Many struggling in relationships describe the lack of love, affection, and appreciation they have received from a loved one through the years. Their emotional love tanks are empty, and they are pleading for love. How painful! Love is humanity’s deepest emotional need. The difficulty in a close relationship is that the focus on receiving love rather than giving love. Many claim, “If she would just be a little more affectionate, then I would be responsive to her. When she gives me no affection, I distance myself from her.” He is waiting for love before he loves; however, someone must take the initiative.

Love is the most powerful weapon for good – and that especially applies in marriage and close relationships. Many think love as an emotion. In reality, love is an attitude, demonstrated with appropriate behavior. While love affects the emotions, it is not in itself an emotion. Love chooses to look out for other’s interests. Love is expressed in behavior.

The fact that love is an attitude rather than an emotion means that you can love your spouse even when you do not have warm emotional feelings for him or her. Paul instructed husbands, “Love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her” (Ephesians 5:25). And Paul challenged older women to “train the younger women to love their husbands and their children” (Titus 2:4). Love can be learned because it is not an emotion.

Take time to pray asking God…

• To show you the power of sacrificial love to transform your marriage;
• To help you choose to love, even when you don’t feel loving.

Take time to reflect…

• Why do couples get in a love stalemate, each unwilling to take the first step to show love?
• Based on what you read above, and filtered through your own experience, is love an emotion, an attitude, a choice, or some combination?
• What does sacrificial love look like in the context of marriage?

Consider these passages for further study on Love:

Colossians 3:12  Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

1 Thessalonians 4:9 Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.

1 John 3:18-19

Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

¹⁹ This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence:

John 10:11-18

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹² The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. ¹³ The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

¹⁴ “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— ¹⁵ just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. ¹⁶ I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. ¹⁷ The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. ¹⁸ No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

Love is the most powerful act you can learn and apply in your life in many forms. Learn from the one who loved us first, Christ. The devotion of Gary Chapman.