7-13-08
Companionship
Building a Joyful Marriage: Part 2
Genesis 2:18, 23

Summary: Jesus pointed to Gn.2 as the picture of the ideal marriage, so our approach is to study the ideal in Gn.2, then see what harmed marriage in Gn.3, then see what the rest of Scripture teaches about how to get back to Gn.2. The initial problem was aloneness, which was solved by the creation of Eve. When Adam saw her he was delighted (loneliness problem solved), but not because of anything Eve did. It was because of Adam’s delight in Eve. The solution to loneliness is not being loved, but loving. The first step in increasing your love is increasing your esteem. Do that by seeing the image of God in your spouse, by realizing your spouse is Christ’s sibling, and by considering the price that was paid for your spouse. Your marriage is crucially important to God!

Review
The Ideal Marriage
Companionship (ideal marriage solves the problem of aloneness)
Aloneness not good
God created in stages to show the necessity for fullness/completion
The calamity of aloneness
Marriage should solve the problem of aloneness
Make sure your spouse is not lonely
If you’re lonely – love more!
Adam’s loneliness was cured by his delight in Eve
Being loved isn’t what causes joy (unless you love)
Enjoying the blessedness of love (enjoy your spouse)
Great news
What if my spouse is hurting me?
How to increase your love
1.	Repent of lack of love
2.	Increase Esteem
Your spouse bears the image of God.
Your spouse is Christ’s brother (if he is a believer)
Your spouse was purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ!
Conclusion

Genesis 2:18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

Review
Last week we learned that it is impossible to love God if you are not properly loving your husband or wife.

1 John 4:20-21 …anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  

It is actually easier to love people than it is to love God – even though God is infinitely good, still it is easier to love people because you can see them and interact with them with your senses.  So if you don’t even love your spouse you really don’t love God.
We also looked in detail at the biblical definition of love.  We found that those who teach that agape is not a feeling, but that it is mere commitment or self-sacrificial giving are wrong.  That idea comes from human philosophy, not from Scripture.  The Bible teaches that at the core of love is esteem, desire, and delight.  You love someone when you esteem them highly (believe them to have great worth and value), and you desire to experience their presence, and when you do it causes delight in your heart.  Esteem, desire, and delight.
That is where we left off last week.  But there is another important part.  True love especially desires and delights in the other person’s greatest good and deepest joy.

Jn.14:28 If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.

Love desires the joy of its object and is delighted when the beloved receives that which is good.  If I really love you then the thing that will make me the happiest is when you are really happy.  And the thing I will desire most is for the best things to happen to you.  That is why love is patient and kind and does not envy and is not rude, always protects and always trusts and never fails.  Love does all that because those things are what will bring about your greatest good and deepest joy.  If you don’t love someone and something good happens to that person it doesn’t affect you much.  It might even bother you.  But when you truly love someone and something good happens to that person it feels so good to you, it feels even better than if that good thing happened to you.
Jesus said the greatest love is for a man to lay down his life for a friend. (Jn.15:13)  If I crave your wellbeing so much that I am willing to die for it, that is the highest level of love because you cannot crave someone’s wellbeing any more than that.  So love is esteem, desire, and delight that compels you to seek the other person’s greatest good and deepest joy.
And remember – this is very different from saying that love is just committed to the other person’s greatest good and deepest joy.  It is not just that you’re committed to it.  It is that you are committed to it because of the fact that you delight in it.  That part is essential.  You really work hard to make the person happy because you love it when they are happy.  You love it so much that it is worth a whole lot of expense or effort or discomfort on your part if that is what it takes to put a smile on the person’s face.

The Ideal Marriage

So now that we know what love is, let’s begin looking at what Scripture teaches specifically about marriage.  Let me start by explaining the biblical approach to this topic.  When Jesus was asked a question about divorce and He said, “Haven’t you ever read…” and then quoted from Gn.1,2.  Gn.1,2 say nothing about divorce, but Jesus pointed us there because that is the starting place for learning about anything that has to do with marriage.  When God teaches us about marriage He begins by showing us the ideal marriage – before the fall.  Then He shows us what effect sin and the curse had on marriage.  Then He shows us how to reverse the effects of the curse through the gospel.  In other words He shows us Gn.2, then He shows us Gn.3, then He shows us how to get back to Gn.2.  So my plan is to take a couple weeks studying the ideal, then we’ll take a look at what happened in the fall and the curse.  And then finally we will study how to return to the ideal.

Companionship (ideal marriage solves the problem of aloneness)
Aloneness not good
God did not create Adam and Eve at the same time.  First He created Adam, and He let Adam live alone for a while.  He was the most single person who ever lived – the only human being on the planet.  And that went on until v.18.

2:18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone.

