7-6-08
What Role Does Emotion Play in Love?
Building a Joyful Marriage: Part 1
Selected passages

Summary: Love is the most important thing, so we are going to take an excursus in our study of John to talk about loving others – especially with regard to marriage. You cannot obey commandment #1 without #2, nor 2 without 1. The main duty of marriage is love, and love is esteem, desire and delight. If you think it is just commitment you will not be able to solve problems of lack of love. Test your marriage for desire and delight (applies to your relationship to God too). 

Introduction: The Primacy of Love
Love for God and love for people
Can’t love people without loving God
Can’t love God without loving people
The main duty of marriage is love
Definition of love
Moses’ conception of love
The prophets
Psalms
Esteem
Desire
Delight
New Testament
You must understand what love is to solve love problems
The Role of Commitment
Desire/Delight Test
Conclusion

Introduction: The Primacy of Love 
We have been learning a lot in our study through 1 John about loving God and loving people, which is good, because when they asked Jesus what was the greatest command in the whole Bible He said number one was loving God and number two was loving people.  We named this church Agape Bible Church because agape is the main Greek word for love.  And we figured, if we are all about one thing why not have that one thing be our name?  That is one of the main reasons why we are studying 1 John – because it has so much to say about loving God and loving people, and the connection between the two.
It has become apparent to me in recent weeks that there is a need to take what we have learned about love in this book and in our previous studies and make some specific application.  The leadership has urged me to take a break from our verse-by-verse study through 1 John and do a study of how to apply these principles about love, especially in marriage so we are going to take a little time to talk about the practical application of how to love people and especially how to love your spouse.  Although I don’t know if it is accurate to call this a break from 1 John.  Maybe a little better word would be excursus.  In the commentaries, when they have a section devoted to exploring some larger theme from the book in detail, they call it an excursus.   So that is what we are going to do – an excursus on loving people.
As I told you a couple weeks ago I believe the marriages at Agape are really under attack by the enemy at this time, and they need some urgent attention.  However if you are single I hope you won’t tune out of this series, because most of the principles apply to loving that difficult person in your life – whether it is your boss or a family member or someone here at church or whatever.  It may be God’s plan for you to be married in the future, in which case it is much better to learn how to love ahead of time.  Or the Lord might place a married person in your path who needs counsel from God’s Word about love.  But much more important than all of that is this - what we are going to study in this series (and especially this morning) is crucially important for your own personal relationship with God.  The quick summary of what I am going to be teaching is this – in a marriage the most important thing is to love your spouse so we will talk about the definition of love.  Then we will talk about how to kindle that love in your heart by increasing your love for God, then attending to how much God loves your spouse, and then loving your spouse as an expression of your affection for God.  So this series is really for anyone who want to increase in love for God.  Pretty much everything I say about marital love you will be able to apply to your relationship with God, because the whole point of marriage is to reflect the relationship between God and His people.

Love for God and love for people

When the guy asked Jesus which was the number one command he did not ask for number two; he only asked for number one.  But Jesus gave him 1 and 2 because they are so inextricably connected.  You absolutely cannot love God without loving people, and you cannot love people without loving God.
Cannot love people without loving God
When there is someone who is especially hard for you to love - that person irritates you, bugs you, rubs you the wrong way, gets on your nerves - and then God comes along and commands you to love that person; you will never be able to do it unless you have a deep and profound love for God.  Because the way to love that person is to consider how much God loves that person.  But if there is only a small amount of affection in your heart for God, then when you think of God loving that person it will not do anything to spark love in your heart for that person.  If you think about the fact that Jesus died for that person and God deeply and dearly loves that person, and still you have no affection in your heart for him or her - that shows you that your love for God is weak.  So to love people you must love God.  And if you want to increase your love for the people who are hard to love, the only way to succeed is to increase your love for God.

1 John 5:2 This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God 
Cannot love God without loving people
And conversely, you cannot love God without loving people.  Jesus said, “Whatever you failed to do to the least of these brothers of Mine you failed to do to Me.”  It is impossible to love the Lord without loving people – period.
If you are seeking intimacy with God, fellowship with God, closeness to God, if you want to glorify Him and honor Him and please Him and obey Him, if you want to experience the nearness of His presence and receive grace from Him; you must love those He loves.  And you must love them because He loves them.  If you do not love those He loves because He loves them, that will stand as a brick wall between you and God.  God will not grant you closeness to Him while you are failing to love those He loves.
Many people think the best way to get close to God is to go off to a monastery and just pray and meditate on Scripture all day long every day.  But if you do that – if you cut yourself off from loving people – you build an impenetrable barrier that keeps you from closeness to God.  Most people would be surprised at how many times in Scripture God promises not to listen to your prayers.

Isaiah 1:15 When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. 

What is the solution to that problem?

17 Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.

Ever since ancient times, people have been trying to love God without loving people.  And God has always said the same thing to those people – “I will not listen to your prayers.”  And if God does not listen to your prayers you can have no closeness with Him at all.  In Ezekiel 8 the people were fighting with one another and being cruel to one another, so in v.18 God says to Ezekiel:

Ezekiel 8:18 Although they shout in my ears, I will not listen to them.

Isaiah 58:3-9 'Why have we fasted,' they say, 'and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?'

