Love & Respect in the Family

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.

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.

When evil comes at you, you’re the one who makes the choice of whether or not it is going to go into you.

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).

God is not pink. God is not blue. God is purple. When two become one, they have the potential of displaying God’s attributes and character.

If you want your wife to express appreciation for your attempts to be loving, you must use thankful words when she tries to speak or act respectfully.

Women give a report to build rapport. Men bond through shoulder-to-shoulder activities without talking.

Marriage is a test of how you unconditionally love and respect your spouse as you obey, honor, and please the Lord.

Fight like a loving man and a respectful woman. Fight fair.

When confronting your spouse, attack the behavior, not the person.

Love and Respect is a faith venture, not a formula.

At the very bottom of things, in every case and in every conversation, you can do your marriage a huge favor by assuming she is seeking to feel loved or he is seeking to feel respected and give your spouse some grace!

Never give up. If you want to have a strong marriage, you need to accept temporary setbacks as part of the game.

Good intentions do not always produce good words or outcomes.

We are either going to give in the darkness or we are going to give into the darkness.

When you love or respect unconditionally regardless of the outcome, you are following God and His will for you.

Often the apparent issue isn’t the real issue; the real issue is always a matter of love or respect.

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.

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

We have discovered that as women motivate their man God’s way, men are energized to love them better. It doesn’t matter if your marriage is good or seems like there is no hope. We have seen God move in powerful ways even when things looked hopeless.

Avoid like the plague trying to punish each other as a means of “motivation.” Christ-followers instinctively know that this destroys any opportunity to act out of reverence for Christ. In all marital issues, love and reverence for Christ must be our primary motivation.

To not forgive is to shoot yourself in the foot and put extra gas in the Crazy Cycle.

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.

You have to become proactive, rather than just trying to stop the reactive.

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

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

Optimism or pessimism? It is always a choice, no matter what your natural temperament.

The moment we cry to Him for help, He is already pleased. He gives us strength to love our children.

The key to motivating another person is meeting their deepest need, especially during conflict.

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

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

When you play the blame game your marriage never wins.

[Husbands] as the church places her burdens on Christ, so a woman needs to place her burdens on her husband. When she shares with you, don’t assume she is asking you to solve the problem. Ask your wife, “Do you want a solution or a listening ear?”

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.

Be a part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Being a person who communicates what is true frequently demands tact, and at times it can feel like sidestepping land mines. It takes work to be both truthful and tactful.

Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative with lots of love and respect in between.

Thank the Lord that in the very beginning He created them male and female – Blue and Pink. Ask Him for patience and ever-growing understanding of how men and women see and hear differently. “He created them male and female, and He blessed them.” (Genesis 5:2)

Will we decide how we see God based on our circumstances, or will we see our circumstances in light of how we view God?

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

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

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.

He will feel appreciated when you recognize his problem-solving approach as his male brand of empathy.

This is the Rewarded Cycle: His love blesses regardless of her respect and her respect blesses regardless of his love.

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

Do you understand that God feels compassion for you, no matter what you have done or what your circumstances may be?

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

Knowing my spouse will not be able to love or respect me perfectly, I commit to having a forgiving spirit so that I may never speak hatefully or contemptuously.

Most marriages will succeed when obeying the command to Love and Respect.

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)

One thing to remember in this culture is if we say something complimentary towards one gender, we aren’t saying something against the other.

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

When you relinquish an offense, you need to send that offense somewhere. So follow Jesus’ example and release it to your heavenly Father.

You can experience hurt, but it is your choice to hate.

When you look to God and His Word as your ultimate source of significance and security, you don’t demand that your spouse take that role in your life. And as you draw strength from the Lord individually, He draws you closer together as a couple.

When the wife flatly says her husband will have to earn her respect before she gives him any, she leaves the husband in a lose-lose situation. Now he is responsible for both love and respect in the relationship. He must unconditionally love his wife and earn her respect.

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.

A wife has one driving need: to feel loved. When that need is met, she is happy. A husband has one driving need: to feel respected. When that need is met, he is happy. When either of these needs isn’t met, things get crazy with conflict.

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

Share what God is saying to your heart, not what you think He needs to say to your mate.

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.

Research shows that 70% of the couples who were extremely unhappy in their marriage, but hung in there and worked through the tough time, identified themselves as being very happy five years later.

Husbands, even Jesus Himself was asked by a woman, “Do you not care?” (Luke 10:40) When your wife accuses you of not caring, decode her deeper meaning.

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

His love motivates her respect. Her respect motivates his love.

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.

Your hunger for God can create an appetite in your children.

It’s crucial to communicate with the right tone of voice and the right expression on your face.

Your spouse may meet many of your needs, but your deepest dependency should be on your Lord.

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

You must distinguish between “I can’t” and “I won’t.”

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

Do you seek to understand or only to be understood?

Your spouse has a need that you don’t have. Are you going to say there is something seriously wrong with them or will you say “Viva la Difference”?

Feeling unloved, a wife gets defensive and acts offensively without respect. Feeling disrespected, a husband gets defensive and acts offensively without love.

Our research shows that couples who pray together are more apt to reap all kinds of benefits, including better and more frequent communication, going on “dates” more frequently and having sex more frequently.

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

You cannot use unholy means to achieve a worthy end.

With a better understanding of God’s promises, you will be on your way to a renewed mind and a changed life.

We all need to wrestle with the spiritual truth that God is good. If you don’t believe God is good, you won’t trust His word. If you don’t trust His word, you will find excuses to ignore His commands.

When a husband feels disrespected, he has a natural tendency to react in ways that feel unloving to his wife. (Perhaps the command to love was given to him precisely for this reason!) When a wife feels unloved, she has a natural tendency to react in ways that feel disrespectful to her husband. (Perhaps the command to respect was given to her precisely for this reason!)

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

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.

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?”

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

Getting married reveals, usually sooner than later, an incontestable fact: your spouse cannot possibly meet all your needs and desires

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.

Every marriage includes trouble some of the time. Do not let the 20% leaven all the rest.

“Living happily ever after” means knowing how to deal with the imperfect parts of life.

Recognize your different gifts--how each of you (Pink and Blue) functions according to God’s perfect design.

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

Focus on the positive in the midst of the negative, and the Energizing Cycle will keep right on humming.

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

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

To get offended is easy, but to forgive is within your power as you walk in His steps.

“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.“

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

When you come home after you have been apart, the first few moments of reconnecting will set the tone for the rest of the evening.

Wives, to energize your husband do an activity with him, shoulder-to-shoulder, without talking.

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