Adam had fellowship with God, and all the animals were all around him, but still there was a very real sense in which he was alone.  And that was not good.
That phrase “it is not good” comes as a startling statement in this context, because up until now we have heard “It is good” over and over.  There is no sin yet – only the work of God.  So we are shocked to hear that something is not good.  God had created something that was incomplete.  This wasn’t an oversight.  He did it purposely, in order to teach us a very important truth.

God created in stages to show the necessity for fullness/completion 
God actually followed this same pattern with everything He created.  He first makes something incomplete and then later fills it so that it is enabled to fulfill its function.  First He made the empty sea, then later He created all the fish and sea creatures to fill the sea.  Then He made the empty sky, then later He created the sun, moon, stars and heavenly bodies to fill the sky.  Then He made the empty land, then later He created all the plants and animals to fill the land.  And He did the same thing with man, which shows us that a world with males and no females would be as empty and incomplete as a sterile ocean or an empty, black sky.

The calamity of aloneness 
The word translated “alone” here refers to “a solitary, desolate, sad, afflicted condition.” (Wilson)  It does not take much imagination to realize what an incredibly lonely situation this would be.  I have heard it said that the most severe punishment given to criminals is solitary confinement.  Even after just a short time they begin hearing voices, having panic attacks, inability to concentrate, disorientation, bizarre fantasies, paranoia, inability to control impulses, and eventually inability to discern between what is real and what isn’t.
God went out of His way to show us what a bleak existence it would be in a world without women.  We know that because God solved this “not good” situation by creating the woman.  
Marriage should solve the problem of aloneness
Make sure your spouse is not lonely 
So the first thing we learn about the ideal marriage is that it is designed by God to solve the problem of loneliness.  There is a depth of companionship that can exist in marriage that is unmatched even by the best of friends who are the same gender.
And therefore it is a travesty for a married person to be lonely.  That is not God’s design.  Pr.2:17 refers to a woman’s husband as the companion of her youth.  Marriage is supposed to be the deepest and most profound kind of friendship and companionship.  So ask yourself, what kind of companion are you to your spouse?  Are you doing all you can to guard your spouse against loneliness? 

If you’re lonely – love more!
Now I am sure some of you are thinking, “Wait a minute – I’m lonely.  My spouse’s loneliness is the last thing on my mind.  My problem is I’m lonely.  I know you told us to listen to these sermons and apply them to ourselves – not to our spouses.  But how can I apply this to myself if I’m the one who’s lonely?  It seems like my spouse is the one who needs to listen to this so he/she can start getting busy with solving the problem of my loneliness.”  What is the solution to that?  If you are lonely, what should you do?
Our first impulse might be to just say if you are lonely you should find companionship and full satisfaction in God alone.  I actually started to write that in my sermon, but that idea kind of ran aground on v.18.

2:18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone.

Adam had access to fellowship with God and yet God still said it was not a good situation until he had the woman.
So how do we deal with that?  Are we to look to God alone for our satisfaction or to God and our spouse?  Jeremiah 2 says that God alone is the only Fountain of satisfying water to the soul, and that it is idolatry to seek water from any other source.  Every other source is a broken cistern that cannot hold water.  But then Pr.5 says “May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth”.  So is God the only fountain (source of joy and satisfaction), or is my wife also a fountain?  The answer is yes.  God is the only source of living water, the only source of joy, the only source of satisfaction and delight, but He wants you to experience that joy and satisfaction and delight through your spouse.
So if you are thinking, “OK, how do I get my spouse to be a better companion so I won’t be so lonely?  How do I get my spouse to do a better job loving me?;” let me ask you a question: How many of you can think of a verse off the top of your head that calls you to love your spouse?  (If you couldn’t think of one – Eph.5:25 calls men to love their wives and Tit.2:4 teaches that wives are to love their husbands.) Now see if you can think of a verse that tells you to get your spouse to love you.  There is no such verse.  Contrary to the belief of many, many people, it is not your role or responsibility or right or privilege to get your spouse to love you better.  Your spouse’s loving you is a matter between your spouse and God.  And you can be involved if you can do something that will help your spouse love you.  (Although you should know that nagging and complaining does not help.)
It is not your job to cause your spouse to love you better.  Nor is that the key to joy in your marriage.  Nor is it the cure for your loneliness.  “But wait a minute.  I thought you said the cure for my loneliness was my spouse.”  It is.  But the cure for your loneliness is not your spouse loving you.  The cure for your loneliness is you loving your spouse.
Adam’s loneliness was cured by his delight in Eve
Let me show you that from the text.  The problem is Adam is lonely.  God’s solution was to create Eve.  Now watch what happens.

23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called `woman, 'for she was taken out of man." 

