“THE WORK OF LOVE” (In a Marriage)

A Sermon Based Upon 1 Corinthians 13,  NRSV

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.  

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Pentecost +19,   October 11th, 2015

Several years ago, Gary Chapman, associate pastor and counselor at Calvary Baptist in Winston-Salem wrote a book on marriage that was well read in Christian circles, entitled, “The Five Love Languages”.   Chapman’s love languages starts with words, saying the language of love starts with “Words of Affirmation”.  But then this love language must go beyond words too, as he says, like spending “Quality Time” together,  “Giving and Receiving Gifts”,  and showing the kind of tenderness which treats the other as one who is ‘beloved’, not a mere ‘object of affection’  (’http://www.amazon.com/The-Love-Languages-Secret-Lasts/dp/080241270X.  

That book is and practical, but as good as it is the ‘love language’ was not invented by Gary Chapman.   The Christian understanding of love goes way back all to the first very detailed description of ‘love’ found in the Christian Bible.  We know it as the ‘love chapter’ found in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13.  I preached on this chapter at the beginning of this year to address the meaning of love in general.  But now I want to return to it and dissect the meaning of Christian love as it particularly relates to love in a Christian marriage.

Starting where we left off last week, speaking about the importance of showing love in our ‘words’ to each other  (Ephesians 4: 29-32; 5: 4-6),  We now turn to Paul’s unforgettable discussion of love as the  ‘more excellent way’ that goes beyond words.  ‘Even if I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (1 Cor. 13:1 NRS).   Of course we must speak love, but we also must ‘live in love’ (Eph. 5:1) and ‘sometimes to use words’, as the saying goes.  So, today let’s consider how Christian love goes beyond words in a Christian marriage?

LOVE BEARS ALL THINGS

In this ‘love chapter,  the ‘work of love’ (Kierkegaard) are summed up in four important ‘works’ found in verse 7:…‘love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things (13:7).  The goal of love in a marriage is of course, to be able to endure in all things.   The kind of love that endures is dependent upon the other three works of love, bearing, believing, and hope.  These also build on each other, as bearing each other in a marriage is dependent on finding ways to keep faith in the marriage, and keeping faith in a marriage depends on finding hope in each other and in the marriage itself. 

Let’s begin by looking at the first ‘work’ of love, Love bears all things.  While I started out this series on marriage using the image of marriage as a ‘lion’,  I now want us to learn how Paul says that that love can be a ‘bear’.  I don’t mean the animal, but that love will ‘bear’ the load of the marriage relationship even when there are weaknesses, limitations, or when one or both fall into fatigue, failure or sin.  As Paul wrote the the Galatians,  Christian love will bear its own load and it also ‘bears’ the load or burden of being with the other person (See Gal 6).

What does it mean to ‘bear’ with each other when you are married?  Just ask my wife.  Or maybe I should ask your spouse?  If you’re married, we all know what it means.  Bearing the burden of being married can mean many, many things, can’t it?  It can mean getting used to their habits; both good and bad.  It can mean putting up with all kinds of things that will annoy and aggravate you at times.  It can also mean staying with a person even when you sometimes don’t like them, or you can see right through them, or even when you may uncover deep, or perhaps difficult secrets about them.  And of course it means that we are to ‘bear’ the other when they are weak, sick, poor, sick or dying, as we say in our wedding vows,  “For richer, For poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”   Beautiful words, but sometimes hard for people to live out.   

While there are, of course, limits to what we should ‘bear’ or what we can ‘bear’ with each other,  being married will bring out the best and the worst,  the ‘bad’ along with the ‘good’,  the ‘weaknesses, as well as the strengths; things we admire, as well as the things we will come to detest.   The key to ‘bearing’ each other’s idiosyncrasies in ‘real life’, not just ‘romantic life’, will only be found in a relationship where there is genuine ‘love.’  Love can bear it because love wants to bear it.  And when we love, and love is reciprocal,  we give it to each other, we don’t just ‘bear’ it alone, but Paul means that we bear love together, with each other, for each other as we face both the challenges and the blessings of our relationships.   Bearing another means that we love them ‘unconditionally’ as we find ways find God’s redemption in our human condition. 

Our differences, our distinctions, and the dysfunctions of human life eventually find their way into every marriage relationship.  Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “Men are from Mars, and Women are from Venus”.   This means not only that we have differences, but we can come to believe we’ve married someone from another planet!     

