Ephesians 5.25-27
I have often considered this passage as a call to right serving. 'Serve your wife to the end of your life, because I have served you to the end of mine. It is right, fitting, to serve your wife as I have served you. Serve her as a response to my service. Serve her as a living witness to my service."
Unconsciously, I replace 'love' with 'serve'. I turn love into legality, desire into duty- what must I do? Let me reach the end of myself, and then I will have done what is required. If I lay down my life in the service of my wife, I will have accomplished my purpose in marriage. Then I will have a good marriage. I de-personalize love, break it into component parts, that I may achieve it.
Crucially, though, the moment that I make love into a law to be achieved, I cease to love my wife. In fact, I am loving myself apart from her. My highest interest in fulfilling the law of love is no longer her good or her beauty but my position, my righteousness. My wife becomes a piece of the environment with which I engage and with which I must engage well in order to justify myself before her, before myself, and ultimately before God as well. She is a means by which I prove myself beautiful. It is my righteousness, my justification that is most important to me- not my wife.
My process:
- I think of myself, and am dissatisfied. How should I be?
- Then I think of her in relationship to my righteousness. How can I be what I should be with her?
- Then I attempt to do what I should.
- Then I think of myself once more. Have I accomplished it?
- And then I delight (or, more often despair) in my accomplishment (or lack thereof).
But this is not how Christ loves the church. He is not concerned with His righteousness nor His position. His relationship with His wife has nothing to do with Him proving Himself or maintaining favor with God or anyone else. He loves his wife simply because has does. It is a self-justifying love, a prime love. He covenants with His bride, lays down His life for her, not to prove a point nor to do His duty but because He truly treasures His wife more than His own life. Notice the purpose behind His sacrifice. It is to 'sanctify her, [cleanse] her... so that he might present the church to himself in splendor.'
He cleanses her, that He might have her clean. He makes her beautiful, that He might rejoice in her beauty. In a sense, His love, too, is self-interested- Jesus desires to partake in the joy of her redemption, to enjoy her company in perfection. He dies, and is buried, that He might delight in her life. It is indeed a self-interested love, yet more beautiful than any 'self-less' love I have ever known. This is a love that takes its greatest joy in the glory of the other, its greatest pleasure in the object of its affection being most fully what it was intended to be. This is the love of the Trinity, Father for Son, Son for Father, Father for Spirit and Spirit for Son. Only the love of God for God could be so utterly self-delighting and so utterly other-glorifying. This is true love, the form of love rather than its symbol. This is the nature of God, and gloriously the nature of His relationship with us. Into this love we have been called.
His process:
- He thinks of Himself in perfect love, and rejoices.
- Then He thinks of us in relationship to His joy. How can I rejoice in their brokenness? How can I make them whole?
- Then He lays down His life to make us whole.
- Then He thinks of us once more. Are they made beautiful?
- He delights in our beauty.
Mine is a love ever preoccupied with myself. So is His. The difference is that my 'love' is rooted in my insecurity, while His Love is rooted in His nature. His is the ringing of a bell, mine a distorted echo. His is a love so perfect as to be beyond our knowledge, yet it awakens our hearts like the scent of summer flowers beginning to bloom once more. It triggers a memory of beauty lost, and is itself the beginning of hope that we might be made beautiful once more by a Husband truly in love with His bride. My 'love' will not let go of myself that I might fully hold the other, for I fear the loss of control- I fear what we might become, how I might be hurt, destroyed. And so I never seek the welfare of anyone but myself. I never delight in anything but my security, which is fleeting. His love need not be afraid, for destruction He has already borne. He has died for His bride, and yet lives. Therefore He can reach out with both hands to her, considering her welfare honestly, truly delighting in her beauty.
Teach me, Lord, to believe that you are preoccupied with my beauty. Teach me to be so preoccupied with the beauty of others. To consider myself worthy of your love, by virtue of your love alone, and yet from that security to see others' beauty as worthy of greater rejoicing than my own life. Teach me to know your love, and to love as You love.
May I live as John Newton Wrote:
Our pleasure and our duty,
Though opposite before;
Since we have seen his beauty,
Are joined to part no more:
It is our highest pleasure,
No less than duty’s call;
To love him [and her] beyond measure,
And serve him [and her] with our all.
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Note: No, you didn't miss something. I have not married in the past month. I am learning about marriage nonetheless, and singleness, and most of all of His love.
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