What comes out of Adam’s mouth as soon as he sees her is a two-beat tricolon and a three-beat bicolon (3 twos followed by 2 threes).  It is complex Hebrew poetry.  There is parallelism (lines 2&3 and 4&5).  There is assonance and word play (ish and isha).  There is verbal repetition (the very first word is “this” and the last word is “this” – focusing all attention on this amazing new creation).  There is even a chiasmus.
The point of all that poetry is to show the delight of Adam in Eve.  He was thrilled!  Some have said that when Adam saw her he said, “Whoa!  Man!” and that is how she came to be called woman.  But he was actually quite a bit more articulate than that.  Adam was absolutely delighted by this woman.  He was lonely, and now his loneliness is gone and he is delighted and thrilled.  Now you tell me, what did Adam get Eve to do to bring about that result?  What technique did Eve use to get Adam to be so happy and satisfied and to make his loneliness a thing of the past?  She didn’t do anything.  As far as we can tell from the text she was just standing there.
Remember the definition of love: Esteem, desire, and delight.  Adam has high regard for her, and he is supremely delighted by her.  In other words, he loves her.  What was it that took away Adam’s loneliness?  It wasn’t Eve’s love for Adam.  It was Adam’s love for Eve!  His loneliness disappeared not when she loved him but when he loved her.
Being loved isn’t what causes joy (unless you love)
You will not go from being unhappy to being happy if your spouse changes.  The joy will come for you not when your spouse starts loving you more but when you start loving your spouse more.  If I am going to sit down and eat some steak, the thing that is going to make that enjoyable is if I love steak.  If I am going to spend an hour with Tracy the thing that is going to make that enjoyable is if I deeply desire her and take great delight in her.  It is loving, not being loved that brings the joy.
Have you ever had someone you didn’t care for just really latch on to you and want to hang around you all the time?  That doesn’t bring joy.  My first year of college there was a woman on campus who had a huge crush on me.  But I wasn’t attracted to her in the least, and I really didn’t like being around her.  She was probably in her mid to late 40’s.  I was a teenager.  And she just would not leave me alone.  She was always giving me strange gifts.  One time she gave me a pair of jeans.  She said they were too small for her and would probably fit me.  I have a photo of me in one leg of those jeans and my roommate in the other leg, and they were still too big.  And I remember thinking, “All these beautiful college girls on this campus – why do I always have to get the one person I have no interest at all in to be the only one in the entire student body who is interested in me?”
You see, joy does not come from being loved.  Joy comes from loving.  That is even true of God’s love.  Not even God’s love is enjoyable if you don’t love God.  If you go up to someone who doesn’t love God and say, “God loves you” it does nothing for them.
But when there is someone whom you deeply love – just being in that person’s presence is enough to fill you with joy even if they are not doing anything.  They don’t have to serve you or give you anything.  All they have to do is just be themselves, and it brings you joy.
Scripture gives us a lot of ways to increase our joy.  But the greatest of all is by loving people.

John 15:11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

Told us what?  What did He just say that will make our joy complete?

10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love

Well what is His command?

12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

So if we love one another we will have the joy of Christ in us and that joy will be made complete.  The path to joy is loving, not being loved.
Enjoying the blessedness of love (enjoy your spouse)

Galatians 4:14-15 Even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus himself. 15 What has happened to all your joy (blessedness)? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. 

In the past, the Galatians really loved Paul.  They endured the burden of Paul’s illness, they did not treat him with contempt or scorn, they welcomed him like an angel or like the Lord Himself, and they had such love and compassion that they would have torn out their own eyes to give them to Paul.  That is how much they loved him in the past.
But now all that has changed and the love is gone.  But instead of saying, “What happened to all your love?” Paul says “What happened to all your blessedness?”  The reason the NIV translates that “joy” is because blessedness means “cause for joy.”  A person who is blessed is a person who has cause to rejoice.  It is not exactly the same thing as joy, but it is very close.  Anytime you have a good reason to be happy, that is blessedness.
So in place of the word “love” Paul places the word “blessedness,” which means love is blessedness.  When you love someone you have cause to rejoice.  You have it made.  You have cause to be happy.  It is a great treasure and is worthy of celebration.  Love, if it is real love, is enjoyable.  It is blessed. 
That is not to say it is easy.  The burden of Paul’s illness was a trial to the Galatians.  Loving a sick, needy person is difficult and costly.  Tearing out your eyes and giving them to someone else is no fun at all, and yet that is what they desired to do because while there are hard, painful aspects to love, there is also enjoyment that is greater than the difficulty. 
So the key to loving people is learning to enjoy them or, more accurately, to enjoy God through them.  You do not learn love just by being nice to people.  You should be nice, but that by itself is not enough (especially in times when love gets hard and demanding).  Nothing short of delight in the person will be enough.  And again – it isn’t delight that terminates on the person, but it is delight in God through that person.

Psalms 16:2-3 I said to the LORD, "You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing." 3 As for the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.

