Would you prefer your spouse be enraptured with strong, emotional, passionate love for you – love largely befallen them beyond their control – or that they have an intentional, committed love for you – a choice they make everyday to be patient, kind and affectionate?
Everybody wants to be in love, to have strong feelings of attraction for their spouse who has a matching love for them. If we can have that kind of mutual love, we’re happy and feel extremely blessed.
But if we had to choose between the two, wouldn’t it be better to have a spouse committed to love us regardless of circumstances or what they felt like on any given day?
Granted, both kinds of love would be ideal, but one (the emotional kind) is out of our control. Our goal should be to have the kind of love we can choose, not just the kind that may or may not supervene us.
When Jesus commanded us to love He spoke of a love we can choose, not one that may or may not choose us. And our spouse is, above all people, the one who needs this love from us.
Speaking of kinds of love and degrees of love, Jesus said nobody will have greater love than that love that would compel us to lay down our lives for our friend (for example, our best friend, our spouse).
Jesus laid down His life for us, His friends, and He calls us to lay down our will and preferences daily for the good of our spouse.
That’s two senses – 1) choice-love over feeling-love and 2) laying-life-down love over gratifying our own desires – in which one love can be greater than another.
But there is a third angle from which to view the idea of greater love: make sure your spouse doesn’t out-love you. This is one of the ways competition can be productive.
Jesus’ final conversation with Simon Peter before He ascended into Heaven was Him challenging Peter to compete with his fellow apostles. Do you love Me more than these? Peter accepted the challenge and we see him stepping up a few days later to lead the disciples in the first acts the infant church of Christ Jesus would make. He acted and spoke from a heart of choice-love for Jesus as he looked after His lambs.
Spouses, we can also step up our choice-love game and lead the way in marital love.
We can have, in many ways, greater love.
May it be so.
