Love Like You Mean It - Bob Lepine

If you want a marriage that lasts, radio host, pastor, and author Bob Lapine has some good advice today on Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. I think we need a revitalization of the hard-working durable kind of love rather than the hallmark channel that is all about the emotional component and how I feel and whether this is pleasing to me. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Every year, millions stand before friends and family and pledge to love for a lifetime, but do they know what they're getting into? Bob Lapine joins us today to talk about how to love like you mean it.

That's the title of today's featured resource at fivelovelanguages.com, subtitled The Heart of a Marriage That Honors God. And Gary, I think our guest today is going to speak your love language because your writing and your speaking all these years have been about making marriages last and helping couples grow together. Well, you're exactly right, Chris, and I am super excited about our guest today. I've known Bob Lapine for many years, and sometimes I've been sitting on the other side of the desk. He's asking me questions about one of my books, but today I want to ask him questions about this book he's written.

So I'm excited about our time together today. Since 1992, Bob Lapine has served as co-host of Family Life Today. You hear him on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg as well.

He has a rich broadcasting history, which means he's really old now. Bob and his wife, Mary Ed, are the parents of five adult children, and they live in Little Ark, Arkansas, where Bob's the teaching pastor at Redeemer Community Church. And the featured resource today is, we've said, Love Like You Mean It, the heart of a marriage that honors God.

Find out more at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Well, Bob, welcome to Building Relationships. Gary, it is a delight to be with you guys today. It's always good to sit down with friends and have a conversation. Well, you know, many of our listeners, of course, will know you from Family Life Today because they've listened to that program through the years, and you've been there almost 30 years now. Talk about the conversations through the years. Let's just reflect a little bit on that experience and maybe what you've learned from all the conversations you've had with people on this topic of family relationships. Well, I have to tell you, too, have had the opportunity to talk with Bible teachers and Bible scholars and counselors and pastors and with so many couples over the years about marriage and relationship dynamics. It's left a mark on my marriage, on my own soul. It's helped disciple me in knowing how to be a better husband and a better father, and so it's been a privilege.

And people have asked through the years about programs or interviews that have stood out for us. And Gary, you know this, Gary, you know this, that the interviews that we've done with people whose names folks might not know, but whose stories are stories of powerful redemption, those are the ones that have stuck with me the most. To see God bring beauty from ashes in the lives of couples who you'd look at the circumstances and you'd say, I don't know how a marriage like this survives with this set of circumstances.

I don't know how this couple can rebuild. And to see couples today who are thriving and can point to God and say, here's what God did in our marriage, those have been the conversations that I think have stood with me. There's never a time in a marriage where we should lose hope because, as 1 Corinthians 13 says, love hopes all things.

Love always hopes, and we always hope because we have a God who is a God who can accomplish exceedingly abundantly more than we could ask or think. You know, just sitting here thinking about the numerous people that you've interviewed through the years, I'm expecting there's probably some humorous things that have happened in those interviews as well as the serious stuff. Any of those just pop to your mind? There is one classic family life today moment that you were involved with. This was back many years when you and Dr. Ross Campbell had co-authored a book on love languages for teenagers, right?

Oh, I know where this is going. I can't wait to hear it. In the first day of the interview, I said, so Gary, just remind our listeners or those who don't know, what are "The 5 Love Languages" ? And you started off and you rattled four of them right off the top of your head and you froze up on number five, couldn't remember it at all. And we laughed and we thought, well, we'll edit this together. We thought, no, we're going to leave Gary Chapman hanging in the wind here. And the funny thing was that the very next interview, because we recorded two days in a row, so the second day we did the same thing. So just give us a recap of "The 5 Love Languages" . And I think it was Ross Campbell this time.

And he froze up on only getting four of the five of them. And I thought so much for the experts here. It's not our blooper reel here at Family Life.

It's one of the ones we pull out and play for people all the time. You know, writing books is one thing. Remembering what you wrote is another thing.

