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The apologetic value of self-sacrificial romantic love

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In his arms
In his arms

Here’s a nice list of descriptions of what love looks like in a marriage on Michael Patton’s Parchment and Pen blog.

My favorites:

  1. Love is being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of your husband or wife without impatience or anger.
  2. Love is actively fighting the temptation to be critical and judgmental toward your spouse, while looking for ways to encourage and praise.
  3. Love is the daily commitment to resist the needless moments of conflict that come from pointing out and responding to minor offenses.
  4. Love is being lovingly honest and humbly approachable in times of misunderstanding, and being more committed to unity and love than you are to winning, accusing, or being right.
  5. Love is a daily commitment to admit your sin, weakness, and failure and to resist the temptation to offer an excuse or shift the blame.
  6. Love means being willing, when confronted by your spouse, to examine your heart rather than rising to your defense or shifting the focus.
  7. Love is a daily commitment to grow in love so that the love you offer to your husband or wife is increasingly selfless, mature, and patient.
  8. Love is being unwilling to do what is wrong when you have been wronged but to look for concrete and specific ways to overcome evil with good.
  9. Love is being a good student of your spouse, looking for his physical, emotional, and spiritual needs so that in some way you can remove the burden, support him as he carries it, or encourage him along the way.
  10. Love means being willing to invest the time necessary to discuss, examine, and understand the problems that you face as a couple, staying on task until the problem is removed or you have agreed upon a strategy of response.
  11. Love is always being willing to ask for forgiveness and always being committed to grant forgiveness when it is requested.
  12. Love is recognizing the high value of trust in a marriage and being faithful to your promises and true to your word.
  13. Love is speaking kindly and gently, even in moments of disagreement, refusing to attack your spouse’s character or assault his or her intelligence.
  14. Love is being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt your spouse into giving you what you want or doing something your way.
  15. Love is being unwilling to ask your spouse to be the source of your identity, meaning and purpose, or inner sense of well-being, while refusing to be the source of his or hers.
  16. Love is the willingness to have less free time, less sleep, and a busier schedule in order to be faithful to what God has called you to be and to do as a husband or a wife.
  17. Love is a commitment to say no to selfish instincts and to do everything that is within your ability to promote real unity, functional understanding, and active love in your marriage.
  18. Love is staying faithful to your commitment to treat your spouse with appreciation, respect, and grace, even in moments when he or she doesn’t seem to deserve it or is unwilling to reciprocate.
  19. Love is the willingness to make regular and costly sacrifices for the sake of your marriage without asking anything in return or using your sacrifices to place your spouse in your debt.
  20. Love is being unwilling to make any personal decision or choice that would harm your marriage, hurt your husband or wife, or weaken the bond of trust between you.
  21. Love is refusing to be self-focused or demanding but instead looking for specific ways to serve, support, and encourage, even when you are busy or tired.
  22. Love is daily admitting to yourself, your spouse, and God that you are not able to love this way without God’s protecting, providing, forgiving, rescuing, and delivering grace.
  23. Love is a specific commitment of the heart to a specific person that causes you to give yourself to a specific lifestyle of care that requires you to be willing to make sacrifices that have that person’s good in view.

Yes, that’s all of them. They’re all my favorites. I’m a big believer in romantic love – and it’s not just for marriage, either, as long as it’s done chastely before marriage. You can do lots of things during courtship that can serve as practice for loving well during marriage, before you ever get married.

I’m blogging this topic because several of my friends (Rob, Wes, Andrew, etc.) have amazing wives and they really, really love them and that’s fun for me to see and hear about since I want to love my future wife like that, too. And I hope that she wants to love me like that, if there is a future Mrs. WK. A list like this provides useful guidelines for knowing what Christian romantic love looks like, although I wish they had mentioned slaying dragons.

And notice that the main focus is on the ability to love self-sacrificially – and the man and the woman are both obligated. Anyone who is growing in their Christian faith should find that growing the capacity for self-sacrificial love is normal for them. And you can actually try it out as you are learning more about it – to follow Jesus by loving self-sacrificially.

The persuasive power of romantic Christian love

One of the neat things that apologists often overlook is the witnessing power of loving other Christians, even romantically. There are lots of non-Christians in my life who are always waiting for the latest news of my adventures in my platonic attempts to loving Christian damsels in distress well. (they usually don’t know who the woman is so I’m not breaching her privacy). Non-Christians are more willing to listen to heroic and dangerous deeds of self-sacrificial love than they are arguments, although the one often leads to the other, because the deeds are supported by a worldview.

