Today, Pastor Kip started a series on marriage and relationships. This week he talked about bringing desires and hopes into a marriage and how they can easily be transformed into expectations. The thing about expectations is you can easily miss expressions of love from your spouse because it's only meeting an expectation, and therefore they 'should' be doing it anyway. The problem is focusing on our expectations rather than the other's needs. Marriage is a covenant based on unconditional love, meaning we're looking to the other's well-being regardless of what they do, and if we expect them to fulfill our expectations first then it's no longer unconditional, and we treat it as a contract that we're only obliged to live up to if they hold up their end. Any relationship can benefit from this principle, and it goes along well with what I was looking at yesterday. While I'm not yet married, I can apply it to other relationships now, and keep it in mind for marriage in the future. Plenty of verses can be applied to this concept, but I'll just close with one for me to mull over for the future. Ephesians 5:28 says, "In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself."
Kip asked a few questions at the end of his sermon today, and finished with a thought, and I'd like to include those here for reference purposes and to think about:
1. What does your spouse owe?
2. When is the last time that you said thank you for the day to day things that your spouse does?
3. When is the last time that you did something for your spouse that they normally do, just to say 'thank you'?
Imagine a marriage designed around fulfilling the desires of the person you married, not simply meeting expectations.
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