Well, it's great to have a little laughter from time to time. Let's talk about this book. Now, part of the reason you wrote this book, Love Like You Mean It, is to help couples who are about to say I do in their wedding understand what they're saying, I do too, right? Yeah, I did have both pre-married and already married couples in mind as I was writing this, because I think a lot of already married couples didn't fully understand, or if what they understood, they didn't understand the ramifications of it. And so now, after marriage, they're trying to figure out how do we do this right. But I would love to think that pre-married couples could read a book like this, go through a book like this with a mentor couple, and get a better understanding of what it is they are signing up for, what it is they're about to pledge to one another, the most significant, the most sober kind of vow we can take with one another.

This is not a relationship to enter into lightly. And Gary, I thought about something I've heard you say for years as I was writing this book. So many couples are trying to build a marriage on the tingles. I've heard you talk about the tingles for years, and they think, you know, as long as we've got the tingles, we've got what we need for a healthy marriage. And as you've said, the tingles are not a sufficient foundation to build a lifelong marriage on, because tingles come and go.

And the kind of love that the Bible describes for us is a love that goes much deeper than the tingles. You know, Bob, the whole idea of a book like this that a couple can take before they get married and work through it, to me, is so important. I don't know about you, Bob, and your marriage. Carolyn and I didn't read a book. We had one session with the pastor who married us.

That's all we had. Never read a book, and that was it. What about your experience? So we had a couple of sessions of premarital counseling that I have vague recollections of, and that I don't think I was paying careful attention to, because I was so overwhelmed with the power of the emotional attraction that I was kind of half listening, like, why do I need to hear any of this? It may be hard for some people, but it's certainly not going to be hard for us because we're so in love with one another. And then it's after you get married that you start to go, I should have been paying a little more attention to what that guy was trying to tell me. And I think for all of us, we get into a marriage and we go, there are things that take us sideways, things that we didn't expect, the adjustments we have to make to one another, events that come along that were unanticipated. And we have to figure out what does love look like in this kind of a situation. So I'm hoping with this book, we can help couples redefine love and move it away from an emotion-based feeling-oriented kind of a definition to a definition that is more substantive, more concrete, more biblical at the end of the day.

Yeah. And I like the idea also that you're writing it, not only for those couples who are anticipating getting married, but for those who have been married maybe a while, because what you're saying is exactly right. That's what Carolyn and I went through. And I think this book could be very, very helpful to couples who've been married a year or two or three and are facing reality now.

So I'm excited about it. Now, you mentioned the word biblical just now, and you talk about a biblical vision of marriage. Explain what you mean by that. Well, years ago, in fact, before I came to work here at Family Life and started working on Family Life today, I thought the Bible had a couple of chapters that addressed marriage. You know, there's Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3.

Genesis 2 is a pretty important chapter. There are a few other places here or there where husbands and wives are talked about. So I thought this is one of those minor themes that the Bible addresses, but it's not the big idea. Marriage is kind of secondary.

And then working here at Family Life, I began to realize that marriage is the first institution that God created. When the man and the woman were in the garden, he didn't say, okay, Adam, you be the pastor and Eve, you be the organist and we'll start a church. He didn't say, Adam, you be the president. Eve, you be the vice president.

We'll start a government. He said, Adam, you're going to be a husband. Eve, you're going to be a wife.

We're starting a family. And everything blossoms off of that for the rest of scripture. So I began to realize the family and ultimately marriage, the two becoming one, is the climax of the creation narrative in Genesis chapter two.

And then it's the first thing that the enemy begins to attack. He divides the husband and wife. When they sin against God, they turn against each other and start blaming one another for what just happened. I started to see marriage is central to God's plan and all of the passages in the Bible that talk about how Christians are to relate to one another apply first and foremost to how husbands and wives should be relating to one another. So there's a lot more in the Bible about marriage than I realized. And I think all of us need to have an expanded view of how God speaks to how we're to love one another, relate to one another in all of our relationships, but especially in marriage. I've often thought if we treated our spouses as well as we treat fellow Christians, you know, sometimes or even sometimes strangers, our marriages would be better if we just did that. But I like that concept. It's not just the two or three passages that kind of focus on marriage, but it's the biblical principles on how to relate to people, right?

