For the last few weeks, we have been talking about marriage from the standpoint of the Scriptures. We have talked about the main problem in marriage (sin), what God created it for (to make us more like Him), as well as some practical things we can do to make it better (practice submission and aim for holiness). Today we are finishing up this series by talking about the thing that has been rather noticeably missing in our conversation thus far: love. The Beatles were wrong that love is all you need, but it’s really important all the same. Let’s talk about how we can get that right to the benefit of our marriages and all the other relationships in our life.

Love Always Looks Up

When I do premarital counseling with a couple, one of the things we always talk about toward the end of the journey is where their expectations for the marriage are versus what the reality of marriage will likely be. It’s not necessarily an encouraging conversation (although I try not to make it too much of a bummer), but it is often a helpful one. What we do is that I give them a list of statements describing various aspects of marriage and how they think it will be. The couples are then supposed to mark which of the statements they think are true, and which are false. 

The statements aren’t complicated or terribly controversial. But they are intended to be thought-provoking. “My partner will meet all my needs for companionship.” “Time will resolve our problems.” “Nothing could cause us to question our love for one another.” “I believe I know everything there is to know about my partner.” “We should live ‘happily ever after’ with no major problems.” “Love is all you need for a happy marriage.” And there are several others in this same vein. Over the years, the consistent pattern here has been that couples mark some of the statements as true, and others as false—right in line with my instructions to them. Once I’ve let them tell me which statements they marked as which, I reveal to them that the whole thing was one elaborate trick question. If you have been married for very long, I suspect you can already see what the trick here is. Anybody want to shout it out? 

All of the statements are false. 

Every single one of the fifteen statements I give to them should be marked as false by the couples.The exercise is really about helping to discover just how thick of an idealistic lens they are looking through when they think about their forthcoming marriage. Now, a bit of idealism is expected. Nearly every couple I’ve ever counseled have marked at least a few of the statements as true. Even though that’s not technically the correct answer for any of them, that is, at least, as it should be. A couple with no idealism at all when thinking about their marriage would be concerning to me in a whole different way. 

What has been interesting to me over the years is seeing which couples mark which statements as true and having them explain their thinking to me. A few have gone to the mat to defend their true answer to this or that statement. And while there is some variance among the responses, there are a handful of them that are more consistently marked as true than others. One of the statements that is most consistently marked as true is that last one I read to you a second ago. “Love is all you need for a happy marriage.” In response to this line, what I always say to the couples is that while the Beatles were great songwriters, they were terrible theologians. If you look to John and Paul for some great music, you’ll be rightly delighted with what your search turns up. If, however, you look to them for good theology, you are going to be led rather seriously off track. Love the way our culture defines it as a mostly emotional expression of attraction to another person is not even remotely the only thing you need for a happy marriage. 

That being said, love really does matter when it comes to marriage. It matters a lot. In fact, you could make a decent argument that love, properly defined, really is the only thing you need for a happy marriage. Of course, when you say that, the whole “properly defined” part becomes really important. A false or otherwise bad definition will get you nowhere, but a good one will take you anywhere. Well, as we wrap up our teaching series on marriage this morning, let’s see if we can do just that, and leave all of us with one more really practical thing we can do to set our marriages on the path toward becoming fully what God intended for them to be. 

This morning finds us in the fifth and final part of our series, The Journey of a Lifetime. Over the past month, we have been taking a look at marriage from the standpoint of the Scriptures. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of the full picture we find there, but we have looked at some particularly key passages that are foundational both theoretically and practically. We started out by establishing the main issue causing problems in every marriage no matter what precise form those problems happen to take: sin. From there, we stepped back a bit further to the purpose God created marriage for in the beginning: to make us more like Him. 