Fasting is what you do when something is really, deeply on your heart and you are especially earnest in prayer.  So they were praying with such earnestness that they were fasting and humbling themselves before God in sackcloth and ashes.  But God refused to listen, and so they ask why.  And God answers in the second half of v.3.

"On the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers.  4 Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.  5 Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself? Is it only for bowing one's head like a reed and for lying on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?  6 "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?  7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-- when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? 
9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.” 

There can be no communion with God where there is no love for His people. And the greater your responsibility to love someone, the greater the sin if you fail to love them.  The closer the proximity God has placed someone in your life, the more egregious the sin if you fail to love them.  That is why failure to love your spouse is pointed out in Scripture as being particularly damaging to your relationship to God.

Malachi 2:13-14 You flood the LORD's altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands.  14 You ask, "Why?" It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.

Failure to love your wife will cause God to pay no attention to your prayers and to reject your worship.  And you might hear that and think, “But wait a minute – Malachi 2 is talking about divorce.  Those people were divorcing their wives.”  Is it really appropriate to apply that principle to other lapses in love?  Or does it only apply if you go all the way to divorce?  Let’s see how the Apostle Peter applied it.

1 Peter 3:7 Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers. 8 Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. 9 Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. 10 For…

Stop right there for a second.  Peter is calling upon men to love their wives so nothing will hinder their prayers.  Then he turns to the rest of us – married, single, male, female – everyone in the church and calls all of us to love.  Then in v.10 he says “for” meaning “here’s the reason for why I’m calling all of you to love one another and especially within marriage.”

10 For, "Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech. 11 He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it. 12 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil." 

The reason it is crucial for us to love one another from the heart with profound compassion and deep affection is because if we do not, the eyes of the Lord will not be on us.  His ears will not listen to our prayers and the Lord will turn His face against us.
The Lord has placed two huge burdens on my heart in calling me to be the pastor of this church.  One is for each of you.  Every one of you is dear to me, and I long and ache for God’s blessing on your lives.
The other burden is for this church.  I love the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and I especially love this particular assembly.  And so I am extremely concerned when I hear about relationships where there is a lack of love – especially if those relationships are marriages.  Lack of love between any two people in this church will damage the ministry of this church.  If there is anyone here with whom you are at odds, that will decrease the likelihood that God will listen to our prayers, and will make it so there is less of an experience of the presence of God when we worship, and it will choke off the flow of grace.  And if that relationship is with your husband or your wife, that makes it all the more severe.  That is the relationship where you have the most responsibility to love, and so to fail there is particularly serious and particularly damaging.  So as we take this little excursus let us all be as attentive to the Holy Spirit as we can possibly be so we can all improve in our loving of others.

The main duty of marriage is love

Can we all agree that the main duty of marriage is love?

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives,

Colossians 3:19 Husbands, love your wives

Titus 2:4 Train the younger women to love their husbands

If the primary duty we have toward all people is love (which is what Jesus said in the passage about the greatest commandment), then certainly that principle does not disappear when it comes to loving your wife.  And there are some unique aspects to loving your spouse.

Proverbs 5:18-19 May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. 19 A loving doe, a graceful deer-- may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.

The Bible calls you to love everyone, but you don’t love your boss at work with that kind of love.  So there are various different expressions of love that are appropriate or inappropriate in different relationships.  But on the other hand there are some constants in all kinds of love.  That is, there are some essentials that make up the bare minimum of what has to be present in order for love to exist.  So let’s begin with that.  What is love?

Definition of love
This is so important because we obviously have to know what love is before we can assess how much love we have or whether or not it is increasing.  That is one reason the definition is important.  The other is the fact that there is a great deal of incorrect teaching about love circulating in our day.  And so it is crucial that we return to a Biblical understanding. 
If you go to the Bible bookstore and pick up just about any book on Christian love, or if you hear a sermon on the subject, there is about a 99% chance you will hear the following: 
•	Love is not a feeling. It is a commitment. 
•	Feelings are unimportant. They do not need to be present. 
•	If you want the feelings, just follow through on the commitment and they will come automatically like a caboose on a train.
•	The definition of agape love is self-sacrificial service. You are loving your wife when you serve her.
•	The term agape refers to a special, divine kind of love that is completely different from earthly, human love. 
Those ideas do not come from Scripture, nor do they come from the meaning of the word agape in ancient times.  They come mostly from a three-volume study by Anders Nygren published in the 1950’s titled “Agape and Eros.”  And 99% of what you hear or read today about agape love comes directly or indirectly from that book.  Almost all the popular preachers and teachers, word study books, Bible study books, and other popular works get their information about agape from Nygren’s book or from some other source that got it from Nygren’s book.
And Nygren seems to have gotten it from philosophy.  You can trace the idea back to the influence of Soren Kierkegaard who was influenced by Plato.  But if you look in the standard Greek and Hebrew word study authorities you find something very different.  The most comprehensive Greek word study book is the 10 volume work edited by Gerhard Kittle called Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.  In that work the article on the word agape is a very extensive study of all the uses of the word in the Bible and other ancient literature.  The article is 34 pages of very fine print.  And that article says this: “Love in the OT is basically a spontaneous feeling which impels to self-giving or, in relation to things, to the seizure of the object which awakens the feeling, or to the performance of the action in which pleasure is taken.”  So it is a feeling driven by desire for the object of love.
You find the same thing with the Old Testament words for love.  And if you look up ahav in the New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology you’ll find that ahav speaks of an “emotive event, expressing a personal feeling of love.” 
So at the popular level you hear a lot of teacher and preachers and writers teaching that agape is a commitment and not a feeling.  But neither the secular usage nor the biblical usage backs that up.  I could take a half hour and read you a large number of quotations from Greek and New Testament scholars who agree with what I am telling you.  But I think I will take the time instead to just show it to you in Scripture. 
Moses’ conception of love
We will start with Moses.  The starting place for thinking about love is the passage that Jesus said was the most important in the whole Bible: 