It is. And I learned this early on when Marianne and I were dating. She came to me at one point and she said, have you ever thought about maybe us memorizing some scripture together? And I said, no, that's a great idea. Now, I said that, Gary, because we were dating and I wanted to impress her, not because I thought memorizing scripture was a great idea, but I figured I'd better act like it was because it seemed like it was important to her and we were dating.

So you lie to each other when you're dating. And so I said, yeah, that's a great idea. I said, did you have a verse in mind? And she said, well, I was thinking about a whole chapter. And I said, wow, and again, I'm thinking, are you out of your mind? Memorize a whole chapter of the Bible?

Who does that? But I said, wow, okay. And I said, did you have a chapter in mind? And she said, I was thinking about Philippians chapter two.

And I kind of nodded my head like, oh, yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, is that Old Testament or New Testament? You know, Philippians two. Because really, I was pretty shallow back in these days, but we started memorizing scripture together. And I'm not great at memorizing scripture, but I got to verse three of Philippians chapter two. And for whatever reason, it got locked into my thinking almost instantly.

And it stuck with me for decades. It's a verse that says, do nothing from selfishness or do nothing from selfishness. And I'm thinking, do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility, let each of you regard one another as more important than himself. And I'm convinced that if married couples would memorize and apply that verse of the Bible and start to apply it in marriage, 85% of the marriage issues would because when you get right down to it, the reason we have conflict in marriage is the same reason we have conflict anywhere. It's because our passions are at war. This is what James four says, our passions are at war against us.

We want what we want, and we don't care what you want. And that's why we fight with one another. And if we would reorient ourselves to think, I'm not going to be motivated by selfishness or conceit, but with humility, I'm going to regard you as more important than me. I'm not going to merely look out for my own interests, but for your interests, I'm going to have this mind in me that was also in Jesus who emptied himself for others. That's a principle that I think is what separates a biblical view of marriage from a secular or a cultural view of marriage.

Yeah. Boy, if we could get that in our marriage, and I agree with you, Bob, maybe we wouldn't even have to read your book. Well, let's not go that far.

Oh, Bob, you've been in this area for a long time now, and you've watched our culture over some decades here. What do you think is the biggest problem in marriage today? I think it's right to that self-focus, self-orientation. It's individuals who get married and they think, I'm in this for what it's going to provide for me. I look back on my motivation for marriage at the very beginning of our marriage. I think I loved being loved by Marianne. I think I wanted to marry her because I wanted her to keep loving me because it felt really good to be loved that way. I've said to her, honestly, I'm not sure it was her that I was in love with as much as it was being loved by her.

It's that kind of self-focus. I had to learn in marriage that you can't sustain a marriage if your focus is on, as long as you keep loving me the way that I want to be loved, then we'll have a happy marriage. I soon learned that the Bible says, no, husbands, your focus should be laying down your life for your wives.

Now I thought, okay, I've got a goal. I'm going to love you the way you deserve to be loved. But even then, Gary, I recognized at the end of the day, it's not, does this marriage make me happy? Or even, does this marriage make you happy? At the end of the day, it's, does this marriage make God happy?

Does this please God? Are we, in our marriage, living and loving one another in a way that God says, this is what I intended for it to be in the first place? So I think the biggest problem most couples are facing in marriage is they have an earthbound, not a heavenly view of marriage, an earthbound view of marriage that tends to be focused on what am I getting out of this, what am I getting out of this, not what am I contributing so that this relationship can be pleasing to the Lord.

Yeah. Well, you know, Bob, again, with all of your experience and at this stage in your life, you're pastoring a church as well as working with all the radio ministry. What really led you to write this book, Love Like You Mean It? I preached a series on 1 Corinthians 13 a number of years ago, in a general sense, not talking about marriage, but just talking about what love looks like. I was aware of the fact that in our culture, we talk a lot about how important love is, but we can't seem to apply it. We are a divided culture. We are people who are more often angry with one another than we are loving one another. And I just thought this passage from Scripture, we need to soak in this so that we can start to relate to one another in the way God calls us to relate to one another. In fact, at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 13, Gary, you know this, Paul says, if you're doing everything else right, and you have love wrong, or there's not love there, then everything else you're doing right amounts to nothing.

