How to Love Your Wife

If you're a husband and a Christian, do you know what Job 1 for you is?

Matt Jacobson does. If you show me a church that is full of godly men, I can show you a church that's full of cherished wives. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine. You'll find us online at familylifetoday.com.

What does it look like for a husband to really cherish his wife? Matt and Lisa Jacobson will give us help with that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I've been thinking about this subject a lot. Boy, boy, what subject is this, Bob? I've been thinking about love. And part of the reason is because I've been working—you guys know this—I've been working on a book that's coming out in the summer that's called Love Like You Mean It. I mean, we have a cruise by that name, and so we've got this book. And what I've done is I've gone to 1 Corinthians 13, and I've looked at the characteristics of love.

And here's my conclusion. Most of us have a very superficial idea of what love is, and when we get married, we're in love with the idea of love, but we're in love with the rom-com idea of love, not with the biblical idea of love. And so we set out pursuing the you've-got-male approach to love rather than you've-got-Jesus approach to love, which is a very different approach.

Yeah, I think our culture sets us up for failure in those regards, because we really don't know what love is. I bet Marianne is a recipient of all your learnings. As soon as I start applying it, she will be, yes. All I'm doing is writing about it right now. We've got some friends who are joining us on Family Life Today who have been thinking very wisely and practically on this subject, and we're glad to have Matt and Lisa Jacobson, our guests. Welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you so much.

It's really great to be here. Matt and Lisa live in central Oregon in the Bend Sun River area there. They've been involved in the publishing world for years.

Matt is pastor of a local church in the area. Did you decide to do this as a book first, or were you just starting to brainstorm together? How can we do a better job of loving one another? Actually, it grew out of us sitting around in a cafe one day, which we often would do. We'd go and write together at one of the local coffee shops. And as we were sitting there, we were kind of holding hands and had my latte in my hand. And we were just enjoying one of those moments in marriage where you go, you know what, this is good. And we're just thankful for enjoying the fruit of all we've been investing and growing in over several decades.

Right. And as we're talking about it, we started thinking about how much of our marriage that we're enjoying today is a result of little choices that we've made over time. And how oftentimes we look at marriage and we think of those big topics, those big hard things, and that is a part of marriage.

I'm not, you know, not minimizing that, but how much of just the happiness, the closeness is a consequence of daily choices of doing things or saying things that communicate love to the other person. So it was kind of a casual thing where we said, you know, let's just write down all the little things you can think of that you've done that you feel contributed to what we're enjoying today. And so he said, okay, I'll write down my list and you write down your list and we won't look at each other's list. So we weren't going to cheat. And we came up with 100, literally. Really?

Yes. And we thought, you know what, other people might even benefit from those little things that make a huge difference. And those lists are what became the books you've written, 100 Ways to Love Your Wife and 100 Ways to Love Your Husband, which are books that give you those bullets, those nuggets that are all about practical things we can do that are just little adjustments we can make that have a huge impact on a marriage over time. So Lisa, did you come up with your list of things you had done to make Matt feel loved or did he say this is what you have done that has made me feel loved?

No, that's a good question. So yes, I wrote down the things that I have tried to do to communicate and express love to him. And when he looked at my list, he said, yeah, no, this is absolutely right on because I didn't know. That's just what I thought. And the same thing. When I looked at his list, I thought, oh, that's funny.

I didn't know you were even mindful that you were doing that. But now that I think about it, that did make me feel loved or those are the kinds of things that help carry us through even the hard times, those little expressions. If you have a beautiful marriage, a lot of people look at that and they go, wow, they're just lucky. They won the marriage lottery. They just get along so well together.

It just worked out for them. They kind of fell in a hole backwards and wow, look, a beautiful marriage. But everybody knows who has a great marriage and who enjoys the best that God intended for them. They know that that's something that you actually built together.

It's not something that happened because you got lucky. And that's really what the book is about. It's about those simple little things that you do every day. See, having a big, beautiful marriage isn't about that one big thing you did to get there. It's not that destination you arrived at.