Deuteronomy 6:5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

When Moses wanted to emphasize that something dominated the entirety of your inner being he would use the phrase “with all your heart and all your soul.”  You see that phrase over and over again in Deuteronomy.  But this is the only place in all his writings where he adds a third term – all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.  So in all the first five books of the Bible this is the most extreme statement about the completeness and totality of being that is required in loving God.  It would be absolutely impossible to somehow exempt the emotions from that.  Love is a function of your entire being, and your emotions and affections are a huge part of your entire being.  And just in case anyone thinks there might be some little aspect of your being that is still exempt, when Jesus quoted the verse He added yet another term.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.  No part of you is exempt or uninvolved. 
The prophets
So that is Moses (the Law) – what about the Prophets?  The prophets are very instructive about the meaning of love, because God frequently describes His own love and in doing so He uses the most emotional kinds of metaphors possible. 

Psalms 103:13 As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.  

Jeremiah 31:20 Is not Ephraim my dear son, the child in whom I delight? …Therefore my heart yearns for him; I have great compassion for him," declares the LORD

Zephaniah 3:17 The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing."

Isaiah 62:5 As a young man marries a maiden, so will your sons marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.

Jeremiah 32:41 I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.

The entire book of Hosea describes God as being like a husband whose emotions for His wife well up in His heart.  What images of love could God have possibly used that would point more to passion and emotion more than a father’s love for his little child or a man’s love on his wedding day or rejoicing with all his heart and all his soul?  That is as emotional as it gets.  And if anything is clear from 1 John it is that the kind of love we are to have for one another is the same kind of love that God has for us. (1 Jn.4:7-11)
Psalms
So the Law and the Prophets give us a picture of love that very heavily involves the emotions.  What about the Psalms?  The best place to go in the Psalms to learn the definition of love is Ps.119.  It is the longest chapter in the entire Bible (by far) and it is all about the psalmist’s love for God’s Word.  And if you just look up the word “love” in that psalm you will see that there are three major components of love.  Those three components are esteem, desire, and delight; and they are all expressed through obedience.

Esteem
If you love someone or some thing you will hold that person or thing in high esteem, which is the opposite of distain.

Psalm 119:163 I hate and abhor falsehood but I love your law.

Desire
The second component is desire.  High esteem is not merely theoretical, but intensely motivational.  It generates a desire to experience the object of love as thoroughly as possible.  If you love someone or something you will desire to experience the benefits of that person or thing.

Psalm 119:131-132 I open my mouth and pant, longing for your commands. 132 Turn to me … as you always do to those who love your name. 

So part of loving is opening his mouth and panting with longing and desire.  Where there is no desire there is no love.  It is nonsense for a person to say “I love ice cream, but I have no desire for it.”  And it is even worse nonsense for a man to say, “I love my wife but I have no desire for her.”

Delight
So when there is high esteem there will be desire.  And when that desire is fulfilled – when you experience the benefits of the object of your life, the result is delight.  If I love cheesecake, then I will desire it.  And then when I get some, that desire turns into delight.  And so delight is connected with love just as often as desire.

Psalm 119:47 for I delight in your commands because I love them.

Love and delight are very often synonyms in Scripture. 

Matthew 12:18 Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight

That is Hebrew parallelism.  “In whom I delight” is another way of saying, “Whom I love.”

Proverbs 1:22 "How long will you simple ones love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery?

Love and delight are very often used interchangeably in Scripture.
Those who want to say that agape is non-emotional commitment only, and has nothing to do with passion or desire never seem to mention the fact that the Greek word used throughout the Song of Solomon for sexual love (in the Greek translation) is agape, not eros. That whole book describes marital love, and the whole thing is nothing but descriptions of esteem, desire, and delight.
Esteem – they are constantly praising each other and going on and on about how wonderful the other one is.
Desire – 1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
  7:10 I belong to my lover, and his desire is for me.
Delight - 2:3 Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my lover among the young men. 
I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste.