He has zero delight outside of delight in God, and ALL of his delight is in the saints.  Which means his delight in the saints was delight in God.  Enjoying people is not automatically enjoyment of God.  It is possible to enjoy people instead of God (which is idolatry – one of the dry cisterns of Jer.2:13).  But it is also possible to enjoy people as part of one’s enjoyment of God (in which case your enjoyment of them is true worship – a drinking from the Spring of living water of Jer.2:13).
So as God hates it when we serve Him with an attitude that says, “What a burden this is” like the priests in Malachi 1, so it dishonors and demeans our spouses when we show kindness to them in a way that is burdensome to us.  Never allow your love to degenerate into mere duty.  If what you are doing in your marriage is not blessedness for you then it is not love.  And if you want to increase your blessedness you will do so not by changing your spouse and getting your spouse to love you more, but by loving your spouse more (esteeming them more highly, desiring them more intensely, and delighting in them more thoroughly).  
Our flesh wants to enjoy those who bring us immediate pleasure and who do not cost us much expense or effort or pain.  People who are especially needy and burdensome and taxing are the hardest ones to enjoy.  And yet that is exactly what Paul was to the Galatians at that time.  He was a pit of neediness, and yet their meeting that need was a function of blessedness for them.  They happily gave to him because they considered themselves blessed in doing so.
That is the way it is when you love.  Love just aches to do something wonderful for the object of love.  Haven’t you experienced that?  When there is someone you just really, really love and who is especially dear to you, and you just wish you could do something for that person, and then finally one day that person is in real, serious need, and finally you are in a position to really sacrifice and do something big for them - and it makes you so happy.
That is what Jesus was getting at in Acts 20:35 when He said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”  You have more cause for joy, more occasion to be happy when you give than when you receive.  If your spouse shapes up and loves you properly that will give you some occasion to be happy, but not as much as if you love your spouse.

Great news
Do you realize what absolutely fantastic news this is?  If you are not following my line of reasoning here let me just put it in a nutshell for you.  If you are married and lonely, the only solution for your loneliness is for you to experience the grace of God through your spouse.  And the way for that to happen is not for your spouse to love you, but for you to love your spouse.
The reason that is fantastic news is because if the solution to your loneliness were in your spouse loving you, then it would be outside your control.  If your spouse failed to love you properly you would just be out of luck.  You could try nagging and complaining, or trying to manipulate your spouse into loving you better, but all that would do is make it 10 times harder for them to love you.  The solution to your loneliness problem would be totally out of your hands.
But since now we know that the solution to your loneliness problem is in your loving your spouse that means it is something you can do even if your spouse never changes at all.
All that has to happen in order for your loneliness to be gone is for you to have a response toward your spouse like Adam had toward Eve.  If you can learn to love (esteem, desire, and delight in) your spouse, you will have the same joy and happiness and delight and satisfaction and companionship that Adam had with Eve before the fall.
What if my spouse is hurting me?
Some of you might be thinking, “Your whole theory sounds great, except for the fact that my husband is impossible to love.  You would not believe the vicious, mean, hurtful things he says and does to me.”  Or maybe you are thinking, “How can I love my wife when she is constantly mad at me?  Every time I turn around she is upset with me for something else and I have to spend a day or two groveling at her feet to try to get back in her good graces, and it lasts for a few days and then she is mad about something else.”  If that is the situation in your marriage, does that exempt you from having to love your spouse?
If your spouse is saying and doing horrible, cruel, hateful, mean things to you or is always getting mad at you; you know what that sounds like to me?  Sounds to me kind of like an enemy.  Those are the kinds of things enemies do.  And you know what does the Bible says about enemies?  Same thing it says about spouses – love ‘em.

Luke 6:27-28 Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.

How is that possible?  How do you make yourself delight in someone that you do not delight in now?
If I follow my plan then we wouldn’t get to the “how to” part for several weeks.  And I just can’t bring myself to wait that long for three reasons: The fact that God gives us the ideal implies that we should strive for it.  And so even though there is no explicit command in Gn.2 about marriage, the command is implied.  That is why Jesus could call divorce a violation of Gn.2.  It is urgent that we begin striving toward what God calls us to immediately.  This is not a matter that is so unimportant that we can afford to wait a month before putting it into practice.  I do not want to wait until the end and then dump a huge pile of actions steps on you.  The kinds of changes we need to make in our lives are not easy to make, and it is very hard to do more than one or two at a time.  So we are going to put a parenthesis here in our study of the ideal marriage, and jump ahead to the question of how we can begin striving for that ideal.

How to increase your love

So how do you increase your love?  (These principles will work for increasing your love for anyone, not just your spouse.  But they will work for increasing your love for your spouse too.)

