Inside-Out Love
How should you love your spouse? By fulfilling their love language? Depositing into an emotional bank account? Or how about filling up an air tank, complete with hoses which you try not to step on? This session will turn these and other popular ideas inside-out as we explore what Jesus calls us to in our relationships. Not for the faint of heart. Prepare your marriage to be turned inside-out. Better yet…prepare to die.
You may have heard of these:
his needs her needs
crazy cycle
emotional air tank
emotional bank account
love languages
But according to God’s Word, he requires a dying love not founded on feelings or manipulation of others to get what I really want as so much of psychology teaches. Consider truth:
God demonstrated his love (Rom. 5:6-11)
We love b/c He first loved us (1 Jn. 4:19)
Love is… (1 Cor. 13)
Love your neighbor… (Matthew 22:37-40)
Restore gently when in sin (Gal. 6:1)
Bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2)
Build others up for benefit (Eph. 4:29)
Effective/Productive circle (2 Peter 1:3-11)
Husbands love, wives respect (Eph. 5:33)
Husbands respect, wives submit (1 Peter 3:1-7)
“The saving love of God, expressed in the death of Christ, does not speak anyone’s natural love language. And yet it is the greatest love and our most desperate need. In this way Christ fails the love language test!
“… As Powlison says, “I’ve found that one acid test of my heart is how I handle being misunderstood, caricatured, reviled, dissed—not how I handle being accurately known and loved! It’s when someone doesn’t speak my ‘love language’ that I find out what I’m made of, and by God’s grace begin to change what I live for.”
“It turns out that it was not that she wasn’t loving me, but that she was loving me in her own language. This had closed my ears (or heart—metaphors are getting mangled!) to those expressions of love. But once I understood her better, then I was prepared to receive love in different and unexpected ways. Now I am learning to understand new languages and to respond to them.
“Part of considering the interests of others is to do them tangible good. But then to really love them, you usually need to help them see their itch as idolatrous, and to awaken in them a far more serious itch! That’s basic Christianity. 5LL will never teach you to love at this deeper, more life-and-death level.
“It sounds more like opiates for the masses than The Revolution needed to bring in the kingdom of solid joys and lasting treasures”
-http://www.challies.com/christian-living/speaking-loves-languages
“Redemption is not less than what Chapman tells people to do. But it is so much more. And it does everything for such different reasons. Jesus’ couples do lots of other things in addition to seeking to love accurately. They seek forgiveness and forgive. They call things what they are. They aim to redemptively remake what others live for, even as God is remaking them. They live for God, not for getting what they want. Jesus offered Himself as the bread of life, when all that the hungry crowd wanted was more pita bread to fill their empty bread tank!
“The love of Christ speaks a “love language”—mercy to hellishly self-centered people—that no person can hear or understand unless God gives ears to hear. It is a language we cannot speak to others unless God makes us fluent in an essentially foreign language. We might say that the itch itself (an ear for God’s language) has to be created, because we live in such a stupor of self-centered itchiness. The love language model does not highlight those exquisite forms of love that do not “speak your language.” You and I need to learn a new language if we are to become fit to live with each other and with God.”
-http://mattadair.typepad.com/communitas/files/five_love_languages_critique.pdf
Picture courtesy of https://shetalkswithgod.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/love-cross-upside-down1.jpg