New Testament
In the New Testament we see exactly the same thing as in the Old.  The NT writers write against the idea of emotionless love in the strongest terms.  Paul attacks that mere-commitment-self-sacrificial-service view of love in the love chapter.  He starts out 1 Cor.13 by saying if you give so self-sacrificially that you give all you have to the poor, and you are so committed that you die as a martyr, it is still possible to do all that without love.  And if that is the case then it is worthless, because it is not love.  That would be nonsense if love were merely commitment or self-sacrificial giving.
Jesus’ words to the church in Ephesus would also be nonsense.  First He commends them for their fantastic service and work and sacrifice and commitment, and then He rebukes them for having lost their love.  And as we saw a few weeks ago in 1 Jn.2 love for God is the same in kind as love for the world.  People who love the world desire the world.  They do not get drunk and pursue riches and sex and recreation and pleasure out of sheer duty.  They desire and delight in the world, and John does not say that it is wrong because they have desire.  He says it is wrong because their desire is not from God.

John 14:28 If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father

It is impossible to have love without having gladness when good things happen to the one you love.

1 Pe.1:22 Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.

Love that is from the heart is love that is deep (ektenos - earnest, or fervent).  The first step is for love to be sincere.  But sincerity alone is not enough.  From there love must become increasingly fervent and earnest. 
So let me put this as plainly as I possibly can: If you do not have a passionate, deep, heartfelt, emotional, compelling, affectionate love for your wife or husband; if you do not strongly desire your spouse – desire to spend time together, desire talk together, desire to hear what is on her mind, desire to please your husband - if those desires are weak or absent altogether, but you are grinding it out and trying to be a committed spouse, you are cutting yourself from closeness to God, you are damaging yourself, damaging your family, damaging your spouse, damaging this church, and disobeying God.
The purpose of this study is to help you rekindle (or in some cases to kindle for the first time) that desire.  But I needed to take the time to show you how critically important this is, so you are motivated to do the things Scripture is going to point to as ways of generating this desire.  When you have low desire for your spouse very often the last thing you feel like doing is working toward closeness with a person whom you do not desire.  Usually when we do not like someone we are content to keep our distance.  And there are couples who have a mutual agreement that they will just kind of live as roommates.  Neither one wants to pursue depth of love with the other.  And so I wanted to take you through these Scriptures so you can see that an attitude like that is flat out disobedience to God, and it is so damaging that it is crucial not to continue that way.  It is just not an option for a Christian.

You must understand what love is to solve love problems

I believe one of the biggest reasons why Christian couples have so little success in solving their problems is because of a faulty understanding of what love is.  They reduce love to mere actions.  I’ll give you an example.  Maybe some of you can relate to this.  The wife says, “I just wish you would spend more time with me and listen to me once in a while.”  She says that over and over, and finally the husband says, “OK,” and he takes the day off work and they spend the day or maybe a whole weekend together.  And the whole time they bicker and fight, and it is an utterly unsatisfying experience for both of them so the man concludes, “It’s hopeless.  She’s never satisfied.   She never will be satisfied.  I don’t even know why I keep trying.”
Why does that happen?  I think one big reason why it happens is because what she wants is not for you to listen to her and spend time with her.  What she wants is for you to want to listen to her and spend time with her.  She wants you to desire her.  She wants you not to just listen, but to listen because of the fact that you are truly interested in what is on her mind.  You see, if you love someone you will be interested in what is on that person’s mind simply because of the fact that it is on that person’s mind.
My wife and I used to have constant conflicts over how I spent my time.  She always wanted me to spend more time with her, and I felt like she resented my ministry and calling.  All through our marriage I had been reading books and doing studies on how to be a better husband, and I was doing all the things in all those books the best I could, but there was still a lack of joy in our marriage.
But then finally my heart changed and I finally learned to really love her and really desire her company.  And that changed everything.  I really, truly wanted to be with her, and I began to enjoy it so thoroughly that it became obvious to her that it was out of desire, not mere duty.  Your wife can tell the difference.  When it is  out of duty the only time you spend with her is time you have scheduled to spend with her.  But when it is out of desire you find yourself coming up with creative ways to spend a couple extra minutes with her here and there.  You have a few extra minutes before you have to leave, and instead of flipping on the TV, or sitting down at the computer, you sit down and talk to your wife.  And when you spend time with her you find yourself planning to spend an hour, but then stretching it out to 1:15 and then finally tearing yourself away out of sheer self-discipline.
And I found an amazing thing.  I keep track of all my time throughout my day.  And what I discovered was that I was spending about the same amount of time with her as before, but there was a night and day difference in her joy.  She was now happy and satisfied.  And if our time together gets interrupted by something, instead of resenting it she tells me, “Go do it. It’s fine” (and she really means it).
What I have found is that for Tracy, if I am off doing something away from her but she knows I would much rather be with her, and that I can’t wait to see her again, that is a lot more satisfying to her than me spending time with her out of duty when I don’t really desire to spend time with her.  And my guess is your wife is the same way.
And if you are thinking, “Does that mean she would be happy if I never spent any time with her at all as long as I had the desire to?”  No, because if that desire is strong enough you will find a way to spend time with her.  If you cannot manage to come up with some creative way that will enable you to spend time with her, then the desire just is not very strong compared to your desires for all the other things you are doing.
And ladies, the same goes for you.  Do you desire your husband?  Or do you just desire someone to take you out to eat or out to some enjoyable activity on a date?  Do you desire him, or do you just desire someone to take you away from the monotony or chaos of your home for a couple hours?
If you have an inadequate or incomplete understanding of what love is you will never be able to love properly.  In fact, most of the time you won’t even be able to discern what the problem is.  People are forever telling me, “I love my wife, but for some reason I just yell at her all the time.”  Or “I love my husband, but I have no desire for intimacy with him.”  Everyone thinks they love their spouse.  And so when the problem is caused by lack of love, they can never find the solution because no one is willing to admit that they do not love their spouse.

