The Love and Respect Devotional

You have two ears and one mouth; use them proportionately.

When a wife asks, “Do you love me?” She is not trying to put her husband on the spot. She is simply looking for reassurance.

Thank God for joining you together and for allowing you to trust Him to help you, whatever the issue. God is there for you and expects you to look to Him to keep you together as a team, so ask Him for His help in the smallest of concerns. “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” (Matthew 19:6)

Don’t conclude that your spouse is wrong when he/she is seeking to do the right and righteous thing.

She’ll feel at peace with you when you let her vent your frustrations and hurts and don’t get angry and close her off.

If you are seeking positive change in your marriage, you will need to make a positive change in your attitude and actions.

Suppressing negative feelings is not loving, respectful or very wise. Speak up tactfully.

You cannot use unholy means to achieve a worthy end.

When there is confusion, I try to refrain from attacking another for not listening carefully (which may not be the case). Instead, I take a run at communicating again, but more clearly.

We must bring our identity in Christ to our parenting—we must not derive our identity from our children.

Our trustworthiness rests on our truthfulness.

The heart of my communication means the other person cannot get my heart to be unkind, unloving, or disrespectful. Instead, I have made a decision about who I will be independent of the other person. I won’t blame my unkindness on someone else.

Your spouse can affect you, but your spouse does not control you.

When you play the blame game your marriage never wins.

In your marriage be the first to “seek peace and pursue it” (1 Peter 3:11)

If we subscribe to the belief that because we are equal we are the same, then we’re going to expect our spouse to respond the way we do.

Your marriage is really a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and reverence for your Lord.

Do you bow to the influence of Hollywood or God’s Holy Word?

Research and experience prove that men and women see and hear differently. Recognizing these differences and adjusting to them is absolutely necessary for reaching mutual understanding and better communication.

When others do not respond to our communication, we need to look first at our communication style. Is the other person incapable of hearing what we have to say? Or are we abrupt, brusque, and curt?

Marriage is a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and your reverence for Jesus Christ.

It’s so easy to dismiss our spouse as childish because we don’t have the same vulnerabilities they do.

The Crazy Cycle is, indeed, “the evil of folly and the foolishness of madness” (Ecclesiastes 7:25).

Self-interest should never come ahead of your spouse’s interests.

When you’re truly Christ-centered, instead of child-centered, you will be a more effective parent in the long run.

The difference between successful couples and unsuccessful couples is that successful ones keep getting up and dealing with the issues.

Your spouse deserves the truth from you. Do your best to tell it with love and respect.

Unconditional respect is as powerful to him as unconditional love is to her.

God rewards your obedience to love and respect, even if your spouse does not respond!

[Husbands] do you realize the power of just holding your wife’s hand?

[Women], your self-love cannot be derived from your husband’s love. It can affect it, but it does not determine it.

Men are solution oriented, they love to solve problems. They want to be helpful.

A major step toward a happy marriage is accepting differences and working them out with love and respect.

We have to step back as Christ followers and ask, “Do I have false expectations that my relationship should be romantic 99% of the time?”

Do you give yourself grace and your spouse judgment?

Negative actions rarely produce positive results.

We get on the Crazy Cycle because without love a wife reacts without respect, and without respect a husband reacts without love.

The Love and Respect message is not about a husband earning his wife’s respect by being more loving any more than it is about a wife earning her husband’s love by being more respectful. Always love or respect is given unconditionally according to God’s commands.

It is hard to be negative while being thankful.

Mutual understanding, not communication, is the key to a healthy marriage relationship.

Responding to offensive words or actions with your own offensive words and actions is damaging and unproductive.

Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean the other person is offensive.

Being friendly to her man is one of the most effective things a woman can do to strengthen her marriage.

Marital researchers agree that a huge percentage of communication problems between husband and wife are due not to what is said but to how it is said – the attitude and tone of voice.

You can be right in the argument, but wrong in your approach.

Although the Crazy Cycle is not what God intends for any marriage, all couples get on it at times from one degree to another.

A parent needs to feel respected, especially during conflicts...A child need to feel loved, especially during disputes.

“Respect is a man’s deepest value. I have had numerous men tell me, ‘I would rather live with a wife who respected me but did not love me than live with a wife who loved me but did not respect me.’ These men are not saying that they are indifferent to love. They know they need love, but they need to feel respected even more than they need to feel loved.“

We blame people for the bad things we do, but take credit for the good things we do.

Always try to look at your spouse the way Jesus does.

Mutual submission is the only way to live fairly together with mutual authority.

Since it is easy to focus on the negative, focus on your mate’s good qualities and express thanks with positive words of Love or Respect.

If a husband loves his wife as he should, she will feel honored and respected. If a wife respects her husband as she should, he will feel loved and appreciated. It’s a win-win.

Holding back your love or respect will just keep the Crazy Cycle spinning away, but being mature and making the first move could slow it down.

Ladies, be careful. “A nagging wife goes on and on like the drip, drip, drip of the rain” (Proverbs 19:13).

Words of love from a husband are like good medicine that brings life to the marriage.

As strong and powerful as marriage bonds can become, our deepest dependency must be on the Lord, not another human being.

Respect for the husband is just as important as love for the wife.

When a wife insists that her husband earn her respect, she puts him in a lose-lose situation.

