The unstoppable love you need for your marriage is closer than you think.
Love.
It’s a much overused word. It’s the source of countless memes and a myriad of cutesy quotes all over the Internet. “Love” is everywhere.
Despite it’s prevalence, I chose “Love” for the third part of my website’s tag line.
Unquenchable Passion – Unimaginable Intimacy – Unstoppable Love
(you can click the links above to get to the two previous posts)
Unstoppable Love
What does it mean to have marriage full of unstoppable love?
Ultimately, it’s a marriage full of the love of God.
That may sound simple, and it is. It may sound trite, but it isn’t at all. God’s unstoppable love is real, and it’s vast. Where your marriage is concerned, I’d even say it’s essential.
My sweet wife, a Children’s Pastor, pointed out to me that the Jesus Storybook Bible describes the love of God this way.
“God loves us with a Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”
Don’t you want a marriage full of that kind of love? That’s exactly how God planned marriage to be when he designed it. Then he sent Jesus to show us what unstoppable love looks like in human form.
Love Like That
Just before the Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians about marriage, he says this.
Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.
Ephesians 5:1-2 (MSG)
To me it’s no coincidence that these verses introduce us to God’s thoughts on marriage. Before you can do the rest of Ephesians 5, you have to get these first few verses down pat.
Doing marriage God’s way starts with loving each other like Jesus loves us.
The Good News
You may be thinking, “I could never love like that.”
I agree. On your own, you could never do it. But you aren’t on your own. As a believer, you have Christ living in you. That’s right, the very love you need to love your spouse in an unstoppable manner is right inside of you.
We just need to learn to let it out. We do that by first receiving and then getting to know this unstoppable love that we carry around in us. That’s not a one time, pray the sinners prayer kind of venture. It’s a lifelong pursuit. As Paul prayed a few chapter earlier:
[I pray that the Father] would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:16-19
As Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, this is not a love that is far away and unreachable.
“I have revealed to them who you are, and I will continue to make you even more real to them, so that they may experience the same endless love that you have for me, for your love will now live in them, even as I live in them!”
John 17:26 (The Passion Translation)
This is fantastic news for marriage. We get to live out the great mystery of getting to know this unknowable love that is deep inside, ever pursuing us, drawing us closer, revealing itself as we get know him more intimately.
This is the love you and I need in our marriage. This is the Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love I get to lavish on my wife. This is the love that you get to lavish on your spouse too.
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