The Role of Commitment

They think as long as they are committed, then that counts as love.  And let me hasten to add at this point that commitment is a very crucial component to love.  You must be committed to do what is in your spouse’s best interests regardless of how you feel.  That is absolutely essential to love.  If you are not committed to their highest good regardless of how you feel, that is not true love.  However if you are committed and the feelings are not there, that is not true love either.
When a guy says, “Don’t tell me I don’t love my wife - I work my fingers to the bone to provide for her”– is that love?  You provide her with money?  You send a lot of money off to the IRS every year; are you telling me you love your wife with the same kind of love you have for the IRS?  Or is it possible that you don’t love the IRS at all, and you only send them money out of sheer duty?
When you do not feel like doing what is in your spouse’s best interests you should go ahead and do it anyway.  But do not be satisfied with that.  Do what is in their best interests, and then get on your knees and repent and beg God’s forgiveness for not desiring what was in their best interests.  God requires that you both desire it and do it.  If you are falling into one sin by not desiring it, don’t commit a second sin by not doing it.  Committing just one sin is better than committing two.  But the goal is to commit neither sin.  So if the desire is not there then study and work and pray and seek counsel and pray some more and labor and strive until you find a way to generate that desire. 

Desire/Delight Test

Let me give you a few questions you can use as a test to discern your level of love for your spouse.  Which way is your heart inclined when you have some spare time?  If your wife is available, and the TV is available, and the Internet is available, and your hobby is available – which has the greatest tug on your desires?  When you are going to spend time alone with your spouse, do you look forward to it?  And if so, is what you are looking forward to their company – or the activity?  When you allow yourself to just daydream and just think about whatever is most pleasurable to think about, is it about your spouse?  How hard to you work to make it easier for your spouse to desire you?  Is it obvious from your actions that the driving desire of your heart is to make it easier for your spouse to desire you?  Pretty much every decision I make about how I look is driven by my desire to bring pleasure to Tracy – hair style, which clothes I wear, which clothes I avoid, cologne – everything.  If I ever discover anything that she especially likes that is possible for me, I’m all over it.  It absolutely blows my mind when I hear a married person say, “Ooh – I just love ____” and it is something their spouse could do and they don’t do it!  

1 Corinthians 7:33-34 A married man is concerned about … how he can please his wife …. a married woman is concerned about how she can please her husband.

If you are not especially concerned with how to please your spouse you are not even living as a married person.

Conclusion

Remember the relationship between desire and delight?  If you love someone, you desire them until you have an experience of closeness with them, and then desire turns to delight.

Proverbs 5:18-19 May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. 19 A loving doe, a graceful deer-- may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.

But even now, without having taught on it, there is plenty that is evident right on the surface.  Just look at the passage for a moment and ask yourself: Does that describe me?  Do the five things in those verses describe your marriage? – fountain, rejoicing, love & grace, satisfaction, and being captivated.  The fountain image means your spouse is delightful, satisfying, and refreshing, like cool spring water to a parched mouth.  Is that what you are to your spouse?  Is that the way you feel about your spouse?  Is your life a life of rejoicing in your spouse – real rejoicing?  Do you experiencing continual, wonderful satisfaction through your spouse?  Are you captivated?  That word is translated, intoxicated, ravished, exhilarated.  Is there any chance your spouse could be ravished and intoxicated and exhilarated and satisfied?
Does that describe your marriage?  “Darrell, we’re not newlyweds anymore.”  This passage is not talking to newlyweds.  The wife of your youth – that means the wife that you married way back in the day when you used to be young.  This is the way God expects our marriages to be; because this is the way we are to love God.  Esteem, desire, and delight.  In the weeks to come we will be exploring what Scripture says about how to increase desire and delight for your spouse.
I know some of you are discouraged in your marriage.  When you do not have love in your heart toward your spouse it feels impossible to imagine having that love.  You do not even want to try.  But I am exhorting you to not only try but to pour everything you are into it, because there is a lot at stake.  Your joy, your spouse’s joy, the health of your family, the health of this church, and the name and renown of the Lord are all at stake. 

Benediction: 1 Peter 1:22  Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.

Devotionals

Day 1: God provides many different avenues of fellowship with Him 

John 14:18 I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.

Matthew 28:20 surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

Psalm 139:7-12 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 

Good morning blessed Father,
Thank You for being with me here this morning and listening to my prayers and attending to me and caring about the cries and desires of my heart. Lord, may those desires honor You.
What is wonderful about this attribute:
God is always available for fellowship with His children and there are many different ways to enjoy fellowship with Him.  Prayer, of course, is an important way.  But it is not the only way.  You can have communion with God …
by being enlightened by Him, as you submissively learn at His feet,
by being listened to by Him, as you lift your hands to Him in prayer as a child in His lap,
by being thrilled by His glory, as you kneel before His great throne in praise,
by being sheltered and protected by Him, as you run into His refuge,
by being provided for by Him, as you take a seat at His bountiful table,
by being used by Him, as a tool in His hand or as a fountainhead through which His grace flows to others,
by being close to Him, as you walk by His side by having the same affections as He has,
by being strengthened by Him as you feel His power through your trials when He takes you by the hand,
by being chastised by Him as you walk with Him to the woodshed,
by being healed and restored by Him as you lie on His operating table
by being conformed to Christ’s image by Him as you are shaped on His potter’s wheel, 
by suffering with our Lord Jesus, as you join Him at the cross.