So you can be gifted, you can be talented, you can be going through all of the motions right. If love is absent, it amounts to nothing. And I think that's true in marriage. I think we need a revitalization in our lives as followers of Christ and in our marriages as couples committed to Christ, a revitalization of the hard-working, durable kind of love that the Bible lays out for us, rather than the hallmark channel vision of love that is all about, back to the tingles, it's all about the emotional component and how I feel and whether this is pleasing to me. We need to recapture the hard work of love. Jesus said, greater love has no man than this, that he lays down his life for his friends. This is how we know what love is.

Jesus laid down his life for us. So recapturing this idea of the fact that laying down our lives is central to how we love another person, that's what's at the heart of this book. That's what I'm hoping married couples will take away from this book.

Well, if we can get that right in marriage or in our culture, it would certainly move us in the right direction. Now, you've been a pastor, I don't know how long you've been at the church where you are now, but what have you learned about marriage in the context of leading a church? I've learned that what's going on in the homes, in the kitchens, and the living rooms and the bedrooms of the couples who are coming to church is very different than what you see happening on Sunday morning. Folks come in on Sunday morning and you look at that and you go, these couples are all doing great. Look, they're smiling, they're sitting next to each other, they appear happy, and then you begin to realize there are fractures and fault lines going on. There's more struggle and more hurt and more pain. There's baggage that's been brought into marriage relationships that couples didn't anticipate and that they don't have the resources in themselves to know how to fix. I've seen couples who will get to a point where they go, I've done everything I know how to do and it's not getting better. They lose hope and they give up on their marriage.

Everybody in the church is surprised because they looked normal on Sunday morning. I always tell couples, when you run out of what you know to do, that doesn't mean that you've run out of options, it's just you've run out of what you know to do. But there are a lot of people who have been at this for a long time. There are books and conferences and radio programs and there are folks who can help mentor you and guide you and can give you a fresh sense of hope for your marriage and can give you the tools you need to begin to apply that can correct some bad patterns and habits and begin to turn your relationship around. At the end of 1 Corinthians 13, the passage on love at the beginning of the chapter, verse 7, it says, Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Literally it says, Love always bears, always believes, always hopes, always endures.

Love never fails, it never runs out, it never ends. And we see in our churches today couples where we think everything looks like it's okay, but what's going on at home, there are fractures and fault lines. And this is where pastors and folks like you and me who are committed to trying to help couples, we need to be not assuming not assuming that the veneer we're seeing is an accurate reflection of what's really going on in those marriage relationships.

Yeah, and often they don't turn to the pastor or to a counselor until they get to that place where they feel like giving up. And I kind of get the sense sometimes they want us to say, well, I understand, so maybe you just go ahead and divorce. But you know, what I know you say and I say, I've often said, I can understand that emotionally lose hope after a while. I said, I've been there my own marriage early on. I said, but why don't you go on my hope? Because I have hope for you. And just as you said earlier, Bob, you know, there are books and there are counselors and there are ideas and all that they haven't tried.

And so go on my hope for a while and let's see what can happen. Yeah, Bob, when you read that endures all things in my head, I'm thinking of a person who's sitting listening today and says, I'm being abused. Yeah, I'm, you know, my spouse is hurling, not verbal insults, just that. But also, my life is in danger and I'm supposed to endure all things.

What does love look like for me? Yeah, Chris, I'm so glad you brought this up and I addressed this in the book because love is patient, but we're not patient with evil or wrongdoing. In fact, one of the things the Bible says about love is that love does not rejoice in wrongdoing. And this is where I think we have to recognize we are not loving another person if we enable that person to persist in a pattern of abuse or violence.