This means that marriage is not easy, but it can be very rewarding.   Getting to the reward will mean that we must ‘bear’ each other in love.   Sometimes one of us will be wrong.  Other times the other will be wrong.  Many times both of us are wrong, because even in our strengths and weaknesses we both come from our own limited perspectives.   This is why one of the most important words that must be spoken and acted upon in any human relationship is: “I’m Sorry”.   Love means always having to say your sorry, even if you feel like you don’t have too.   

Again, we bear with someone, even when we feel like we can’t bear them, because we love them, not because we always ‘like’ them.  The real test of any relationship is not always asking ourselves can we bear it, but it’s about what is the nature of love.  Only the kind of love that will ‘bear’ the other, in good and in bad, can endure.  As Pastor Adam Hamilton has rightly said,  “Good marriages don’t just happen.  They take discipline, sacrifice and effort’, which is, I think, what ‘bearing’ each other ‘in all things’ means  (See ‘Making Love Last a Lifetime’  Abingdon Press, 2004, p.21) . 

We must make the effort to bear each other so the relationship itself becomes ‘load bearing’ like a load bearing wall.  Of course, I want to reiterate again that there are always limits to what any of us can and should bear.   Love means accountability, responsibility, answerability, and obligation to each other.  Unconditional love will always find a way to bear the other, unless that love has been destroyed by the lack of true love on behalf of one or both.  That is why who I love, not what I like is the true foundation of bearing with each other in a loving marriage.

LOVE BELIEVES IN ALL THINGS

But how do we bear the negatives within our relationships so that we can have a break through instead of a breakup?   How does love bear, when it gets hard, heavy and difficult?   The answer comes with the next word:  ‘loves believes’.  

Several years ago, Psychologist James Dobson, wrote a very popular book about Marriage, entitled, “What Wives Wish Their Husband’s Knew about Women.”   Some were critical saying this title is much too wordy.  It should have simply said,  “What Wives Wish Their Husband Knew, period.”  But you get the point.  James Dobson, along with many after him, like the sociologist John Gray, who wrote the very popular book “Men are From Mars, and Women are From Venus, have argued that marriages can be improved greatly if men and women come to understand their unique differences.   The point is that we can’t assume that we know what the other is feeling, thinking, or saying.  Our differences are real.  God has created us to complete and complement each with unique differences,  so we must make an effort to understand that difference, if we are going to believe that this different person really loves us, even when we find ourselves in dispute or argument.     

I don’t think anyone disputes that men and women are wired differently, and it would do all our marriages good to understand this.  But it doesn’t end with just finding out how we are different, but the key may still be that we realize again just how we are very much alike.  One recent expert on marriage, John Gottman, claims that he is able to predict the success or failure of a marriage with 91% accuracy.  He says that he can listen to a couple and tell you within 5 minutes whether or not they will divorce.  He says other surprising things like “frequent arguing will not lead to a divorce”,  or ‘financial troubles don’t always spell trouble”,  and ‘wives who make sour facial expressions when their husband talk are likely to be separated in four years”, and finally that ‘there is a reason husbands withdraw from arguments.”  There are many interesting findings in Gottman’s research of over 20 years, but what I like best is his finding that what couples want most from each other 70% of the time “friendship.”  “You see,” he says, “men and women come from the same planet after all.  When couples lose respect for each other and lose faith, which means they no longer believe in each other or in their marriage,  that marriage will most likely not recover.  More than anything else,  a marriage is about partnership and friendship.  If a couple still believe in each other, if they still are caring, nurturing, respectful, fond and full of admiration for each other and haven’t lost faith,  then there is always hope.  Belief is the key to having hope in a marriage.  (Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,  by John M. Gottman,  Crown Publishing, 1999, p. 17).

When Paul puts ‘belief’ or ‘believing’ as one of the key works of love an enduring  marriage, he reminds us, just as the experts do, that conflict, differences, even occasional arguments will not destroy a marriage as long as we keep bearing with each other, helping each other , understanding each other, and as long as we keep believing in each other.   The kind of ‘belief’ Paul means more than having some kind of belief that resides only in our head or our heart, but he means actually being being ‘faithful’ friends to each other, as we are faithful to God.    Again, let me repeat that the greatest threat to marriage is not our differences, not our distinctiveness, nor even our normal dysfunctions as human beings,  but the greatest threat to a marriage is a failure of being actively, not just passively ‘faithful’ to the one we have pledged our ‘faith’ to in our wedding vows.  Only a ‘marriage’ that keeps the faith that results in friendship in all things, can bear all the other challenges of love. 