So many ways to draw near to Him – at His feet, before His throne, by His side, in His lap, in His hand, on His potter’s wheel or operating table, in His woodshed, by His cross.  But oh how often His presence is available to us in these ways and we ignore it or prefer some earthly amusement. 
Experiencing this attribute:
God comes to us and visits us with His marvelous presence to tutor us and open our eyes to some wonderful truth; and so often we just think of it as a moment of clear thinking, oblivious to His immediate presence and special act of grace.  Many times we come to Him in prayer and He listens and cares and attends to us, and we hardly notice His presence and fail to appreciate the blessing of being listened to.  So often His glory is there to be behold, but we fail to seek Him enough to be able to see it.  He shelters and protects us, and we have no sensation of being in His presence.  He provides for us, and we assume it came from the work of our own hands or from other people.  We do His work without any appreciation of being a tool in His hand or a worker by His side.  We have a powerful love for something He loves or a distain for something He hates, but we fail to interpret that as a closeness to His heart.  We are strengthened by Him but fail to realize it is an alien strength.  We suffer the sting of His rod but fail to feel His displeasure or fear His anger.  We are restored and healed by Him, but it does not generate much gratitude.  We are shaped by Him and conformed to His image, and we just interpret it all as the normal circumstances of life.  We suffer, but fail to rejoice as we participate in the sufferings of Christ. 

Oh Lord, how many opportunities to commune with You do I pass up every single day?  Am I even in communion with You right now?  Dear Father, teach me to delight in these ways of having fellowship with You.  Teach me to eagerly anticipate them.  In the morning, before the time arrives for me to begin my work; teach me to look forward to having the experience of the power of Your Spirit course through me as I carry on with my day.  When I think of all the material things You are giving me, and I see all the food in the house, let me delight in being provided for by You.  As I come back into my prayer room, let me look forward to the amazing experience of being listened to by You.  When I am reminded that I could have been hurt, like in a near miss in the car; or when I resist some temptation, let me enjoy the sensation of being protected by You.  When I see a needy person, let me joyfully anticipate the experience of having the wind of Your grace flow from me to that person like air from a high pressure system to a low pressure system.  When I like or dislike as You like or dislike, let me enjoy the closeness of being near to Your heart.  When it is clear that You have a hard test in store for me, let me delight in anticipation of the experience of being strengthened by Your direct hand, and being taken by the hand like a child.  When I am in the woodshed, let me rejoice that the pain is all corrective and redeeming rather than condemnation.  When I suffer, let me rejoice that I participate in the sufferings of Christ that I might be overjoyed when His glory is revealed.

Think: God is available to you right now for fellowship.  Are you taking advantage of that?

Day 2: The God whose delightful, all-satisfying presence is available every moment 

Psalm 16:9-11 Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoices; my body also will rest secure, 10 because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see the pit. 11 You have made known to me the path of life; you fill (satiate, satisfy) me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures in your right hand.
What is wonderful about this attribute:
It is only in His presence that we find joy.  Joy does not come from His gifts; only His presence.  When His presence is experienced through His gifts, they can be the bearers of joy.  But when His gifts are experienced apart from His presence they bring no joy at all. 
What fullness of joy there is in His presence!  For quality, there is pleasure.  For quantity there is fullness.  For accessibility, He fills me.  For duration, eternal.  For availability, at His right hand (there is no chance of His hand running out of supply because the mere presence of His hand is all that is needed).  There is never any sorrow or trouble that could possibly come into your life that is so great that it could be greater than the joy available in His presence.

Dear God, teach me to crave You instead of Your gifts.  And teach me to desire Your gifts only as an expression of my desire for You.

The word “fill” means to satiate or satisfy – fill in the sense of being filled by a meal.  Never can you say you pursued some other pleasure because that was more satisfying than His presence.  The wonderful statements of today’s passage of Scripture leave no nook or cranny of lacking where you might point as an excuse for seeking some other pleasure besides the presence of God.  You can never pursue some sin or some earthly pleasure or some substitute for His presence and claim, “I had to do that to find satisfaction, because the joy of His presence was lacking in that area.”  You can never claim that you needed to do it because while His joy has enough quality, it lacks in quantity, or availability.  His grace is superior in every conceivable way. 

Oh Lord, help my heart to believe that throughout the day. 
Experiencing this attribute:
The only thing that will be good about heaven will be fellowship with God.  Whatever we will be doing there – ruling cities, judging angels, rejoicing in all kinds of work in His great kingdom – all of it will be glorious and joyful and fulfilling and delightful only inasmuch as they will be acts of personal fellowship with Him.  The Lord is the delight of heaven.  He is the only delight of heaven.  His presence is the only reason heaven is good at all.  And that same God – that same all-satisfying, pleasure-giving Spring of living water – is in this very room right now attending to you!  He is listening intently to the desires of His child right now.  He will be with you all day long today.  His glorious presence will be available to you every moment!  Heaven is right here for the seeking, if you just turn to Him and set Him ever before you and follow hard after Him with all your being and desire Him.  You can have a piece of heaven now!