It's built on a lifestyle and a lifetime of making choices every day, simple little choices in the normal days of marriage that say I love you rather than choices, that say I love me. Yeah, I was going to comment on that. That's in your opening page.

I love you rather than I love me. Talk about that because it's easy to be selfish. It is. At least for me it is. Oh, hey.

Talk about everybody else. But I mean, that's a choice to not be selfish and to consider somebody else more important than yourself, your spouse. Well, that's exactly right. And, you know, there's that little phrase in the Bible that gets passed over.

Well, I think in application it gets passed over. We bandy it about, but it says, love your wife like Christ loved the church. And we're going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that phrase in Ephesians. And that is something that we need as men to spend some time meditating on because it's the big job that God has given us to do as husbands. Love your wife like Christ loved the church. And you're right, it's very easy to be selfish. It's very easy to think about me and the thing that I don't want to do in that moment. And often in marriage there are such little decisions, there are little moments in your marriage and in your day choosing for yourself or choosing for your spouse. Well, I like that you said that it's a choice too. Exactly. Because we're all faced with that and it has to be, I believe, an intentional choice. It's not always based on how we feel about our spouse at the time.

That's right. Sometimes you're doing it because God has told us or commanded us or has encouraged us, but that's not easy either. Have you felt that at times, Lisa? Like, I don't want to love Him or respect Him.

I don't feel like it. Well, not really in our case because it's so easy for her because of who she's married to. Oh, you're that guy. Yeah, I make it really, really easy. No, honey, I'm that guy. You are, you are that guy. There's a few of us around.

I mean, there's just a few of us. No, I think that is so true and I think that as far as that choice and the difficulty of that choice is oftentimes as a believer, we look at verses in the Bible that talk about the kinds of ways we're supposed to treat other people with kindness, with patience. You know, those verses in 1 Corinthians 13, for instance, and we think about it for those other people out there. And so, for example, you know, I'm going through the, I'm at the grocery store, I go through the line at the cashier and she is clearly having a bad day. She's kind of grumping at everybody and I'm a little irritated myself, you know, because I'm trying to get through and she's going really slow. And so I get up to the line and she's, and I have this kind word for her. How was your day? And thank you so much. And I kind of feel good about myself because I have just made her day even though she was a having hard one and what a testimony of God's love that was.

And I go home and I get in the door and maybe Matt's having a hard day and he's feeling a little bit edgy, right? Now, my response to him is? Well, let me take you to a part in the book.

Oh, okay. One of the points is he needs a warm, welcoming wife, so you begin by saying, I hear his footsteps, unmistakable, firm, solid feet, man steps. Quite different from the quick pattering of all the little feet I've heard throughout the day. Madly chopping and slicing, I never even looked up when he entered. Take us into the rest of what happened.

Well, the rest of what happened on that particular day was he kind of came behind me and he kind of did the little love thing, the little husband love thing. And my first response was, I don't have time for this. Literally, that's just all I'm thinking of. I'm trying to make dinner. I've had a big day. I don't want to, I don't want this. And I caught myself thinking, what in the world am I thinking? Why would I not have time for love and to just enjoy this moment of affection? And I could see him pull away.

You know, he kind of feels my rejection. You're tensing up. Yeah. Which now I think about it, probably wasn't probably that great. But I thought, okay, wait a second.

So I turned around and I thought, what would happen if I turned around and leaned right back into him? And it worked. It was very effective.

Yes. But I thought, what a difference the whole rest of the evening would be just by that exchange of love and just being a little playful right there in the kitchen in front of the kids. The rest of the evening was fun. It was warm. And the kids, you know, they pick up on that too.

And so they also, the bickering that had been preceded this evening was just somehow better and lighter. We've talked about this as adjusting the thermostat because you can cause the room to go cold or you can cause the room to be warm based on how you respond to one another. And when it's warm, everybody's comfortable and happy. And when it's cold, everybody's kind of tensed up. And you don't want to drive the temperature lower in your house.

You want to keep it warm. Well, the irony is that if we're not careful, that we can just be very mindful of giving our best to all the people that don't really know us, all the people that we bump into in life. And what we really should remember is, no, we need to give the best to each other. We need to give the best to each other.

