If your desire is for your unbelieving spouse to accept Jesus as Savior, or for your spouse to grow in their small faith, then you need to love them with your actions.

Loving someone who fails to love you is significantly more challenging, but it’s what God calls us to do. It’s what He did for us.

We will never be able to love our spouses well until we remember how love was first demonstrated to us. Love is action.

If we are trying to define what love in our marriage should look like, we must start here: God is the very definition of love. We must look vertically before we can ever look horizontally to find the love our hearts desire.

When you love your spouse with the kind of love that can only come from God, they see Him in you. And when they experience God in this way, their hearts are softened and prepared for change.

If we are to love as God loves us, we need to love our spouses unconditionally. We need to love them without any expectation of return and whether or not they deserve it.

True sacrificial love means we lay down what is important to us in favor of what is important to our spouses. We give up our point of view, our beliefs, our comforts, our expectations and we pick up theirs as valuable.

God designed marriage because He knew putting you in a relationship with one person for the rest of your life would eventually break down the barriers that keep you from seeing your sinful heart.

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.

Marriage is hard. It is a constant battle and there are difficult people and difficult situations all around us. God never meant for us to do this in our own power.