• Culture tells us love should be effortless
• God tells us real love takes effort
  
  
  Are you building your marriage the world’s way, or Jesus’ way?
  
  
  

  addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, —Ephesians 5:19-25
  

1. A Love That Lasts is

Reveal Answer

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” —Ephesians 5:21

• Selfishness says: “What can I get?”
• Selfless love says: “What can I give?”
  
  
  “You don’t fall into love. You commit to it. Love says, ‘I will be there no matter what. —Tim Keller
  

2. A Love That Lasts is

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. —Ephesians 5:25

• Convenience says: “I’ll love you as long as it’s easy.”
• Sacrificial love says: “I’ll love you even when it costs me something.”

“You don’t get married for you. You get married for us. Marriage is a daily commitment to die to yourself for the sake of the other.” —Paul David Tripp

“Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” —Matthew 19:6

• The Greek word for “joined together” (synezeuxen) means to yoke together permanently—like two oxen pulling in the same direction.

To love like Jesus is to have a love that lasts.

So What Now?

1. What does it look like to truly love my spouse selflessly?
2. How can I demonstrate sacrificial love in my marriage every day?