If we sit still and allow that to happen, we're not loving that person. That person is caught in a sin and they need help. First of all, you need protection, but then they need help. So whether it's calling the authorities or calling the leadership at your church or calling other people to bring them in on this situation, so that this person who is an abuser can be confronted with and get the help they need to be free from their abusive tendencies and patterns. They need that sin issue addressed. Anytime we see a spouse with a besetting sin issue, we need to be an ally with our spouse to try to set them free, to help them be set free spiritually, get victory over that sin pattern in their life. And if abuse is what that sin pattern, that's how it's manifesting itself, then your job is not to simply endure abuse. Your job is to continue to believe and hope that God can do a redeeming work in your spouse and then get people alongside you who can help arrest that out of control sin pattern in another person's life and get them free from it. So I'm really glad you brought that up because I wouldn't want a listener to think, well, I'm just supposed to endure and turn the other cheek. You are supposed to be an ally to help your spouse get free from their sinful tendencies here. Yeah, Bob, that's often what we call tough love, right? But it's still love because the object is that you want to help that person break that destructive habit.

You can't do it for them, but you can reach out and find help. Bob, what misconceptions do you think people have about marriage today? That it's going to be easy and that it's going to be just all fun. I think back, I grew up in an era when the Beach Boys were teaching me what love is all about, and they said it's going to make it that much better when we can say good night and stay together.

And I think I had that thought. Marriage is just going to be that much better. If dating is fun, marriage is just going to be fun squared or fun cubed. You know, it's just going to be, we're together all the time.

What could be better than that? So I think we have this misconception that that's what it's going to be, or then we have the misconception that that's what it's supposed to be. And when we get into marriage and we realize, oh, it's harder than I realized it was going to be, a lot of couples go, well, this isn't what I signed up for. I didn't sign up for hard. I signed up for fun. I signed up for joy. I signed up for happiness. And I'm not happy today, so there's something wrong with my marriage.

And I would say, well, there's something wrong with your perception of what marriage is supposed to be in the first place. And if what you're looking for is happiness, I would suggest to you, you are settling for something less than what God has for you, because what God has for you is joy and joy is deeper than happiness. Happiness, I learned this years ago. Somebody told me that happiness comes from the same root word as happening. So they said in Great Britain years ago, they used to say to somebody, may the haps be with you. And what they were saying was, may things go your way.

May circumstances work out for you. And this is where people say happiness is really tied to circumstances. What's happening is what makes me happy.

Well, that's true. Joy is something completely different. Joy is transcendent and transcendent. And so the apostle Paul says, I've learned in the middle of whatever circumstance I'm in to find joy. Christ strengthens me and there's joy in the middle of whatever the circumstances I'm in are. I think the misconception about marriage is I will always be happy.

And it's your job to make me happy. And I think God says, no, there's something much deeper than just happiness here. And you will go through hard times and you'll go through struggles. But as you go through them together, you will find something that is richer and more substantive and ultimately more satisfying and more fulfilling for you than just momentary happiness. You know, earlier you said that the emphasis of this book or the strong emphasis is 1 Corinthians 13, which actually describes love. Let's talk about some of those characteristics in there and how they apply to marriage. For example, love is patient.

What does that look like in a marriage? Isn't it interesting that that's where the Bible starts when it's describing love is with patience. I mean, if we sat down, Gary, you and I sat down with a couple and said, just write down five words that you think describe love.

I'm guessing we could do that a hundred times and patience would not show up very often as one of those top five words. And yet that's where the Bible starts when it describes love. And if you pull out your old King James Bible and you open it says, love is long suffering. So the very first place it starts is when you love somebody, you're going to suffer for a long time.

Now who's signing up for that, right? But this is where love is putting on work boots and saying, this is going to be a challenge. This is going to be hard, but it's going to be so worth it for you to do it. Love is patient, is the Bible telling us that when things become irritable, become challenging, when things aren't going the way you want them to go, what love does is it perseveres. Think back to the vows when we said, for richer, for poorer, sickness, health, better or worse.

We're in this thing. We're going to persevere. Hardship and suffering will be a part of marriage. But love is patient means that I will endure. I will persist. I will persevere in the midst of this. Again, not enduring abuse, but I will respond to circumstances with grace that is fueled by love. And think about the fact that God is patient with us. His patience is demonstrated in that while we were still sinning against him, Christ died for us. And I think we need to recognize when things get hard, patience says, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stick with this.