Think: Have you experienced His presence yet in this prayer time?  If not, seek harder!

Day 3: The God who is sympathetic to our sorrows 

Psalm 62:8 Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts before His face, for God is our refuge. Selah
What is wonderful about this attribute:
We usually don’t doubt that God is available for us to come to Him at all times.  What we do often doubt, however, is that He can be trusted at all times.  In difficult times we are tempted with fear to think that consolation and refreshment are not accessible, as though His ocean of grace will not be adequate to fill our teaspoon of need.  For the one who knows of God’s ever-present trustworthiness, despair is an impossibility.  There are some times when His favorable presence cannot be found - times when He turns His face away, and withdraws His presence.  But never is there a time when we cannot trust Him.  Even when the lights go out for a season and in the darkness we cannot see that He is, still we can trust Him. 

Oh, thank You, tender, loving, caretaking, reliable, faithful Father! 

Because of His trustworthiness we are called to pour out our hearts before His face.  The imagery of pouring out one’s heart is vivid.  There are times when what is inside us becomes so overwhelming that it comes pouring out like a flood.  We go to a friend with our crippling anxiety or our overflowing happiness and just talk nonstop about what is on our heart.  God wants us to talk to Him like that.
Sometimes we are reluctant to speak to God that way because it seems so redundant, since He already knows all our thoughts.  But knowing about someone’s thoughts is not the same thing as having that person pour them out to you.  It is in the act of pouring them out that we experience Him as a trustworthy refuge. God may be full of compassion toward you, but you will not experience that compassion until you have poured out your anxious heart to Him.
Experiencing this attribute:
When there is a great anxiety in your heart, and you go to a friend with an effusive gushing of words, you may do it because you want sympathy, comfort, encouragement, and perhaps guidance.  Sometimes we do it because the articulation of our confused thoughts can help us put them in some kind of meaningful order and begin to understand better what is happening.  And sometimes we do it simply as a relief valve, because we can no longer contain what is boiling inside.  Whatever it is we are seeking when we do that we must learn to seek from God.
Sympathy is a wonderful thing.  It helps in times of pain when someone else knows what you are going through, and it feels good if they love you enough to be troubled by what troubles you.  It takes effort, however, to learn how to appreciate sympathy from God.  We must activate faith, and think deeply about the fact that God does understand, He is interested, He delights in being the one to whom we pour out our hearts, and His great heart is deeply moved by what troubles us
.
Teach me to look to You for all that, dear Lord.  Teach me to cast my cares before You, because You care for me.  Teach me to crave sympathy and pity from You alone.  Teach me to look to You for comfort and encouragement and strengthening and guidance. 

Learn to do this as an instant reflex whenever you feel anxiety.  So often we get some bad news, or someone hurts us, or something goes wrong in our lives and right at the moment that happens it does not even occur to us to pour out our anxiety before the Lord.  We might ask Him for help and guidance, but that is not the same thing as pouring out your heart.  How much closer would we be to God if our natural reflex were always to pour out our hearts before Him – with an eye to receive and enjoy His sympathy?

Thank You that at any time, when I am being tossed at sea by a storm, I can throw my anchor upward, and it always holds.  No one but Your children can do that.  Worldlings cast their anchor downward in vain.  Other religionists may throw their anchor upward, but only to have it drop right back down on their heads.  But Your quick and mighty hand is always there, like the lightning-fast hand of Jesus grabbing Peter as he started to sink, catching my anchor even if I can only heave it an inch up into the air.

Think: What has been most on your heart lately?  Have you poured that out before the face of God?  Is there anything on your heart that you haven’t poured out to Him?