1.	Repent of lack of love
For many of us I think the starting place needs to be repentance.  Many times we do not have success in increasing our love for our spouse because we are not truly repentant of our lack of love.  And we are not repentant because we hardly even think of it as a sin.  It is very important to understand: lack of love for your spouse is sin.  It is wickedness.  It is evil.  It is vile and defiling and offensive to God.  It is disobedience.  It is rebellion.  And no matter what your spouse is doing to you, your lack of love is inexcusable.  
And if you say, “Well, my spouse’s sin is worse than mine,” think about this – what sin is worse than lack of love?  If the greatest commandment is love, would I be off base if I said the greatest sin is failure to love?  And so if you are failing to love your spouse your own sin is huge.
So we need to repent of our lack of delight in our spouse, and of our lack of desire for our spouse.  And beyond that, there are other sins we need to repent of.  Maybe you have harbored unforgiveness in your heart for a long time, and you sort of recognize it as bad, but you haven’t really taken it seriously.  There is no real brokenness or contrition before God.  No serious steps to find victory over that sin.  You are not taking any obvious, drastic measures that show true repentance and willingness to let go of that sin.  You are not memorizing any Scriptures about forgiveness, you are not asking anyone in your small group for help, you are not in an accountability relationship, you are not reading books about forgiveness, listening to sermons about forgiveness, or studying passages of Scripture about forgiveness.  True repentance does not mean you will have perfect success and you will never fall into that sin again.  But it does mean you will take drastic measures.
For others maybe it is laziness that you need to repent of – or bitterness, or selfishness, or rudeness, or insensitivity, or lack of respect, or dishonesty, or discontent, or failure to fulfill your God-ordained role in the marriage.  There is not time now for a whole sermon on repentance, but I have preached on that before so if you need some instruction on that go to TreasuringGod.com and listen to…part 5 of the “Favorite Psalms” series, or parts 2 and 6 of the “Introduction to the Life of David” series, or parts 1, 3, and 4 of “Sin in the Christian Life” (1 Jn.1).  You will never be successful in attaining to the virtue of love until you repent of the sin of lack of love.
2.	Increase Esteem
Then, once there has been true repentance, you are ready to start working toward building love in your heart.  And the beginning point of love is high esteem.  If you want to your love the first step is to somehow crank up your conception of your spouse’s worth.  Love is an emotion that is a response to the assessments made by the soul.  So how can you make it so that your assessment of your spouse increases from where it is now?  You do that by spending time thinking about God’s assessment of the person.

Your spouse bears the image of God.  
One insight Scripture gives us that will help with this is the fact that your spouse is in the image of God.

James 3:9-10 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness.  Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. 

James was writing to some people who were failing to love one another so he points out to them that the ones they are failing to love are in the image of God.  Why does he bring that up?  Because he knows that if you have a high regard for God, then the more you consider the fact that a person is in God’s image the higher will be your regard for that person.
So the starting point for increasing your love for your spouse is to spend time thinking about the fact that you are dealing with the image of God.  Think about this: How important is God’s image to God?  Does God have high regard for His own image?  If so, the how much more should we!  Those who bear the divine likeness should be regarded with the utmost respect and honor and with the highest esteem. 
If that has no effect on your heart then study the image of God.  Learn some of the amazing differences between human beings and animals and how that teaches us about God’s nature, and keep studying that until it starts to have an effect on the way you think about your spouse.

Your spouse is Christ’s brother (if he is a believer)
Another way to increase your esteem for your spouse is found in Mt.12:49.  

Matthew 12:49 And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, "Here are My mother and My brothers! 

 If your spouse is a believer than he or she is Christ’s brother or sister.

Matthew 25:40 I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

The passage would have been remarkable if the Lord had said, “whatever you did for the least of these servants of mine you did for me.”  If your spouse were just a servant of Christ that would be reason enough to have a special love for him or her.  But Jesus went way beyond that.  Just take some time and think about the fact that your wife is the sister of Jesus Christ.  Your husband is His brother.  And if you have any love at all for Christ that will cause you to deeply love your spouse.

Your spouse was purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ!
And third, think about how much your spouse is worth to God.  What is the worth of a person whose purchase price was nothing less than the blood of the spotless, precious Lamb of God! 

1 Corinthians 10:8-13 For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol's temple, won't he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols?  So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge.  When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ.

It is an egregious sin to do something that would cause a weak brother to sin because of the fact that Christ died for that weak brother.  So when you sin against that weak brother you sin against the very blood of Christ.  Paul uses the same argument in Romans. 

Romans 14:15 If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died.”

Love results when you consider the fact that Christ died for that person.  That is the motive for ministry.

Acts 20:28 Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.

If you love the Lord Jesus Christ, even a moment’s consideration of the depths of love in the heart of God that drove his Son to the agony of the cross for that person should be enough to elevate your assessment of him or her.  (Are you starting to see why it is impossible to love people properly without loving God?)
So those are some ways to increase your esteem.  And remember – love is made up of esteem, desire, and delight.  So next time we will talk about how to increase your desire for your spouse and your delight in your spouse.