I'm going to be here with you. It takes time, doesn't it, to have the kind of marriage that we dream of having and that the Bible says we can have. But it is a process and not an appeal you take. It takes time and it takes work. Marianne will often say to me when we're talking with a young couple or a couple who's engaged, and I say to them, you know, marriage is hard. And she will always say, and it's glorious. Let's not lose sight of the fact that it's glorious.

And she's right. Don't make it sound like it's just drudgery. It's not drudgery. But I think the couples who are engaged are thinking it's going to be easier than it winds up being.

Yes, it's going to take time and it's going to take work. And you're going to have to be able to bite your tongue and be patient and accept the fact that you're married to a flawed human being. You married a sinner and they married a sinner. And you're going to have to endure with one another and be patient with one another. Love, the Bible says, overlooks a multitude of sins, covers a multitude of sins, and it's a man's glory to overlook some of these minor transgressions. There are times when we have to confront one another about issues, but most of the time we're just going to be patient with one another and say, I'm not going to let this become a wedge in between us. Yeah. How about love is kind?

What is that like? Well, it's interesting to me that I think people sell this word short. We think of kindness as kind of niceness, and I think niceness is a part of kindness, but kindness goes deeper than just being nice. If I said to you, I want you to meet two of my friends and this person, he's a really nice guy. And then I said, and this other person, he's a really kind person. You would instinctively understand that the nice person is going to be pleasant to be around, but the kind person is bringing something more to the table than just niceness. A kind person is somebody who is proactively, intentionally doing things that bring about good for another person. A kind person is somebody who is intentionally seeking the best for you.

They want you to thrive. The Bible, this was interesting for me as I was working on this book, I recognized that the most often listed attribute of God in the Old Testament, the thing that the Bible says about God more than anything else in the Old Testament is that he is a God who is full of loving kindness. His loving kindness is better than life. Michael Card, the Bible teacher, singer, songwriter said in the Old Testament, you would expect God to be holy and awesome and powerful. That didn't surprise anybody that God would be those things. But the Bible writers were continually amazed at the fact that in addition to those things, God was a God of loving kindness, which meant he would sacrifice himself for the good of his people. To be kind in a marriage relationship means I will sacrifice myself, that my goal is your good.

I'm going to sacrifice myself for your good and for you to thrive and for you to be the person that God wants you to be. Every one of us would like to be married to a person like that. To us.

But doing that. Part of the way that we find ourselves married to a person like that is that we start doing it ourselves and I think some of that rubs off. I think when we are abundantly kind to our spouse, over time that softens the heart of our spouse and some of that kindness gets returned our way.

That's kind of what you're talking about with "The 5 Love Languages" , Gary. You move into somebody else's life with the way that they receive love and that massages that relationship, right? Yeah, because love stimulates love.

The Bible says we love God because he first loved us. His love stimulated our love and that principle is true on the human plane. So yeah, I fully agree that if you are expressing kindness and words and deeds to your spouse, you're influencing them in a very powerful way. Now we're not manipulating people, right, Bob? The attitude is not manipulating them.

If I do this, they'll do that. But it's choosing to follow the biblical pattern here that we're discussing and it is a positive influence on them. And you brought up words and deeds and I would say even at the heart of all of that has got to be an attitude of kindness that those words and deeds come out of. If all we're doing is saying, well, I'll manufacture some words today or I'll do a few kind actions today, but we don't really have a heart attitude of kindness that is bent in that direction.

This is where I had to pray for God to put in me an attitude that says Mary Ann's good is what you're here for. And so now out of that attitude, my words and my deeds are being reshaped. So kindness has to happen at three levels. First, it has to happen at the attitudinal level. Then it has to happen in kind words being exchanged between husband and wife and then acts of kindness toward one another. And that's how kindness begins to thrive in a marriage. Yeah, I was going to ask you where you get this attitude, but you answered that already. You run to God, right?

