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Love God More Than You Love Your Wife After 3 years of dating Mary Ann, we began to talk about marriage. A little while later we broke up. I was devastated. While praying one night, things became crystal clear: Mary Ann had become an idol in my life. I cared more about what made her happy than what made God happy. It was as if God were saying, " You will have no other gods before me, and if you put something or someone else in My place, I will remove it." In 25 years of marriage, I still run into the same problem. I keep myself in check with this question: Whom do I fear more: my wife or God? The level of pain may be more immediate or more pronounced when I don ' t please my wife. Because when I don ' t please God, He doesn ' t go into the other room and get silent on me. But God reminds me, " You do the right thing, even if, for the moment, it doesn ' t make her happy."
Love Her Biblically and Extravagantly To love her biblically, we need to ask, " What is God ' s love for us like?" The essence of His love for us is reflected in His commitment to us and His sacrifice for us. That ' s what our love for our wife needs to look like too. For me, it often means placing her needs ahead of my own. And it means that I will still sacrifice for her even when we disagree. She must be my priority. Remember the little line in the marriage vow, " Forsaking all others, until death do us part "?
That means your relationship with your wife is more important than any other relationship-- friends, your boss or even your children. Put simply, we must love our wives more than anything on earth; that is the essence of the marriage relationship. D. L. Moody summed it up best: " If I want to find out whether a man was a Christian, I wouldn ' t go to a minister; I ' d go and ask his wife.
If a man doesn ' t treat his wife right, I don ' t want to hear him talk about Christianity. What is the use of talking about salvation for the next life if he has no salvation for this life?"
This past May, Mary Ann and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary in Maui, Hawaii. The surroundings were incredible, but really we were just happy to be together. Over dinner that night, we could both say that in spite of any challenges that have come our way, we wouldn ' t change the outcome of our shared 25 years. That ' s because God has used our relationship with each other more than anything else to make us more like Christ. And ultimately, that is His purpose for marriage.
by Bob Lepine with Chris Lawrence
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