Conclusion

For now, let’s just wrap up by reminding ourselves how important this is.  Some of you are hearing all this and perhaps thinking, I don’t think I can do it.  Or I just don’t want to do it.  And you are not even inclined to try.
Others might be thinking, “This sounds like great stuff.  I need to put these things into practice.”  But the reality is it is not something you’re taking very seriously, and you won’t be 10 paces out the church door before it’s the farthest thing from your mind.  And tomorrow will be just like every other Monday.  You are intending to do all this now, but you are not going to put any special effort into it or make any drastic change in your routine.
Whatever category you are in, I just want to leave you with a reminder of the importance of your marriage.  Your marriage is exceedingly precious to God.  Maybe it is not important to you, but it is important to Him.  Marriage was invented by God as a means of displaying the truth of the gospel.  It shows the relationship of Christ and the Church.  Why was there the death penalty for adultery in the OT?  Why are sins against your marriage so damaging?  Why does God refuse to listen to our prayers when our marriage isn’t close and intimate?  Why does Scripture make such a big deal out of something that the world thinks is really nothing?
It is because the meaning of marriage is bound up in the gospel.  The world thinks the gospel is foolishness, so of course they are not going to see the importance of marriage.  But we should.  And so if you need motivation to take some time to do some thinking and planning and talking and writing and scheduling and counseling and whatever else you need to do to get your marriage to where God wants it to be; let this be your motivation: Your marriage is precious to God.  That is why Jesus said, “What God has joined together let no man tear apart.”  You do not just take something that is precious and priceless to God and throw it in the trash can.  Let’s devote ourselves to building marriages that God can look down and say once again, “It is very good.”

Benediction: Eph 3:17-19  I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Devotionals: 
Day 1: The solution to loneliness
Genesis 2:18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone.

The word translated “alone” here refers to “a solitary, desolate, sad, afflicted condition.” It doesn’t take much imagination to realize what an incredibly lonely situation this would be.  I have heard it said that the most severe punishment they give criminals is solitary confinement. Even after just a short time they begin hearing voices, having panic attacks, inability to concentrate, disorientation, bizarre fantasies, paranoia, inability to control impulses, and eventually inability to discern between what is real and what isn’t.  God went out of His way to show us what a bleak existence it would be in a world without women.  We know that because God solved this “not good” situation by creating the woman.  
So the first thing we learn about the ideal marriage is that it is designed by God to solve the problem of loneliness.  There is a depth of companionship that can exist in marriage that is unmatched even by the best of friends who are the same gender.  And therefore it is a travesty for a married person to be lonely.  That is not God’s design.  Pr.2:17 refers to a woman’s husband as the companion of her youth.  Marriage is supposed to be the deepest and most profound kind of friendship and companionship.  So ask yourself, what kind of companion are you to your spouse?  Are you doing all you can to guard your spouse against loneliness? 
But what if you are the one who is lonely, what should you do?  Our first impulse might be to just say if you are lonely you should find companionship and full satisfaction in God alone.  But that idea runs aground on v.18.  Adam had access to fellowship with God and yet God still said it wasn’t a good situation until he had the woman.
So are we to look to God alone for our satisfaction or to God and our spouse?  Jeremiah 2 says that God alone is the only Fountain of satisfying water to the soul, and that it is idolatry to seek water from any other source.  Every other source is a broken cistern that cannot hold water.  But then Pr.5 says, “May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.”  Is God the only fountain (source of joy and satisfaction), or is your spouse also a fountain?  The answer is yes.
God is the only source of living water, the only source of joy, the only source of satisfaction and delight, but He wants you to experience that joy and satisfaction and delight through your spouse.
“But how do I get my spouse to be a better companion so I won’t be so lonely?  How do I get my spouse to do a better job loving me?”  You don’t.  It is not your job to cause your spouse to love you better.  Nor is that the key to joy in your marriage.  Nor is it the cure for your loneliness.  The cure for your loneliness is not your spouse loving you.  The cure for your loneliness is you loving your spouse.
Remember, the problem is Adam is lonely, and God’s solution was to create Eve.  Now watch what happens.

23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called `woman, 'for she was taken out of man." 

What comes out of Adam’s mouth as soon as he sees her is a two-beat tricolon and a three-beat bicolon (3 twos followed by 2 threes).  It’s complex Hebrew poetry.  There is parallelism (lines 2 and 3, and 4 and5).  There is assonance and word play (ish and isha).  There is verbal repetition (The very first word is “this” and the last word is “this” – focusing all attention on this amazing new creation).  There is even a chiasmus. 
The point of all that poetry is to show the delight of Adam in Eve.  He was thrilled!  Adam was absolutely delighted by this woman.  He was lonely, and now his loneliness is gone and he is delighted and thrilled.
What did Adam get Eve to do to bring about that result?  What technique did Eve use to get Adam to be so happy and satisfied and to make his loneliness a thing of the past?  She didn’t do anything.  As far as we can tell from the text she was just standing there.
Remember the definition of love: Esteem, desire, and delight.  Adam has high regard for her, and he is supremely delighted by her.  In other words, he loves her.  What was it that took away Adam’s loneliness?  It wasn’t Eve’s love for Adam.  It was Adam’s love for Eve!  His loneliness disappeared not when she loved him but when he loved her.
Have you ever had someone you didn’t care for just really latch on to you and want to hang around you all the time?  That doesn’t bring joy.  Joy does not come from being loved.  Joy comes from loving.
Scripture gives us a lot of ways to increase our joy.  But the greatest of all is by loving people.