So that's really what you're talking about. And I tell you, when you see your spouse give the best to somebody else, you get resentful. Absolutely.

Even if it's your kids. And I know Anne's felt this from me with the church, with my job, that it's more important and the people there are more important. And yet there are times, and I'm sure, Matt, you've felt the same thing because you're a pastor as well.

There are times I have to remind myself, wait a minute. I'm called to love, and not that I don't love the people in my church, but I am commanded by God to love my wife and my children and lay down my life for them. At a different level.

Totally different level. This is such a critical point because ministry can be very deceiving because, after all, it's ministry for God. So we don't want to let other things get in the way of that. But the fact is, God has already stipulated what our first priority is. And our first priority is that little phrase we talked about a moment ago, Love your wife like Christ loved the church. And the reason that we have to get that right as Christian men, see, it's not optional to have a wife who isn't cherished. If you show me a church that is full of godly men, I can show you a church that's full of cherished wives. There's no such thing as being a godly Christian man and not having a cherished wife. And all of the ministry, all of the endeavor, all of the effort poured into other things does not negate the responsibility that we have to cherish and love our wives. And Satan is so good at making us think these other priorities are equally as legitimate and so that our wives are then competing with the church and competing with the children and competing with our jobs and all of the other things we have going on. The reason it is so critical is because everything else relative to the Great Commission grows out of that relationship.

Now, I know that that might be overstating the case for some, but hang with me for a minute. So the Great Commission is the job that the Lord gave the church to do, right? And it's not just evangelism, it's discipleship. Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations. Right, so discipleship. Jesus is teaching them everything I taught you. So here we have a man who doesn't love his wife and he's supposed to be discipling his children.

All right, so failure right there. You've taught your children something wrong about marriage. You're discipling them away from what God wants you to disciple them toward. Number two, if you don't love your wife as Christ loved the church, you're actually disqualified for leadership in the local assembly.

You're disqualified. So pastors out there, if you don't have a marriage where you can say, follow my example in marriage, if you can't say that from the pulpit without embarrassment, you're disqualified for the role you're in. So it's so critical as men in the church to love our wives, to do what God has called us to do, because all of these other things and really the Great Commission itself is affected by how we are living examples of what God has called us to do and what he's called us to be.

So talk about this. What does it mean as Christ loved the church? Love your wives as Christ loved the church. Okay, well, one of the ways Christ loved the church is he sought the church. Remember that parable of seeking out the one lamb that was stray, right? So he's a pursuer. He is seeking out.

He is pursuing his bride. And so that is one thing that we as men need to do. Lisa likes being kissed. Every wife likes being kissed the way she was kissed on her wedding day. She never stopped desiring to be kissed that way. She never stopped desiring to be desirable to you.

She never stopped desiring to be pursued by you. So number one, pursuing our wife. She is a priority. We care about how she feels. We care about her day.

We care about her heart. I'm loving this. Every wife is going to send this to her husband. Keep going, Matt. This is good stuff.

Well, it is interesting. I mean, I want you to keep going, but I'll pause real quick because in your 100 ways to love your wife, I don't know which one it is, but I read it last night, kiss her passionately. Not just kiss her, but kiss her with passion.

Why not? All right, you're heading out the door. You're going out to do chores in the yard. She's heading out to some responsibility that she has, and you're saying goodbye for the day. Why do a throwaway kiss?

It takes five seconds, and just kiss and hold for a moment, and it says so much more than just, ah, goodbye, kiss, goodbye. See, it's about pursuing. It's about investing, and it's so great for how it makes your wife feel.

It's so great for what it communicates to her. So that's one thing, pursue, loving your wife as Christ loved the church. Secondly, it means you get to sacrifice, big guy.

All right? It means that all of those things that you want to do that are a priority, everything about your world and the things that you want to pursue just as a person, it doesn't mean they don't matter. It just means that they get to be prioritized in relationship to this number one priority that God gave you. You get to lay down your life for her. Now, that looks different in every marriage, but one thing for sure, no matter what marriage you're in, your wife knows whether she's a priority with you. Your wife knows whether you're actually laying down your life for her or whether your life is organized and orchestrated to do the things that you want to do, and she just gets to be along for the ride. No, we are Jesus Christ's priority. And how did He love? He laid down His life for His bride.