Then, over the past couple of weeks, we have meditated together on Paul’s counsel to Christian wives and husbands about how to make sure their marriages fall as fully in line with God’s intentions as possible. The big ideas here were submission and holiness. If we want our marriages to be the best they can possibly be, then husbands and wives both need to work with great intentionality to move each other in the direction of Jesus—even if that means setting aside our own needs and desires—with the overriding goal being that their partner comes to more and more fully reflect the beautiful, wonderful holiness of God in Christ. This is a far greater and higher goal than just trying to make each other happy. If all you aim for is happiness in marriage, you’ll probably miss it and land in misery. If you strive for holiness, happiness will come along for the ride. 

This morning, I want to finish our journey by talking about love. There are all kinds of ways we can stand on very firm scriptural ground and rather cynically criticize our culture’s close association of love with marriage. Our poking holes in the happiness myth last week is one of the ways we have already done some of that in this series. But taking that kind of a curmudgeonly approach to the topic not only isn’t going to accomplish very much, it’s really not even all that wise. Instead, the better approach is to make sure we understand love properly so that we can agree with our culture but in terms that will keep us on the right track rather than being drawn off course by things that just aren’t true. 

Well, if we want to understand love properly from the standpoint of what God has revealed to us through the Spirit-directed writings of some of His earliest followers, there are several places we could go. But what Paul writes to the Corinthian church in his first letter to them is awfully helpful. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me at this famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13. 

I suspect these words are familiar to many of you. “If I speak human or angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give away all my possessions, and if I give over my body in order to boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.” 

Jumping down a few verses for the moment: “Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know in part, and we prophecy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known. Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love—but the greatest of these is love.” 

While I have heard these words read at funerals a few different times, the most common place they get read is at a wedding. The irony there, of course, is that Paul was not even remotely talking about love in the context of marriage here. That wasn’t likely even a thought on his mind as he wrote. A funeral is probably a more contextually appropriate place to read these words than at a wedding. Okay, then what was he talking about? That becomes clear when you take the passage more fully in context which includes chapters 12 and 14. Paul here was talking about the essential ingredient for a church to function properly as God designed in such a way as to not only allow, but to encourage worship. 

In this, the first part of the passage I read for you a second ago really looks back into chapter 12. Paul had been talking there about the various spiritual gifts God gives the church so that it can accomplish all He has set before it to do. To exercise any of these spiritual gifts without love as the driving, organizing principle is to commit yourself to a path of utter pointlessness. You won’t be advancing the Gospel then, you’ll be pursuing empty religiosity which God is not a fan of in any way, shape, or form.

In a similar way, the last third of the chapter looks forward into chapter 14. There Paul spends a lot of time unpacking the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues, but from the standpoint of avoiding unnecessary distractions in the worship gathering. There is a day coming when we won’t need the kind of special revelation of God’s word and will that He has occasionally given the church through the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues and interpreting the messages for the church. That doesn’t mean God has used these gifts to offer new revelation to the church. That is entirely contained in the Scriptures. But He has used them to offer a word of encouragement or accountability on occasion over the centuries of church history. Until then, though, leading with love will help keep things in good working order in the worship gathering. 

In between these bookends, Paul offers us this beautiful meditation on what love is that bridges the first and third parts together. He does this by describing a variety of things that love is and is not. You know this list. This may have been the part of the passage here you had read at your own wedding. Listen to this: “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” 

Now, does your love look like that? Mine doesn’t always. Depending on who you ask, mine may not look like that very often at all. This is a heavy list, right? If we’re not careful, this list can become a source of guilt. I’m not nearly patient enough. I’m certainly not as kind as I could be. I’m often envious and arrogant. Sometimes I’m just downright rude. I’m definitely self-seeking and irritable on occasion. The hits just keep on coming, right? I guess I’m just not very loving. I don’t get love right. And is this the point here? To just make us all feel a little worse about ourselves as we reflect on the nature of love as God revealed it to us? 

Not at all. This is about helping us grasp more fully what love is so that we can live it out more successfully in all of our relational contexts. And even though Paul probably didn’t have marriage on his mind when he was writing, marriage is nonetheless one of our most significant relational contexts, which means this stuff is directly relevant to our efforts to get our marriages right as far as the wisdom of the Scriptures goes. Given this, I think we can glean a pretty important principle for getting the most out of this for our marriages by making a quick observation and then diving just a bit deeper into how Paul describes love here. 