And that's the source for all of this. I mean, anything that we're trying to do, if all we're trying to do is behavior modification, you know this, that'll last for a while. We can develop some new habits or attitudes, but pretty soon we're going to default back to what's in our heart. And if we're not addressing the attitudes of our heart and letting our words and actions come out of that, then all we're doing is trying to hang ornaments on a dead tree.

We've got to have a tree that has the deep roots that are drawing life from God, and then the ornaments just blossom off of that. Bob, 1 Corinthians 13 also says that love is humble. The whole idea of humility, what is that like? Well, specifically, it says love is not arrogant and does not boast, that love is not self-seeking. Those ideas are all put together, and humility is... it's back to Philippians chapter 2, that passage that Marianne wanted me to memorize. Maybe she had that in mind, because she recognized that the guy she was dating was not a naturally humble person, and she thought maybe the Bible can help do a work here. Humble is an idea that says there's a priority here that I'm going to put your agenda ahead of my own. It goes on to be described in Philippians 2 where Paul says that you should have this attitude in you that was also in Jesus, who, although he existed as God, did not regard that equality with God to be clung to, but instead he emptied himself for the good of others.

And this is something you and I have talked about this before, Gary. When we talk about somebody being humble, we're not talking about them thinking lower of themselves than they really are. Sometimes people think humility means, oh, I'm supposed to think I'm a wretched worm of a person. Well, the Bible does say that we're sinful people, and wretchedness is a part of that. We need to have a biblical understanding. The Bible also says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. We're created in God's image. We have worth and value and dignity as God's creation.

Every human being is an image bearer of God, and for children of God, we have his Spirit in us. Humility, I think, is not thinking more highly of yourself than you should. It's also not thinking more lowly of yourself than you should. In fact, humility is not thinking about yourself as much as you do now. It's thinking accurately about yourself and thinking, I am a sinful person in need of a Savior. I'm also a child of God, and both of those things are true about me.

I need to live out of that new identity in all of my relationships, and particularly in my marriage. Yeah, it's that whole thing about Jesus again, right? Putting our interests above his own. In Philippians passage you mentioned earlier, he humbled himself.

So we choose to put the other person and their well-being above our own and work for that. Arrogance and self-centeredness are incompatible. You would never say about somebody, that person is such a loving person.

They're so arrogant. Just saying that, we'd laugh at that. Those two are like oil and water.

They can't mix. So the more we're focused on self, love leaves when we start to become self-focused. Generous is another characteristic of love that you discuss, being generous toward the spouse. And this is a generosity that says that what matters here in our marriage is what does God want, not what do I want or what do you want.

What matters here is for us to have a focus that is not self-seeking, but that is God-seeking. As I told you, when I got married, I think I was thinking, what will this marriage make me happy? And then later in marriage, I was thinking, okay, what can I do to make Marianne happy? The real turning point for us was when I started to think, how can this marriage make God happy? How can this marriage be pleasing to him?

Because that's when now we were allies together, saying we want our us-ness to be more important than our individual desires or selves. We want who we are together as a couple to matter to matter more than our own individual preferences or wants. And when you start to get to that point in a marriage, you start to turn a corner, I think, or at least we did, where marriage is not about you, it's not about me, it's about us, and it's about our us-ness being something that people can look at and see God in that and glorify God when they see how we love one another. And in the early days of the church, the Christian church began to grow and began to thrive. And the early church fathers say that it began to grow and thrive because the pagans saw how the Christians loved one another, and they were astounded by their sacrificial love for one another.

They were astounded that when a plague came, the Christians went and took care of the people who were hurting rather than backing off and saying, okay, how do I protect myself in this situation? I think marriage today has a great opportunity to be a cultural signpost to say there is a God and he transforms lives, because look at how that couple loves one another. Yeah. Bob, you and Marianne have been married now for more than 40 years, and you've shared already some of your journey. What's been the hardest part of loving like you mean it in your own life, in your own experience? There was a moment, I always go back to a moment. We'd been married, I guess we'd been married five years.