That's what we're called to do. So, as I say, it's different in every marriage, but you're a godly Christian man, so how about spending some time really thinking about this and saying, What would it mean for me to lay down my life for my wife? What would that look like in my marriage?

So, we've got that spelled out. I mean, the general sense. Husbands love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. There's not a parallel I'm familiar with. Wives, it says wives respect your husbands, but is there a specific spelling out of how a wife is supposed to love her husband, and is it different than the sacrificial expectations that Matt has just talked about?

Well, that's a good question. Yes, it is different, because it doesn't say the same thing to wives. You wrote two different books, right? So, there is How to Love Your Wife and How to Love Your Husband. There are differences in how we're to approach this.

Right. And I think, generally speaking, that wives are pretty good about loving. We have a better sense, probably, of what love looks like, what love means. That's why we watch all those little romantic comedies you were talking about. But communicating respect and submitting to your husband, which is, I know, always a big word when you're talking these days. But that's the part that we probably struggle with, that we have to spend more time considering on what that looks like, how I can communicate respect and honor to my husband. And it is different. Some things are the same.

I mean, he doesn't mind being kissed back, right? But there's going to be other ways of doing that. You know, I'd like to speak to that issue for a bit, because when we come to the Word of God and what it says to the husband, we like to read our wife's mail. Hey, God said to you that you're supposed to do these things, right?

I think we need to focus on our own mail. We need to focus on what God sent to us to do. And it's amazing how beautiful a relationship can be when a husband truly loves his wife, truly cherishes her, truly lays down his life, pursues her, right? Isn't selfish, but says, I love you instead of I love me and the choices that he makes. It's amazing how easy it becomes for a wife to submit to that guy. Now, the Bible does say that it's your responsibility to walk that way before your husband. So, if you're not a believer and you're listening to this, this is just nutty, okay? We get that, right? But for the person who claims to be a biblical Christian, this is how we're supposed to walk. And we're supposed to make submission a beautiful and safe thing for our wives. Well, Matt, as women are listening, they're resonating with you. Like, I long for this. I want this.

My husband really hasn't ever done that. What's the best way for me to approach him? Do I say this is what I'm not getting from you? What do you think, you guys? You're the experts. Well, I don't know if we're experts, but what we like to say is we have to decide whether or not we want to be biblical Christians, for starters.

We just have to decide that. Because if we are, what that means is the Bible gets to define how we're going to go forward. See, if you're not willing to make that commitment on the front end, then cobble it together and figure it out as you want. But if you're a biblical Christian, you're somebody who is involved in the church, and you say, no, I'm following the word of God.

It's authoritative for every area of my life. That's a starting point. And at that point, you have a situation where a guy is literally going to do what the word says, or at least when he becomes aware of it.

But for the wife who's feeling like, you know, I'd really like this. OK, so first of all, what I would say is, OK, we're biblical, right? We're biblical Christians. So that means you get to do what God calls you to do, regardless of whether he's walking in holiness or not.

OK? Because our personal holiness is not dependent on whether someone else is holy. It's easier in marriage if we're both walking in holiness.

But if I'm not walking according to the word of God, Lisa still can be yielded and submitted to what the word says. So what I would say is, if you've got a good relationship with your spouse, then this is time for conversation. This is time to get together.

Never try to deal with these things in the moment of emotional intensity. So if you're mad that your spouse hasn't done these things, and there's a moment right there where it's brought all of this anger and frustration to the fore, that's not the time to talk about it. Let the day pass, but come together and say, Could we talk about something? Because we need to get to a place where, if we're loving each other, I need to ask Lisa, What are the things that I can do that make you feel loved? And then conversely, she should be able to ask me about that.

Some of our listeners have heard me share this story, but it just resonates with what we're talking about here. I was working with a guy who had been married for six months, and we were out on a sales call together, and I said, How are things with you and Kathy? And he said, We're doing okay. He said, But she's having a hard time submitting to me. And I said, Well, that's interesting.

