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 ESV
This world would be a desolate place without the great warmth of love. There are so many times we get it wrong, but when we get it right—when we feel the kind of love toward our spouses that God intended for us to know, our eyes are opened to His purpose and His plan. Its inexplicable beauty that is unmatched. Our lives are full when love is present, but so empty when love is absent. Anyone who has lived through a loveless period in their marriage, knows the weight of absent love is crushing.
When we see love demonstrated, or when we’ve experienced it in our past, we long to feel its presence in our lives. You see, God put within each of us a desire to love and to be loved. He created our hearts with an innate ability to love with one purpose—so that we know Him. We know from scripture that we were created in His image, and His image is love. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27. He created man and woman in His own image—both of us, in union, in His image. And we read here in 1 John 4:8 that God is love. His image is love. God created man and woman to love, to represent His image to the world. Every failure in your marriage is a failure to love; every failure in your marriage is a failure to demonstrate His love to one another and to the world.
We’ve got to get this right if we want to represent Him well to the world. If our deepest desires are aligned with God, and our purpose is in accordance with His will, then we need to figure out how love well. This passage in 1 John chapter 4 captures all God wants you to know about love—if love in your marriage is waning, or absent, spend your days here and your love will be rekindled. Become a student of love, study what God wants you to know about love, and He will guide your hearts back to love.
We must start by understanding God alone is the source of love. He is the only kind of love that truly satisfies, the only kind of love that meets the hunger of our hearts. We foolishly spend an incredible amount time looking for His love in the wrong places. We chase after love in things and we define what love should look like in our marriage with our expectations. As a result, we spend a great deal of time disappointed and hurt. We are defining love by the wrong standards. God created each of us with a deep desire to be loved—that is why we spend so much energy searching for love, that is why our expectations for our spouse to satisfy our needs is so great. The problem is we use the world’s standards for love to define our expectations, and when those worldly things we chase after or our spouses fail to meet our worldly expectations, we end up deeply discouraged. We believe love has failed.
He alone satisfies our heart. He created us with a deep desire to be loved that can only be satisfied by Him. But it doesn’t stop there—we are called to be a demonstration of His love to the people on our lives. And not just a demonstration when it’s easy, but an abundant example of His love, even when it’s most difficult. The most beautiful part of this plan is how great we feel His love when we demonstrate love where it is most difficult.
Press on, ladies ~ you are loved 💗
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