John 15:11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

Told us what?

10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love

What is His command?

12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

So if we love one another we will have the joy of Christ in us and that joy will be made complete.  The path to joy is loving, not being loved.

Day 2: Enjoying God through loving people 

Galatians 4:14-15 Even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus himself. 15 What has happened to all your joy (blessedness)? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. 

The Galatians endured the burden of Paul’s illness, did not treat him with contempt or scorn, welcomed him like an angel or like the Lord Himself, and had such love and compassion that they would have torn out their own eyes to give them to Paul.  Now all of that has changed and the love is gone.  But instead of saying, “What happened to all your love?” he says “What happened to all your blessedness?”  Blessedness means “cause for joy.”  A person who is blessed is a person who has cause to rejoice.  So in place of the word “love” Paul places the word “blessedness,” indicating that love is blessedness.  To be kind to a needy person and to show him compassion and to welcome him like the Lord Himself is blessedness.  It means you have cause to rejoice.  It is a great treasure and is worthy of celebration.
Love, if it is real love, is enjoyable.  It is blessed.  That is not to say it is easy.  The burden of Paul’s illness was a trial to them.  Loving a sick, needy person is difficult and costly.  But while there are hard, painful aspects to love, there is also enjoyment that is greater than the difficulty.  The key to loving people is learning to enjoy them, or, more specifically, to enjoy God through them.

Psalms 16:2 I said to the LORD, "You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing." 3 As for the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.

First he says that the Lord is his only good and then says that all his delight is in the saints.  The only way for that to not be a contradiction is if his delight in the saints is enjoyment of God.  Enjoying people is not automatically enjoyment of God.  It is possible to enjoy people instead of God (which is idolatry – one of the dry cisterns of Jer.2:13).  But it is also possible to enjoy people as part of one’s enjoyment of God (in which case your enjoyment of them is true worship – a drinking from the Spring of living water of Jer.2:13).
Experiencing this attribute:
Never allow your love for people to degenerate into mere duty.  If it is not blessedness for you then it is not love.  As you seek to increase your love, work at not only acting in loving ways, but, more importantly, at increasing your enjoyment of the person.  That is what will make that person feel most loved and honored, and it will enable a hundred times more acts of kindness than a mere sense of duty.
Our flesh wants to enjoy those who bring us immediate pleasure and who do not cost us much expense or effort or pain.  People who are especially needy and burdensome and taxing are the hardest ones to enjoy.  And yet that is exactly what Paul was to the Galatians at that time.  He was a pit of neediness, and yet their meeting that need was a function of blessedness.  They happily gave to him because they considered themselves blessed through him.

Dear Lord, teach me to allow my joy to fill up and overflow when You bless me though people.  Help me to think about what is actually happening, so that I don’t just take it for granted and fail to be made joyful over it.  And let that joy drive me to love them and to enjoy You through them.  And when there are people that seem to bring me no benefit from You, let me still enjoy giving to them simply because it is more blessed to give than to receive.  Let me enjoy the flow of Your love through me. 

Acts 20:35 In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'"

Isaiah 58:9-11 "If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, 10 and if you spend yourselves (lit. furnish them with your soul) in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. 11 The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. 

Help me believe this great and precious promise, dear Lord, that I might greatly delight in spending myself for the needy. Teach me, dear Lord, to give them my very soul.

Think: Who is it that you have most need to increase your love for?  Give careful consideration to what it what it would look like, then next time you will see that person, to enjoy God through that person.

Day 3: Repent of lack of love
The starting place needs for increasing your love is repentance.  Many times we don’t have success in increasing our love for our spouse because we are not truly repentant of our lack of love.  And we are not repentant because we hardly even think of it as a sin.
It is very important to understand: lack of love for your spouse is sin.  It is wickedness.  It is evil.  It is vile and defiling and offensive to God.  It is disobedience.  It is rebellion.  And no matter what your spouse is doing to you, your lack of love is inexcusable.  If the greatest commandment is love, would it be off base to say the greatest sin is failure to love?  Failure to love your spouse is a huge sin.  And so we need to repent of our lack of delight in our spouse, and of our lack of desire for our spouse.
And beyond that, there are other sins we need to repent of.  Maybe you have harbored unforgiveness in your heart for a long time, and you sort of recognize it as bad, but you haven’t really taken it seriously.  There is no real brokenness or contrition before God.  No serious steps to find victory over that sin.  You are not taking any obvious, drastic measures that show true repentance and willingness to let go of that sin.  You’re not memorizing any Scriptures about forgiveness, you are not asking anyone in your small group for help, you are not in an accountability relationship, you are not reading books about forgiveness, listening to sermons about forgiveness, or studying passages of Scripture about forgiveness.  True repentance does not mean you will have perfect success and you will never fall into that sin again.  But it does mean you will take drastic measures.
For others maybe it is laziness that you need to repent of, or bitterness, or selfishness, or rudeness, or insensitivity, or lack of respect, or dishonesty, or discontent, or failure to fulfill your God-ordained role in the marriage.  For more detailed instruction on the subject of repentance go to TreasuringGod.com and listen to part 5 of the “Favorite Psalms” series, or parts 2 and 6 of the “Introduction to the Life of David” series, or parts 1, 3, and 4 of “Sin in the Christian Life” (1 Jn.1).
You will never be successful in attaining to the virtue of love until you repent of the sin of lack of love.