Let’s start with that observation. This is going to be right on point with where we were last week. As you survey this list, do you see anything about feelings here? Anything about emotions? I don’t see anything at all that has to do with feeling or emotion. Now, that doesn’t mean we aren’t or even shouldn’t have feelings about another person that we associate with our love for them. That’s perfectly acceptable. But as far as a biblical understanding of love goes, feelings don’t factor into the equation. Love isn’t an emotion. You don’t feel love, you choose love. Now, again, the choice to love may make you feel a certain way. That’s fine. That’s good even. Those feelings can grease the wheels of your choice such that they help you keep making it even when it gets hard to make. But if you associate love with those feelings too closely, then when those feelings aren’t there—and, given the fickleness of feelings, there are going to be some times when they just aren’t there—you are going to be questioning your love for the other person. When the other person acts toward you in a way that doesn’t suggest a proper reciprocation of your feelings for them, you are going to be questioning their love for you. That’s a really scary moment to face if you aren’t prepared for it and don’t have a good definition of love to support you in that moment. And if you bring all of the uncertainty of feelings into the marriage relationship, you are setting yourself up for trouble right out of the gate. Thus I talk about this with all the couples I counsel. 

Okay, so then what exactly is love as far as Paul understood it? Well, he breaks it all down for us here. But trying to take in all of this at once can be overwhelming as we just experienced. So, let’s simplify things a bit. What Paul says about love here breaks down fairly neatly into three parts. Let’s look at each of these in turn. 

The first part is the lighting round of quick descriptions of love, both positive and negative. “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable.” Stop right there. How could we summarize all of these? How about this? Love is charitable. Love puts self to the side and actively seeks to move in a way and at a pace that the other person can handle. It is willing to operate with the other person’s capacity fully in mind and with gentleness as its guide. Love doesn’t seek to advance itself and its interests at the other person’s expense, and doesn’t harbor ill will when the other person gains a blessing or can’t move at the pace it wants to go for some reason. If in each situation you face you ask yourself what the charitable thing to do would be, you are going to be staying on track with love the way God revealed it to Paul, who was really only presenting an assessment of what Jesus did. 

If you are going to do all of this, though, there will inevitably be some things you are going to have to let go of along the way. This is where love as a choice rather than merely as a feeling starts to become really important. Look at the next part of what Paul wrote here again. Love “does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth.” 

Now, what does it mean to “keep a record of wrongs.” I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that you are going to forget every hurt and offense you are dealt by another person. There are some wounds you will never forget, never stop reliving if you aren’t careful to guard your thoughts. There are some wounds that you will always have to take care not to allow them to color your assumptions about and treatment of the people around you. The very idea that we can forget some things is a foolish one to the point of stupidity. But love doesn’t keep lists. It doesn’t keep a record of those kinds of things that it then consciously uses to justify the treatment of others. Love doesn’t keep score. It doesn’t count up the number of wrong things the other person has done, and then demands a balancing of the scales before any kind of forward movement in the relationship is going to be able to happen. Perhaps to put this another way, love always forgives. 

And love always forgives because it is looking beyond the immediate to something entirely bigger and more consequential than that. Love—the kind of love that reflects the love of God and which can transform a marriage into something entirely greater and stronger than it will otherwise be—always hopes. Now, as Paul makes clear in the next section of this chapter that we read earlier, love won’t always hope because eventually the need for hope will pass. The need for faith will pass. Jesus will return, restore all things, and we will have the sight Paul mentions. But until then, love is fundamentally rooted in hope. When we commit ourselves to seeing someone become more fully who God made them to be, this commitment operates on hope in an absolutely essential way. 

Listen again to how Paul expresses this. He says love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Love is determinedly optimistic. We make this commitment and we stick with it even when it gets hard because of our rock solid belief that our efforts will pay off in the end. God will honor our faithfulness and move our person in the direction of reflecting His image in Christ more fully. Love holds this belief and absolutely refuses to let it go. 

