ground for us to truly learn what sacrificial love is like.
To others, time is equal to love. If we do not give them our
time, to listen to them, to be their friend, to teach them
Scripture, to care for their needs in a creative and practical way,
then they will not believe it when we tell them we love them
and God loves them. We must invest our lives in our children
even as Jesus left the throne of heaven to give all of his time to
his own disciples, which is what our children are to us. If He
gave His life and lived with them, fed them, instructed them,
and loved them—can we expect to do anything less?
Then there is marriage. All marriages eventually have stress,
some more than others. Yet, marriage is a place where we
portray the picture of God’s relationship to the world. Even as
Jesus calls himself the bridegroom and gave himself up for his
bride, (the believers—his church) so marriage pictures the
eternal loyalty of God to us. God will never divorce us. Hosea
is a book that portrays how loyal God’s love is to us. Hosea is
commanded to stay loyal in his love to an adulterous as a
picture of God’s loyal love to us.
Cultivating love in marriage is learning to show respect to our
spouse out of our love for God. Learning to give words of life
instead of complaining. Learning to overlook the faults of our
spouse because God overlooks our sin.
Peter is such an example of this. He experienced the grace and
mercy of God when he denied Jesus at this time of death. Jesus
prayed for Peter and still validated him as the rock, the leader,
the one that would lead the disciples. And so Peter writes, out
of his own experience, “Above all, love each other deeply,
because love covers over a multitude of sins.” I Peter 4:8