For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
GALATIANS 5:14
Lamar was an angry man. Not violent, just angry—and bitter.
His children had grown rebellious. He had been through back surgery and two hip replacements; then he lost his job and went on disability. He grew angry at God and decided he wanted out of his marriage. “I don’t love you. I don’t need you. I don’t want you,” he told his wife, June.
June wouldn’t give him a divorce, so he said, “Well, just leave me alone.” He didn’t move out, but he stopped talking to her. Totally.
For the next three years Lamar and June continued living in the same home as husband and wife, but they didn’t speak. June continued serving her husband as she had before—cooking for him, cleaning his clothes, mowing the yard.
June’s parents and her grown children urged her to get a divorce. “God doesn’t want you to suffer like this,” they said. But she felt that God wanted her to stick with her husband. In the silence, she spent more time reading the Scriptures and praying. In her journal one day she wrote, “Lord, I cannot change this man, but You can change me.”
Eventually, faced with such determined love, Lamar was bound to crack. He broke his silence and told June that he didn’t know if he could love her again, but he wanted to restore their marriage. “And it wasn’t two weeks before he was calling me darling and telling me he loved me,” she says. Their marriage settled into a new pattern of selfless love. “It was almost like we were in a contest to see who was going to outdo the other.”
This story admittedly describes an extreme example of a marriage in trouble, but it is one of the best stories of selfless love we’ve seen. June determined to love her spouse no matter what he did. And her faithfulness had a huge impact on the children who had once urged her to get a divorce. Now they tell her, “We don’t want to miss out on what God has to teach us, even during the hard times.”
Matthew 22:35-41 records a remarkable statement by Jesus Christ:
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
In other words, you could sum up the entire Bible in these two commandments. The first addresses how you should relate to God, and the second, “love your neighbor as yourself,” how you should relate to other people.
Now consider this: Who is your closest neighbor?
Your spouse.
Treating your spouse as your closest neighbor is more than being selfless—treating your spouse as more important than yourself, as you are instructed in Philippians 2:1-8. Rather, it is an active love that seeks opportunities to please and serve and encourage, even when your spouse is not doing the same in return.
So what does “love your spouse as you love yourself” mean?
One way of finding an answer in Scripture is to look at the “one another” passages. These talk about encouraging one another, building one another up, confessing your sins to one another. One of these passages is Colossians 3:12-14:
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
Do you want your spouse-to-be to show you kindness and compassion? Then that’s what you should show to your future spouse. Does it please you when your future spouse bears with you and forgives you when he or she has a complaint against you? Then you should do the same with your spouse-to-be.
Consider what good could happen in your marriage if you learned how to love each other the way you love yourself. Think of the intimacy and oneness you will enjoy. Think of the conflicts you will avoid as well as the conflicts you will resolve. All you need to do is apply this one simple and difficult commandment.
Discuss