One last thing about ‘believing’.   In his book about Christian words, Fredercik Buechner calls Christianity “Wishful Thinking”.  What he means is not that having faith means that we wish for things that are less than true, but by ‘wishful thinking’ he means having a ‘faith’ that wishes and lives for what we want to be true, because we are living out its truth.   Our Christian faith is based on ‘wishful thinking’ in the same way a Christian marriage is ‘wishful thinking’ because we ‘want’ our love to be true to each other and we are faithful to each other in making this happen.   Faithfulness’ creates faith, love and hope in our marriages, and this faithful love makes us believers in love and in our life together. 

   

LOVE HOPES IN ALL THINGS

When we bear with each other and keep actively believing in each other, we will have hope, even when we go through troubled spots in our marriages.   Bearing with each other causes us to remain friends, to keep bearing, working, and believing in each other.  Because we haven’t lost faith in each other,  we can always have hope in our relationship.

Let me give you an example with something called a ‘love bank’.  As we saw either, it the apostle Paul told the woman to respect or practice submission to a man, not out of her weakness, but from a position of strength and power.   Also,  it is the man, whom Paul says is to supremely practice showing ‘loving devotion’ to the wife, because of his own power which my overpower his wife.   When Paul tells men to show their true strength by showing love, he is on to something that can bring a lot of faith, love and hope back into a troubled marriage.  

Willard Harley and Barbara DeAngelis have also worked with thousands of couples and they use a wonderful ‘metaphor’ to describe how a husband should show love for his wife.  They say that we should understand a woman’s heart as a ‘love bank’.  In the woman’s heart, actions of both partners constitute deposits to and withdrawals from the woman’s love bank.   When a husband shows his love for his wife in certain ways, deposits are made to her ‘love bank’.  When a wife takes care of home and children, when she give herself to the husband emotionally and physically, withdrawals are made from that love bank.  Thus, a relationship in a marriage is characterized by ongoing deposits and withdrawals.

When a couple gets married, there is all kinds of ‘hope’ because there is a huge ‘balance’ in the love bank.  The man has romanced her.  The man has talked to her.  The man has spent quality time with her.  The man has told her how beautiful she is, bought her a ring, and whisked her off on a honeymoon.  But then the honeymoon ends, life settles into a comfortable pattern.  You both start making withdrawals from the ‘love bank’.  Unfortunately, the man is making less and less deposits into his wives ‘love bank’.   Sometimes, days, maybe even weeks go by between deposits.  A huge balance is whittled away and now has become a huge deficit.   As the husband, you do not know it, and often your wife doesn’t either, because she is able to operate long periods of time working ‘in the red’.   But then ‘overdraw warnings’ start to appear like unexpected irritation, shorter temper, coldness to your physical advances, or tears.  When a woman’s love bank operates in overdraft protection for too long, the love bank will eventually have to declare bankruptcy and the account must be closed.  She will have nothing left to give and this is when the marriage loses hope  (Interpreted from Adam Hamilton’s “Making Love Last a Lifetime”, Abingdon Press, 2004, pp 27-51). 

While this is just a ‘metaphor’ is does make a valid point.  What restores ‘hope’ and ‘belief’ in a marriage for a woman or a man is that we continue to give each other reasons or proofs that we believe in each other.   According to a survey made in one Christian congregation,  to keep believing and having hope in their marriage, the top things women needed were:  ‘affection’,  ‘attentiveness’ and ‘active participation’ family life and chores.   In that same congregation, what husbands needed from their wives was “admiration” or respect, “sharing”, “support” and “sexual intimacy”.   The only way any couple can discover exactly what will bring faith and hope their marriage is through honest, open, and caring communication. 

LOVE ENDURES

The final thing Paul says about the nature of true, Christian love, is that ‘love endures all things’.  Certainly, every marriage will go through its ups and downs, and as I said before, all of us marry the wrong person, until we become the person we need to be for each other.   There is no map, manual or magic on how to make this happen other than helping each other know what we need from each other.   Needs are real whether they are always realistic or not.   Human life must always be negotiated and in a marriage, the only way we can negotiate the difficult moments is through the genuine work of love.   It is the love that endures, because love will do the work.  Amen.