I said, What made you think she's supposed to submit to you? And he said, Well, it says so in the Bible. I said, Well, where does it say that? There's a New Testament in my glove compartment. So he gets out. He knows his Bible.

He opens to Ephesians 5. He says, Right here. It says, Wives. I said, Hang on. What's that first word?

Wives. I said, Are you a wife? He said, No.

I said, Well, that verse isn't for you. Go on to the next one. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. And he looked up at me like, Like what?

I said, No. You don't need to read the verses that start with wives. You read the verses that start with husbands, and you apply those. And all of a sudden, it was like, Oh, maybe that's what I should be focusing on. Right. This is something where we can all continue to grow and get better. And the thing I love about the books the two of you have written, 100 Ways to Love Your Wife, 100 Ways to Love Your Husband, is that this is not a sit down and get out your highlighter and study and read. You can read four of these ideas a day. One a day. You can read one a day.

Yeah, one a day. And if you applied it, you would have a different marriage in 100 days. You know what?

I can say that we have had people say, I've got a different marriage this week. And they just started doing what's in this book. And it's so doable. It's so practical.

It's so hands on. And it will begin a difference right away. And one of the things, and I just wanted to get this in, about the issue of respect. Okay, because one of the ways to love your wife is to respect your wife. Now, a lot of people, it's kind of funny, I wrote a blog post, put it up, about the business of a man respecting his wife. And somebody came back to me, Hey, hey, the Bible doesn't tell men they're supposed to respect their wives. It says the wives are supposed to respect their husbands. But what I like to remind men is, if you don't respect your wife, you are in the process of destroying your marriage. See, a lot of people say, well, this is what the wives supposed to do for the husband.

But I've looked deeply into this particular verse at the end of Ephesians 5 that people kind of highlight as well. The wives are supposed to respect the husband. And it is a huge misunderstanding to focus on that word, just respect. Because the fact of the matter is, there is a definition in the Bible for that word. And it isn't the typical word we use for respect.

That's why in the King James, they actually have it right. You're supposed to reverence your husband, okay? The word respect goes both ways in a marriage. And if you're not respecting your wife, you're in the process of destroying your marriage.

That word has a definition. The definition of that word is to defer in a reverential manner. And he's tying it right back in to what happens at the beginning of that passage on the subject of submission. A wife is to yield to her husband in his role of leadership in the home and in the marriage. And so at the end, it isn't really talking about the specific subject of respect.

It's talking about, and this is the specific definition of that word, to defer in a reverential manner. You absolutely must respect your wife. It's one of the ways in the book, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife, that you can love her by respecting her.

Well, let me just give an example. You say in the book, one way you can love your wife is to seek her counsel. And somebody could say, I can do that today. I can ask my wife, what do you think we should do here? Absolutely. Then you say on the next day, listen to her wisdom after you've sought her counsel.

Which I thought, okay, that's a good follow-up to have here. These are just some of the practical things that Matt and Lisa talk about in their books, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband. And given everything that we've all been going through over the last two or three months, the stress and the strain and the pressure, this has been a hard season for marriages, hard to carve out time to invest well in one another.

We have not been loving one another well. We can do a better job. And so we thought, we're going to make your books available to any Family Life Today listener who'd like to get a copy. If you can donate to support the ministry of Family Life Today, go online at familylifetoday.com, make a donation, and we'll send you both A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband and A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife from Matt and Lisa Jacobson. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com. We are grateful for those of you who join with us to make this ministry possible for others. When you're investing in Family Life Today, you're really investing in the lives and marriages of tens of thousands of people who come to us every day for practical, biblical help and hope for their marriage and their family.

That's where your investment goes. So if you can help with a donation, we'd love to send you as a thank you gift both of these books from Matt and Lisa Jacobson. Again, donate online at familylifetoday.com. If it's easier, call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. There are folks here who can take your call and would love to help you however we can. 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. Now, tomorrow we're going to continue to talk about how we can do a better job of expressing our love for one another in marriage. Matt and Lisa Jacobson will join us again. We hope you can as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.