Loving Your Spouse When You Don’t Feel Like It - Crosswalk Couples Devotional - October 18
Loving Your Spouse When You Don’t Feel Like It
By Lynette Kittle
“But if anyone obeys His word, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know we are in Him.” - 1 John 2:5
Movies and television shows are filled with couples falling out of love, deciding they don’t love their spouse anymore. Sadly, most in these pretend scenarios decide to separate or divorce, thinking they’ll find someone new to love.
They usually model a love that goes by feelings alone and gives up when times get bumpy. It’s not the kind of love that God gives. He loves us at our worst, even when we don’t love Him as 1 John 4:19 describes, “We love because He first loved us.”
God is our example of choosing to love, of loving when it’s hard, of loving the unloving, and of loving when we don’t feel like loving.
Worldly Examples of Love
My daughter and I recently met an 80-year-old woman, lovely on the outside, telling us about her past five husbands, her current sixth husband, and how she is all about love. She laughed at how she didn’t want to be in one marriage for 50 years because that would be boring.
Running through my mind’s subtext while listening to her story, was that she must be very mistaken, because how could someone be all about love, yet be on her sixth marriage, because love never fails.
Although she proclaimed love, she had a history of repeatedly failing in her love relationships, causing me to think what she considered love must be something else. Needless to say, she didn’t convince me that she is all about love.
It’s a huge problem in our culture today, mistaking like, desire, lust, and everything else for love. To discover what real, true love is all about, we need to look to God.
God’s Love Is the Basics for All Love
Often we try to categorize love, believing its different kinds of love for different relationships, but the core and the basis of love, is all the same, whether for our spouse, parents, siblings, friends, children, co-workers, and neighbors.
As well, we make the mistake of putting higher and different expectations of love when it’s of the romantic nature, setting ourselves up to be more easily disappointed, discouraged, and looking for it to fail, because we view it as a higher, different kind of love, instead of realizing the basics of love are the same.
As 1 Corinthians 13:4-9 describes:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.”
All Love Comes From and Through God
Loving our spouse comes from God. His love is the only true source of love, as 1 John 4:8 clarifies, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
If we say we love God, but we don’t choose to love our spouse, we’re deceiving ourselves because God is love, and we can’t really love Him without loving each other.
Sounds difficult, but God doesn’t expect us to love out of our own strength, but to choose to love through God in us, as 1 John 4:16 describes, “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”
Let’s Pray: Dear Father, fill me with Your love today so that I might love You and love my spouse. Help me to see that marital love comes from You, and it doesn’t fail when You are the source. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/fizkes
Lynette Kittle is married with four daughters. She enjoys writing about faith, marriage, parenting, relationships, and life. Her writing has been published by Focus on the Family, Decision, Today’s Christian Woman, kirkcameron.com, Ungrind.org, StartMarriageRight.com, and more. She has a M.A. in Communication from Regent University and serves as associate producer for Soul Check TV.
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