When non-Christians see how Christians in relationships bounce back from sin and disappointment to love other Christians, it says something about Christianity. When Christians in love forgive each other for sinning against each other, that says something about Christianity. I think it’s sometimes tough on non-Christians that we have all of these moral rules that make us appear exclusive and judgmental – but by distinguishing ourselves in loving others then we can actually balance that out by the way we love.

Obviously, I think it should be paired up with good reasons and evidences, but love does get their attention. Especially romantic, married love that produces a lot of well-behaved children who know the Lord and serve him effectively! And I think that Christians need to think more about viewing opposite-sex Christians as people who need love and who can be loved – as a way of serving God and witnessing to unbelievers. It’s good to serve God by shoring up other Christians who are in tough trying to serve the Lord effectively. And there is no way to shore up a person more than by marrying them and knitting your soul to theirs, your fate to theirs. It’s the ultimate act of unselfishness towards your spouse and towards Christ the Lord, who expects to be served effectively by the marriage.

Consider John 13:31-34:

31When he was gone, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him. 32If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.

33“My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

34“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Christian romantic relationships are not the same as secular romantic relationships. The criteria of attraction are not the same, and the goals are not the same. It’s not about individual fulfillment, it’s about helping another person be more Christlike and helping them to serve Jesus better. It’s about two people fighting on the same battlefield who are less concerned about their own well-being, and more concerned about the life and combat capability of the soldier next to them. We need to put ourselves second and take care of the soldier next to us even when we don’t like them. It’s enough that they they are on the same side as we are. Some people who are not fighting yet may join us when they see the care and concern we have for each other.

The person whom this post is about can own up to his amazing marriage in the comments, if he wants to. Glenn, Neil, Matt, and Richard B. can all mention their super-duper marriages, too. It’s fun for me to hear about – although I remain cautious.

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Michele Bachmann makes the case for limited government

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Michele previews the Tea Party Caucus on Fox Business Network’s America’s Nightly Scoreboard. She also calls for a pro-business growth economy to help spur job creation forward and discusses the impact of SIGTARP.

Here’s another one where she discusses the financial regulation bill which exempts the SEC from transparency measure.

A while back she had called for an audit of the SEC.

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Why American employers are not hiring any more workers

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Here is a Wall Street Journal article from a New Jersey business owner who knows.

Excerpt:

With unemployment just under 10% and companies sitting on their cash, you would think that sooner or later job growth would take off. I think it’s going to be later—much later. Here’s why.

Meet Sally (not her real name; details changed to preserve privacy). Sally is a terrific employee, and she happens to be the median person in terms of base pay among the 83 people at my little company in New Jersey, where we provide audio systems for use in educational, commercial and industrial settings. She’s been with us for over 15 years. She’s a high school graduate with some specialized training. She makes $59,000 a year—on paper. In reality, she makes only $44,000 a year because $15,000 is taken from her thanks to various deductions and taxes, all of which form the steep, sad slope between gross and net pay.

[…]My company has to write checks for $74,000 so Sally can receive her nominal $59,000 in base pay.

[…]Then the federal and state governments want a little something extra. They take $56 for federal unemployment coverage, $149 for disability insurance, $300 for workers’ comp and $505 for state unemployment insurance. Finally, the feds make me pay $856 for Sally’s Medicare and $3,661 for her Social Security.

When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally’s pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits. Bottom line: Governments impose a 33% surtax on Sally’s job each year.

[…]In a saner world, health insurance would be something that individuals buy for themselves and their families, just as they do with auto insurance. Now, adding to the insanity, there is ObamaCare.

Every year, we negotiate a renewal to our health coverage. This year, our provider demanded a 28% increase in premiums—for a lesser plan. This is in part a tax increase that the federal government has co-opted insurance providers to collect. We had never faced an increase anywhere near this large; in each of the last two years, the increase was under 10%.

[…]As much as I might want to hire new salespeople, engineers and marketing staff in an effort to grow, I would be increasing my company’s vulnerability to government decisions to raise taxes, to policies that make health insurance more expensive, and to the difficulties of this economic environment.

This is why the unemployment rate is continuing to rise as the Democrats continue to pay off their special interests and raise taxes on US businesses. The more money they transfer away from private businesses to non-producing public sector workers, the more American companies will stop hiring, or just shift their hiring overseas. Some will just move their entire companies overseas. If depends on how far the Democrats go in implementing their left-wing agenda.