Did Paul mean I should love my wife like my dad showed his love for my mother, or should I love her the way men in my culture treat women? Let’s find out! This young couple may be heading for marital problems because their understanding and expectations of love are so variant, but for our purposes this kind of conversation shows how our views of love are developed. He died when I was a teenager, and I cried because I wanted to talk to him, but it was too late. He came to some of my games, and if I played well he said, ‘You did well, son,’ but if I didn’t, he bawled me out. My dad never said anything I never saw him and my mother being affectionate. He nervously wipes his face and hesitatingly replies, “Yeah. We never forgot birthdays we always gave presents even when we went on vacation. We hugged a lot we wrote love notes to each other. In our family we were always telling each other we loved them. “Oh yes,” she replies enthusiastically, “I was loved. Let me introduce you to a lovelorn couple as they answer my two questions. In my pre-marital counseling with young couples, I often asked them, “Were you loved as a child?” And “How do you know?” The answers caused me to ponder the question, “Do our ideas of love condition our reading of such Scriptures, as ‘Husbands love your wives'?" I have no doubt they do – and that can be dangerous. Our ideas of loving are greatly conditioned by our environments, our culture, and our upbringing. Part of the problem with this teaching is the confusion over what we understand – or more accurately, what the Apostle meant – by love. Yet, I got quite an eye-opener when I finally took the time to “inwardly digest” what Paul actually said. “Husbands love your wives” seems to be simple and rather obvious. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church… for we are members of his body. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. Whether or not it gets as much airtime in the contemporary church I am not prepared to say, but that men should carefully study it is beyond dispute.Įphesians 5:25-33 says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. Paul’s instruction to husbands to love their wives is probably almost as well known as his instruction to wives to submit to their husbands.
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