Day 4: Increase Esteem
Once there has been true repentance, you are ready to start working toward building love in your heart.  And the beginning point of love is high esteem.  If you want to your love the first step is to somehow crank up your conception of your spouse’s worth.  Love is an emotion that is a response to the assessments made by the soul.  So how can you make it so that your assessment of your spouse increases from where it is now?  You do that by spending time thinking about God’s assessment of the person.

Your spouse bears the image of God.  
One insight Scripture gives us that will help with this is the fact that your spouse is in the image of God.

James 3:9-10 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness.  Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be.  

James was writing to some people who were failing to love one another so he points out to them that the ones they are failing to love are in the image of God.  Why does he bring that up?  Because he knows that if you have a high regard for God, then the more you consider the fact that a person is in God’s image the higher will be your regard for that person.
So the starting point for increasing your love for your spouse is to spend time thinking about the fact that you are dealing with the image of God.  Think about this: How important is God’s image to God?  Does God have high regard for His own image?  If so, the how much more should we!  Those who bear the divine likeness should be regarded with the utmost respect and honor and with the highest esteem. 
If that has no effect on your heart then study the image of God.  Learn some of the amazing differences between human beings and animals, and how that teaches us about God’s nature.  And keep studying that until it starts to have an effect on the way you think about your spouse.

Your spouse is Christ’s brother (if he is a believer)
Another way to increase your esteem for your spouse is found in Mt.12:49. 

Matthew 12:49 And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, "Here are My mother and My brothers!

If your spouse is a believer than he or she is Christ’s brother or sister. 

Matthew 25:40 I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

The passage would have been remarkable if the Lord had said, “whatever you did for the least of these servants of mine you did for me.”  If your spouse were just a servant of Christ that would be reason enough to have a special love for him or her.  But Jesus went way beyond that.  Just take some time and think about the fact that your wife is the sister of Jesus Christ.  Your husband is His brother.  And if you have any love at all for Christ that will cause you to deeply love your spouse.

Your spouse was purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ!
And third, think about how much your spouse is worth to God.  What is the worth of a person whose purchase price was nothing less than the blood of the spotless, precious Lamb of God! 

1 Corinthians 10:8-13 For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol's temple, won't he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols?  So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge.  When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ.

It is an egregious sin to do something that would cause a weak brother to sin because of the fact that Christ died for that weak brother.  And so when you sin against that weak brother you sin against the very blood of Christ.  Paul uses the same argument in Romans. 

Romans 14:15 If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died.”

Love results when you consider the fact that Christ died for that person. That is the motive for ministry.

Acts 20:28 Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.

If you love the Lord Jesus Christ, even a moment’s consideration of the depths of love in the heart of God that drove his Son to the agony of the cross for that person should be enough to elevate your assessment of him or her. 

Day 5: Your marriage is precious to God
Matthew 19:3-6   Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?"  4 "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' 5 and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? {5 Gen. 2:24}  6 So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." 

How serious are you about putting all the principles from this week into practice?  If it is not an urgent matter in your heart, remind yourself of how exceedingly precious your marriage is to God.  Maybe it is not important to you, but it is important to Him.  Marriage was invented by God as a means of displaying the truth of the gospel.  It shows the relationship of Christ and the Church.  Why was there the death penalty for adultery in the OT?  Why are sins against your marriage so damaging?  Why does God refuse to listen to our prayers when our marriage isn’t close and intimate?  Why does Scripture make such a big deal out of something that the world thinks is really nothing?  It is because the meaning of marriage is bound up in the gospel.
The world thinks the gospel is foolishness, so of course they are not going to see the importance of marriage.  But we should.  And so if you need motivation to take some time to do some thinking and planning and talking and writing and scheduling and counseling and whatever else you need to do to get your marriage to where God wants it to be; let this be your motivation: Your marriage is precious to God.  That is why Jesus said, “What God has joined together let no man tear apart.”  You do not just take something that is precious and priceless to God and throw it in the trash can.
Let’s devote ourselves to building marriages that God can look down and say once again, “It is very good.”