Day 4: The God who delights in our joys 

Psalm 62:8 Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts before His face, for God is our refuge. Selah
What is wonderful about this attribute:
The two occasions when we are most prone to pour out our hearts in an effusive gushing of words are times of great anxiety and times of great joy.  This is because of the marvelous truth behind the saying, “A joy shared is a double joy; and a sorrow shared is a half a sorrow.”  (The fact that God has built that law into the natural fabric of human life is an example of how the whole earth is full of His glory!)  There is a comforting effect of pouring out our anxieties to the Lord.  But there is also a delightful increase in our happiness when we pour out our joys to Him. 
If something has been especially enjoyable or interesting we can hardly wait to tell a friend or loved one.  It can actually be kind of painful if we do not have a chance to tell them right away.  This is because the sharing of the joy actually increases our experience of that joy.  When someone we love is happy with us, it increases our happiness. 
When we experience some thrilling joy, there is a big difference between mumbling a quick “thank You” to God and pouring out your heart to Him.  One of the things that might prevent us from pouring out all that is in our hearts to God in times of joy is the fact that He already knows the good news.  If we tell someone else, they enjoy hearing it because they are hearing something new.  But we can never tell God anything that is new to Him. 
God’s prior knowledge of the good news, however, does not reduce His ability to rejoice with us.  When one of my children runs to me with some exciting news about which they are thrilled, (in my best moments) I am elated, not because of the news, but because of their happiness in the news.  If I already heard the news from my wife earlier in the day that one of my kids won some contest, then I have the knowledge.  But if when he gets home he is smiling from ear to ear and jumping around and laughing – that fills my heart with joy that was not there when I first became aware of the news.  My joy comes not from the news but from my son’s happiness.
When David’s men risked their lives to get him some of the water he so craved, rather than drink it he poured it out on the ground before them to honor what they had done.  But when God gives us some wonderful happiness in life we honor Him not by refusing it but by drinking deeply, and then pouring out our hearts before Him.  And the pouring out of our joy to Him causes joy in His great heart and increases the joy in ours.
A second reason why we might be reluctant is because we tend to think of God’s emotions as steady and unchanging, and therefore unaffected by our “news.”  Scripture is clear, however, that God is delighted by specific things and grieved by other things.  He wants us to think of His emotions as responsive to good and bad things.  We do not serve a God who is indifferent and unaffectable. 
Experiencing this attribute:
When there is a great joy in your heart, do more than utter a quick “thank You” toward heaven.  Share your joy with God!  Rejoice with Him.  Pour out all that is inside you – all that you feel and all your thoughts about why this joy is such a good thing.  True prayer is the pouring out of a full heart to God, which means times when our hearts are empty are times when prayer is especially difficult.  Take advantage of the times when your heart is full – whether it be full of sorrow or full of joy! 

Think: What is there to rejoice over right now in your life?  Increase the level of joy in your heart over those things right now by pouring out your heart to God.  And take time to think about the joy it brings to the heart of God when you do so.

Day 5: Availability at night and in the morning 

Psalm 139:17-18 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you. 

It’s amazing that You would have any thoughts of me at all, much less thoughts more numerous than the grains of sand.  Those thoughts and all the rest of Your thoughts are precious to me.  I cannot even begin to know any percentage of them, yet I can know many of the thousands of them that You have revealed.  And from those I can infer the nature of many of the others.  What a privilege, dear Lord, that I can be involved with the workings inside Your awesome mind!  That I could sit here in this chair and commune with You, speak to You and be listened to by You, hear from You through Your Word and Your Spirit.  To receive into my feeble mind Your actual thoughts!  What unholy ground such precious, holy jewels suffer to traverse!  How unworthy I am to have such priceless, undefiled, holy treasures enter into my innermost being and be joined together with my own thoughts – to actually become my own thoughts.  I praise You, dear Lord, for lifting up my lowly thoughts into the heavenlies as they are conformed to Your marvelous thoughts. 
What is wonderful about this attribute:
What a hell the world has invented in their theories about an impersonal God – such a ridiculous contradiction in terms.  What a cold, dead world it would be if everything were mere impersonal machinery.  What a grim, hard, cold existence!  Thoughts of such a “god” could no sooner bring rest and peace and joy to the soul than you could rest your head on a razor blade at night to fall asleep. 

I rejoice in You God – Someone I can know and speak to and hear from.

When I awake I am still with You. 

When you awake you are still with Him in that He is there, available to be communed with – available to speak to and hear from and to be comforted and encouraged by.  He is available to fill you with all His fullness and awe you with His greatness and holiness and to awaken your joy with enthralled enjoyment of His attributes. 
Experiencing this attribute:
What blessedness and joy belongs to the person who falls asleep every night in the arms of God – like a baby that cannot go to sleep unless his mother rocks him to sleep in her arms; and then wakes up in the morning with her as his very first desire. 

Lord, let me attain to that.  Let me lie restless in bed each night until my soul finds rest in You and in Your great and precious promises.  And then when I find comfort and rest, and I begin to drift off to sleep, let my last thoughts be enjoyment of recounting Your mercies and faithfulness and grace over the previous 24 hours.  Work in me enough love for You that my mind would fixate on those things as I fall asleep, that I may dream often of the joy of Your presence, and so wonderful thoughts of You would be the first things to greet my conscious mind in the morning. 

There are so many dangers and threats and perils at night.  Think of how rare it is to have dreams of sweet fellowship with God, but how often we have dreams of all kinds of evil.  So many times we awake in the morning like Sampson waking up with the Philistines already upon him and having to instantly fight the moment he woke up – the first seconds of consciousness the enemy is upon us assaulting us with fiery arrows from every direction – thoughts of worry, lust, pride, anger, folly, trivia… Oh the fierceness of the battle in those first waking moments of the day.  What a comfort to know God is there guarding us! 
Train my heart, dear Lord, to look to You and Your glory as the first impulse of my heart upon waking up – let it begin even before I am fully conscious.  The man who deeply loves will enjoy thinking about the object of his love a hundred times a day.  He falls asleep with a smile on his face as enjoyable thoughts of the one he loves are his last thoughts at night and his first thoughts in the morning.  Teach me to love You like that, dear Lord.  Why shouldn’t my love for my God be more intense and moving and enjoyable than even the most powerful infatuation or romantic love? 

Think: What could you change in your life in order to take more delight in God’s availability for fellowship at night and in the morning when you wake up?