We fool ourselves into thinking the other person causes us to be the way we are. They really don’t! But if we lock into that idea, we become helpless, hopeless victims.

Your wife feels you are open with her when you discuss financial concerns, possible job changes or ideas for your future.

Stay the course regardless of the child’s respect and obedience. This is the Family Rewarded Cycle: a parents love unto Christ regardless of the child.

Trusting and obeying God’s Word because we love and reverence God never, ever makes us a hypocrite! When the alarm goes off in the morning, we get up, even when we don’t feel like it getting up. Because we do what we don’t feel like doing, does that make us hypocrites? No, it’s a sign we are responsible people. Showing respectful behavior when we don’t “feel respectful” is evidence of maturity.

God is not trying to trick you or mess with you. Trust that He wants to reveal Himself to you just as much as He wants to reveal Himself to the world.

Your words reveal your heart.

Pink and Blue perceptions not only affect seeing, they affect hearing as well. Women hear with pink hearing aids and men hear with blue hearing aids. Even more important to understand as you and your spouse seek to gain better communication, you can hear the very same words, but each of you will hear different messages.

God designed the woman to love. He’s not going to command her to agape her husband when He created her to do that in the first place. God is not into redundancy.

A husband may deserve contempt, but that doesn’t win him any more than harshness and anger wins the heart of a woman.

Before hitting send, ask yourself, "Have I listened carefully and understand the exact issue on the table?"

You must “ask God from the wealth of his glory to give you power through his Spirit to be strong in your inner selves.”

Your husband knows you value his friendship when you tell him you like him and you show it (he knows you love him, but he often wonders if you really like him).

It’s true that women have intuition and that men should listen to them. It’s also true that women have blind spots and need the insight of their husbands.

It is so easy to draw wrong conclusions about a spouse’s character and motives due to an occasional flare-up or silly comment.

Christian maturity involves a lot of things, but surely it includes knowing how to process your anger.

We can communicate the truth in the best of manners, but the person may be so insecure he or she can only react and attack like a wounded bear.

I have concluded that those of us in the church who believe we have the Truth are not using the whole truth. A crucial part of God’s Word has been completely ignored, or perhaps simply gone unnoticed, when it has been there right under our noses the whole time! Many Christian spouses know Ephesians 5:33 and can at least paraphrase it. The Apostle Paul tells husbands to love their wives as much as they love themselves, and wives are to respect their husbands. But is anyone really listening? Perhaps the first step to better communication between husband and wife is to hear what God’s Word clearly says. --Emerson

The Crazy Cycle is, indeed “the evil of folly and the foolishness of madness” (Ecclesiastes 7:25)

When a husband chooses to come across lovingly even though he feels disrespected, he can prevent the Crazy Cycle from spinning and possibly getting out of control.

Troubles over sex and money do not cause a marriage to go under. The lack of love and respect during conflict cause the marriage to go under.

No matter what your struggle- criticism, constant conflict, sex, money, parenting, harsh words- learning to communicate the Love and Respect way can help you make crucial changes and build the kind of relationship that God blesses.

In the ultimate sense you marriage has nothing to do with your spouse. It has everything to do with your relationship with Jesus Christ.

God’s commands are there to help us, not to hinder us or hold us back as male and female.

Could you be facing a crisis in faith more than a crisis in your marriage?

Just because you may feel unloved or disrespected does not mean your spouse is sending that message.

Through Jesus and Peter, God set forth His standard for living in the unconditional dimension: choose to be loving even when the other person is not; do what is right regardless of the treatment you receive. I believe this standard applies directly to marriage. A husband who speaks lovingly to his disrespectful wife will be rewarded; and a wife who speaks respectfully to her unloving, not-worthy-of-respect husband will be rewarded. Whether you are husband or wife, the reward is what can keep you going in the midst of the craziness: knowing that God commends you, knowing that you have found his favor for your words and actions.

Parenting is a faith venture. As we parent “unto Christ” we reap God’s reward, “knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord” (Eph. 6:8 NKJV)

Whose voice are you listening to: Hollywood or God’s Holy Word?

How we react to a situation reveals more about us than about the other person.

Always remember that Pink and Blue have different wiring, different preferences. Assume your spouse has goodwill toward you, no matter what. Both of you can be right, while being different.

When a wife feels unloved, it can be such a shock to her heart that she is oblivious to her disrespectful reactions toward her husband, though any man watching could see it plainly.

Marriage is a tool and a test to allow God’s will to be revealed in our lives.

Your marriage is a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and reverence for Jesus Christ. God is using your spouse to bring you an eternal reward.

If husbands and wives are to understand the Love and Respect Connection, they must realize that they communicate in code. And the problem is, they don’t know how to decipher the messages they send to one another.

Don’t pressure yourself with perfection. We are going to fail. A righteous man falls 7 times but gets back up.

Husbands primarily want to hear ‘respect” talk during conflict. Wives primarily want to hear “love” talk during conflict.

Truth will carry its own weight if delivered respectfully and lovingly.

Your wife will feel esteemed when you speak highly of her in front of others.

A man has a natural, inborn desire to go out and “conquer” the challenges of his world – to work and achieve.

We might say that every negative action in the family has an equal and opposite negative reaction.

Words of Love or Respect must uplift your spouse, edifying- never manipulating him or her.