If you're a husband and a Christian, do you know what job one 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 have 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, as you guys know, I just recently wrote a book that came out called Love Like You Mean It. We have a cruise by that name, so now we've got a book by that name as well. And what I did in the book was go back to 1 Corinthians 13 and looked at all of the characteristics of what love is according to the Scriptures. And the conclusion I came to is that most of us have a very superficial idea of what love is. When we get married, we're in love with the romantic comedy idea of love, not with a biblical idea of love. I think we set out pursuing a you've-got-male approach to love rather than a you've-got-Jesus approach to love, and that's a very different approach.
And 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. But 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 a Matt and Lisa Jacobson, our guests. Welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you so much. Thank you.
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 café 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 I 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. And as we were 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 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, at least for me it is. I don't know about anybody else, but that's a choice to not be selfish and to consider somebody else more important than yourself, your spouse. Well, that's exactly right. 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. 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. Well, not really in our case because it's so easy for her because she's married too. 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, those verses in 1 Corinthians 13, for instance.
And we think about it for those other people out there. And so, for example, 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 because I'm trying to get through and she's going really slow. 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, you know, 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.
I thought, what would happen if I turned around and leaned right back into him? And it worked. It was very effective.
Yes. 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.
Yeah. I've always felt this from me with the church, you know, 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 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, 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, you know, 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 all of the other 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?
Right. So discipleship, Jesus says, 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.
Alright, 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. By 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 that 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. I'd like to speak to that issue for a bit because, you know, when we come to the Word of God and what it says to the husband, we like to read our wife's mail. Hey, you know, 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. Let's go to the next one. Perfect.
Absolutely perfect. And he looked up at me 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 aren't 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 husbands. 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. And 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 Matt and Lisa talk about in their books. A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband. And, you know, given what the past year has been like for all of us, the stress and the strain and the uncertainty, this has been a hard season for a lot of marriages.
It's hard to carve out time to invest well in our marriage and one another. So we thought, let's make these books available to Family Life Today listeners. Anyone who can support the ministry with a donation, let's send them a copy of both books.
A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife. All you have to do is go online at familylifetoday.com, make a donation and request your copy of these books. And we're happy to send them to you. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com. You can donate online or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make a donation over the phone.
Again, that's 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. And you should know, we are grateful to those of you who join with us to make this ministry possible for so many others. When you invest in Family Life Today, you're really investing in the lives and marriages and families of hundreds of thousands of people who come to us every day for practical, biblical help and hope for their marriage and for their family.
That's where your investments go. You're building stronger marriages and families. So again, if you can make a donation today, request your copy of two books, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife by Matt and Lisa Jacobson.
Donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. By the way, I mentioned earlier the book I had written called Love Like You Mean It. In addition to the book, we have a 10-part small group series that you can go through with other couples or go through on your own as husband and wife.
Find out more about the Love Like You Mean It video series and how you can use that when you go to familylifetoday.com. Now tomorrow we're going to continue talking about how we can do a better job of expressing our love for one another in marriage. Matt and Lisa Jacobson will be here with us again.
I hope you can join us as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. Extra help today from Bruce Goff and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann 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.
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