We had gone through a series of challenges. I had gotten fired from a job. I was looking for a new job, and the one I found was, we were living in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the time, and the job I found was in Phoenix. Marianne had grown up in Tulsa. Her whole family was in Tulsa.

Her support structure was in Tulsa. We had one child at the time, and right after I got fired from my job, we found out we were pregnant with number two. I find a new job that's in Phoenix. I go out there and start looking for a house while Marianne is staying back.

Again, she's pregnant. She's trying to sell the house we're in, so we're separated for about six weeks. I found a house. Gary, I bought a house for us that my wife did not see before I bought it.

This is a rookie mistake. Marianne joins me in Phoenix at our new house that she is seeing for the first time. She is six months pregnant, and it's Phoenix, and it's July. She's got no friends and no family. She was miserable.

She sunk into a depression that, I don't know if it qualified as clinical, but I would come home from work at the end of the day. She didn't want to talk. She didn't want to be with me. I would say I'd try to solve it by saying, well, let's go out to eat. Part of the reason I said that is because there was nothing there for us to eat because she hadn't made anything, so I was hungry.

Well, let's go out to eat. I'd try to do things that would bring happiness into our marriage, and she was miserable. I was becoming miserable. I remember one night out in the backyard, she'd gone to bed, and I was kicking the dirt in the backyard and looking up at the stars and thinking, I'm not going to get a divorce because you're not supposed to, but I understand why people want to. I didn't want to be married. This was not a happy time for me. For some couples, that's when they say, I don't have any hope, and I don't know how to fix it, and I was right there.

What do you do in those moments? What we did, by God's grace, was we persevered. We stayed together, and we and we got some help, and we grew together, and we worked our way through it. I've always looked back on that time, and you've seen the studies that couples who were right on the verge of divorce who stay married, five years later, they report that their marital satisfaction is good. Five years later, our marriage was good in part because we bore all things, believed all things, hoped all things, endured all things, and we didn't quit.

God will meet you in those moments when you just persevere through the hard times, and you come out the other side and you go, God taught us some things. We learned how to love one another better. We grew through that experience, and our marriage is better on the other side. Now it's 40-plus years for us, and I'm so grateful that we persevered in the hard times.

Yeah, absolutely. When you do persevere and you look back, you thank God you didn't give up because it becomes really the marriage you wanted. Well, Bob, obviously we cannot talk about all the characteristics of love that you discuss in the book, but let me just ask this as we come to the end of our time. What's your main hope for this book, Love Like You Mean It? My hope and prayer is that couples will read through this together, talk about what they're reading. I've got questions for couples to interact all through the book.

I hope they'll come out with an understanding that love is going to take more work than they realized, but that there's a payoff with this. That when you love things, love the way the Bible teaches us to love one another. What you get at the end of the day, it's the difference between plywood furniture with a veneer on top and solid hardwood furniture that is durable and steady and strong. Nobody wants plywood with veneer when you can have the real hardwood, and the real hardwood of marriage is when you have the kind of love that the Bible illustrates for us, describes for us. You live that out in your marriage. That's the marriage that goes the distance and a marriage that brings a kind of joy that you can't get with veneer. I like that analogy, and that's what all of us want.

Nobody ever got married hoping they would not have that kind of marriage. Well, Bob, our time has gone quickly, and I really appreciate your time with us today. I do believe that this book will do exactly what you just said for any couple who will simply take it and work through it and discuss the questions at the end of the chapter. Again, thanks for being with us today. Well, and thanks to you for the years and years, how you've poured into my life and all I've learned from you and how you have shepherded and guided so many couples.

It's just great to be able to have a conversation with somebody who is on the same page and pointing people in the same direction. Appreciate you. Thank you. It's been great to hear the heart of Bob Lapine today, and husbands or prospective husbands, if you take nothing else from the conversation, don't buy a house without your wife seeing it first. If you want to find out more about the book, our featured resource, go to 5lovelanguages.com, Love Like You Mean It, the heart of a marriage that honors God. Again, go to 5lovelanguages.com. And next week, Pursuing Love, Faith, and Mount Everest. Harold and Rachel Earls will join us in one week. A big thank you to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Todd, Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.