There is Love in Respect

LOVE AND RESPECT

Maybe you've heard that a woman needs to be loved by her husband and a man needs to be respected by his wife. However, if you're like the average man or woman, you're thinking, "Sure, that all sounds great, but what does it mean?"

Men often define love differently than their wives, while women often don't know how to define respect. If both you and your spouse have these needs, but don't know what they are, how can you satisfy each other? Without a definition, it's like trying to throw a dart at a board but you don't know where to aim.

That's why we're here to help. Once you and your spouse understand what it means to love and respect, relational landmines can be avoided. The result can be greater love, deeper intimacy and movement toward the kind of marriage that God desires for you.

What Do You Mean by Love?

Love is the unknowable. It can be realized only when the known is understood and transcended. Only when the mind is free of the known, then only there will be love. So, we must approach love negatively, not positively.

What is love to most of us? With us, when we love, in it there is possessiveness, dominance, or subservience. From this possession arises jealously and fear of loss, and we legalize this possessive instinct. From possessiveness arise jealousy and the innumerable conflicts with which each one is familiar. Possessiveness, then, is not love. Nor is love sentimental. To be sentimental, to be emotional, excludes love. Sensitivity and emotions are merely sensations.
. . . Love alone can transform insanity, confusion, and strife. No system, no theory of the left or of the right can bring peace and happiness to man. Where there is love, there is no possessiveness, no envy; there is mercy and compassion, not in theory, but actually for your wife and for your children, for your neighbor and for your servant. . . . Love alone can bring about mercy and beauty, order and peace. There is love with its blessing when "you" cease to be.

Who lives with beauty and love?

The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die. Husbands love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. (Eph5vs25)

Love Is Dangerous

How can man live without love? We can only exist, and existence without love is control, confusion, and pain -and that is what most of us are creating. We organize for existence and we accept conflict as inevitable because our existence is a ceaseless demand for power. Surely, when we love, organization has its own place, its right place; but without love, organization becomes a nightmare, merely mechanical and efficient, like the army; but as modern society is based on mere efficiency, we have to have armies and the purpose of an army is to create war. Even in so-called peace, the more intellectually efficient we are, the more ruthless, the more brutal, the more callous we become. That is why there is confusion in the world, why bureaucracy is more and more powerful, why more and more governments are becoming totalitarian. We submit to all this as being inevitable because we live in our brains and not in our hearts, and therefore love does not exist. Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. A man who loves is dangerous, and we do not want to live dangerously; we want to live efficiently, we want to live merely in the framework of organization because we think organizations are going to bring order and peace in the world. Organizations have never brought order and peace. Only love, only goodwill, only mercy can bring order and peace, ultimately and therefore now.