I love The Message translation of Ephesians 5:25 about husbands loving their wives.
Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for the church—a love marked by giving, not getting.
The love that Paul is referring to isn't about feeling. Sometimes you feel like going all out, sometimes you don't. His term for love means to accept, welcome, entertain, pursue. It has little to do with feeling and much to do with decision.
Today, we seem to classify a great marriage as one that avoids divorce. We glory in 50-year wedding anniversaries, even if the old geezers don't like each other. Now, I'm all for 50-year anniversaries and pray that God lets Debby and I live to become old geezers together. (Well, the geezer part will probably be just me.) But the early Christian view of marriage was so radical that it changed what people thought of marriage, and more importantly what people thought of God. As the gospel was lived in marriage, people recognized it's power.
How about your marriage? Does it carry the power of the gospel or the impotence of indifference? What decisions are you going to make to change that? How are you going to go all out in love?
