love you to your spouse, why not be the first to say it. If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves how much more should we love the one that lives with us and sleeps with us and eats with us every day of the week?

Of course, the ideal place to begin a good marriage is long before the wedding ceremony. Background is very important. However, perhaps you have not been fortunate enough to see a good example with your own parents. If so, you have to strive to be of good character, honest, loyal, trustworthy and a good communicator long before you get married and then continuing into marriage. It is too much to expect all these qualities to appear overnight. In my own marriage, as a child I did not have a mother and father that enjoyed a marriage that was a good teacher for me. This was the same for my wife. We both spent hours on end before we got married just talking about what we wanted out of marriage. We both knew that what our parents marriage were like and we did not want that. Early on I discovered that a bad example of a marriage was also a teacher. It taught both my wife and I what should not be allowed in our marriage. We communicated this to each other. Throughout our marriage the line of communication has always been open. It is a major factor in having a loving, successful marriage.

Some have been known to express love verbally at the same time as being unfaithful! This is the harsh reality of many modern marriages. Approximately 80 percent of those going into marriage expect total faithfulness, but less than 40 percent will actually have it. Roughly 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women in Western societies are unfaithful. This behavior - so common, yet so destructive - is an insult to the very words and actions meant to express love.

If you sincerely give to one another in words and actions, love will continue to grow. Do not let your marriage drift. You can not afford to wait until you "feel right."

The apostle Peter told husbands to be considerate of their wives (1 Peter 3:7). To do this properly, they have to get to know their wives. "Knowing" is a good way of depicting what marriages should be. To know. To understand. Not to know is to court marital danger. To know manifests itself in unexpected ways. As in giving a gift, the better you know a person, the more suitable your gift will be.

The real beneficiary of gifts given in marriage (directly or otherwise) will not only be one another but also the generation to come. If you really love your husband or wife, if you show deep and appropriate affection based on intimate personal knowledge, your children will also be infused with a happiness hard to come by in any other way. Break the mold. Bring love into your marriage. Work at it. Do it for yourselves - and your children!

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What do we as Christian do when it comes to living in the culture we live in? The Bible tells us that we are sojourning here on this earth, meaning strangers passing our time here as we are traveling towards our real homes which are in heaven.[1Peter 1v17] But does this mean that we as Christian should live in isolation from those in the world? Should we only be concerned about those others that are Christians and stay clear from those unbelievers in this world.

Time after time all we need to do to find the answer to these questions is to look at how Jesus Christ lived in this world. The leaders of the day often accused Jesus of spending time with the sinners of the world, those that were not Jews were considered undesirable company for any upstanding Jew. To be seen with "those people" would have been considered living to close to the world. Yet Jesus commanded His disciples to go into the world preaching the gospel. [Mark 15v16]

The Christian is warned  not to  become part of the world and its ways. Those that want to show that we should not mingle with this world use verses such this one as proof: 2 Cor. 6:15-17 "Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you." This verse is very clearly not talking about staying clear of sinners in the world, it is saying not to get involved with this world's idol worshipping. This does however lay a path for us on how we should become involved.

Our involvement in the world is a commandment as earlier shown in Mark 16v15. We are not to become students of this world and its system . We are to walk uprightly preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to all that will listen, not shoving it down the world's throat or as some would say not clubbing them on the head with our Bibles. This old saying comes to mind, "There is more than one way to skin a cat." Though I do not necessarily think it is wrong to stand on a street corner shouting "repent, repent," I do believe there is a more intelligent and proper way of bringing the good news of the Gospel to the people of the world. The men in our church for example go out every Saturday after their morning breakfast get together and do their Street Ministry. They hand out material about our church and invite people to come. When they can and the Spirit leads them, they talk to others that will listen about our Lord. They often have opportunity to pray for some that they talk to and have led others to the Lord right there on the street.

The question of should Christians get involved with the world is of course yes and no. Yes we should get involved with those in the world providing that we do not get caught up in their ungodly way of living. For example, many years ago I was invited to a house warming party where I was asked to ask the blessing of the meal and of course a blessing on this young couple's house. The time came and I was asked to pray and I did. Right after the prayer a man asked to make a toast and he did. To my surprise and to the embarrassment of the young couple this man gave an off color toast which left some of the group stunned in silence, the other part broke out in laughter. When we get involved with the world we will be tested by God to see how we will react when these type of things happen. Of course I felt the spot light was on me then to see how I would react. My reaction was, I did not laugh, but I also did not try to correct the man that did this. We must be prepared to respond appropriately to others in the world when these situations occur, and they will occur. By my not laughing I was showing my disapproval, and not a word had to be said, and just by this simple act of not doing something I was not becoming involved in this world's evil ways. Sometime later as I was getting ready to go, the young couple came and apologized to me for this man's poor behavior. The couple saw my reactions to what had happened and by me not getting involved in the laughing approval of the toast I demonstrated to them my sincerity of being a man of God. We must be very careful that we do not do any thing that would destroy our witness to the world and some times that will be by simply not getting caught up in the moment.

We as Christian are to go out into the world preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ by not only preaching the word but by living the word. We must walk the walk before we can talk the talk as a believer in Jesus Christ. When we get involved we must not be thin skinned and  ready to pounce on someone with our Bible in one hand and a club in the other. We must realize that what the unbeliever does best is sin. We must expect this from them and be prepared to be able to demonstrate the proper ways to respond to what ever is said or done. I know a Christian man that had his 21 year old son living with him. One day the father found that his car would not run and his son was away on vacation. So he decided that his son would not mind if he borrowed his car. In the process of this he found a pornographic magazine in his son's car. He became enraged over this. He went into his son's room and began a search looking for more of this stuff. And guess what, he found it. He gathered all this stuff up in a big box and when his son came home he confronted him with this. Of course porno magazines are sin, but do you think that this was the way to go about teaching someone about sin. Is that the way God handles us when we sin? What one of us would want God to get our big box of sins and shove them in our face? Other's sins should not cause us to become enraged, it should first lead us to prayer. We should first ask God how we should handle this. We should go to the word of God and search for the proper ways to handle the situation at hand. The rest of the story about the man and his son is this. The son got very defensive and a literal fight broke out, and the son moved out. The father was very sad that he handled himself that way and the real lesson was not taught. Do you see why it is so important to handle ourselves in a godly way when we get involved with the culture we live in?

The hope of the Church rests on God for men. It does not rest on men, not even on religious men—and not even on the belief that men with the help of God will finally build that bridge to Him. Our hope is not found in man’s efforts. Our hope is found in God’s provision for eternity. But this does not denigrate our involvement with culture. There is a radical difference between human culture generally, which is thoroughly secular, and that which is developed as a loving service to God. Utopia will never refer to this life. Since no culture this side of the Parousia [Second Coming] can be recognized as divine we are limited to the more modest hope that life on earth may gradually be made better; or, more modestly still, gradually be made less bad." A Christian’s response to culture should be described with such modest hopes in view. Let us go into the world not trying to change the culture but to influence the culture. Let us not forget that this world will change some day. This world and its culture will someday all bow down at the feet of Jesus Christ.

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