Putting all of these themes together—the idea of love’s being charitable, not keeping lists, and being determinedly optimistic—I think we can summarize them with a single statement. Love always assumes the best. Love finds whatever is the most generous explanation for what the other has said or done, and operates as if that were true whether or not it actually is. Love always assumes the best. Maybe to put that even more simply: Love always looks up. 

Now, this idea of assuming the best, of love always looking up, is something I have talked about before—and something I always talk about when I’m doing premarital counseling with a couple—as a critical foundation for all of our communication in marriage. But really, it’s foundational for just about anything we do in life. Let me describe again how this works because it is not naturally intuitive. Whatever situation you happen to be in, if you want to be able to live out the love of Christ in it in a way that will invariably make it better, you need to first find the most generous explanation for what is happening in it. Now, sometimes that isn’t very hard because the situation is unabashedly good. But sometimes that takes some work. When it comes specifically to situations in our marriages, it can occasionally take a lot of work. When your partner has said or done that thing you’ve asked them not to do for the thousandth time…today…finding the most generous explanation for why they did it may be the last thing you want to do. But love demands it. Love always looks up. 

Once you find this most generous explanation, you then operate in the situation or toward the other person as if this most generous explanation were true. Whether or not it is actually true doesn’t matter here. The most generous explanation may be the furthest thing from the truth. You are going to let it motivate your actions toward the other person anyway. This doesn’t mean you are embracing a delusional fantasy and avoiding dealing with reality as it actually is. You can and should acknowledge the actual truth for what it is. What you are doing is allowing this aspirational truth to be the thing that determines and defines your words and actions in the situation because of your vision of hope that God’s love through you can yet make a positive difference in it. Love always looks up. 

Do you see what a difference this will make in the situation? And notice that I didn’t say “might” make, or “could” make. If you operate as if the most generous explanation were true, that will 100% make a positive difference in the situation. It will make a difference because it will necessarily change how you approach it and how you respond in it. You may not be able to control anything else in the situation, but you can control your reaction to it. You can choose to love in it. There will absolutely be a difference in the situation if you go in with your rhetorical guns blazing versus if you go in with the gentleness, kindness, and compassion of Christ. If you want to move the other person in the direction of who God made them to be, there’s really not a choice here. You’ve got to go with the latter. You’ve got to love. You’ve got to love because you know what the results of love will be in the end: the restoration of all things. Including your relationship. Love always looks up. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t occasionally still have hard conversations. When it becomes clear that the most generous explanation still isn’t a very positive one, there may be a very painful reckoning that is going to have to happen. But even then, if you go into that situation with the mindset that this other person you have intentionally committed to moving in the direction of Jesus is struggling under the weight of some sin and in spite of the pain that sin is causing you, God has put you in that position specifically to help them out of it and to walk in the holiness of the image of Christ—just like He has already helped and is ongoingly helping you to do in Christ—you are going to approach it differently than if you just go in hurt. Hurt people, hurt people. But hurt people who are committed to loving the people around them—including those who have hurt them—allow God to redeem and transform their hurt into something that can be positively used to invite people more fully into His kingdom than they otherwise are. That’s different. And if you do that consistently in your marriage, it will be different—and better—than it will be otherwise. Love always looks up. 

So, how can you look up? How are you looking up? What steps are you going to walk out of here and take to make sure you can look up more consistently in your relationships than you are right now? Love always looks up. This may not be easy. In fact, depending on the reaction pattern you are currently in, it may be really hard. You are going to have to retrain your brain to respond differently to the people around you. Instead of looking through a lens that anticipates being hurt or frustrated or disappointed, you are going to be looking through a lens of grace and hope for what could be. If your assumptions in the relationship are usually pretty grim, you are going to have to start getting really creative in determining what the most generous explanation is. But if you will both commit to this, your relationship will change for the better. Love always looks up. And if you commit to looking up with it, your marriage will become just exactly what you have always wanted it to be. Love always looks up.