Love and Respect Husband + Logo Mug

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

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

When parents genuinely trust and follow the Lord and His ways, their faith spills over onto the children.

Your husband knows you appreciate his desire to protect and provide when you praise his commitment to provide for you. You empathize when he reveals his male mindset about position, status, or rank at work.

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

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

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.

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

Your spouse has a need only you can fill.

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.

It is hard to be negative while being thankful.

You may believe that the careless, unloving or disrespectful words you speak are because your spouse is causing you to speak this way, but Jesus says that it is coming out of your heart.

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.

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

Can you begin to trust that God feels love for you even when you don’t feel that love?

Good intentions do not always produce good words or outcomes.

Thank the Lord for all the trouble-free moments in which you and your spouse enjoy Him, each other, your family, your ministry and life as a whole. Ask Him for the strength to accept your measure of trouble, and the wisdom to deal with the annoyances and irritations by loving and respecting each other with new commitment. (You may also want to pray about troubles at work, at church, with the children…) “But those who marry will have trouble in this life” (1 Corinthians 7:28)

So I encourage every husband and wife to commit to the Jesus Way of Talking. Instead of allowing the stress of the situation to control you, you can say to yourself, “Because I love the Lord and I know that He rewards every good word, I am going to be truthful even if my spouse is not. I will also be uplifting, forgiving, thankful and scriptural in my speech because my ultimate goal is to please the Lord. Whatever my spouse’s weaknesses or bad habits might be, I will not let them cause me to sin with my lips.”

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

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.

Words of wisdom for all husbands and wives are these: We easily see what is done to us before we see what we are doing to our mate.

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

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.

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.

You’re the only person in the world who can meet your spouse’s deepest need for love and respect. After all, you alone are married to your spouse.

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

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

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

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

He will feel appreciated when you disagree with him only in private and honor his authority in front of the kids.

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

As a wife, if you can start to understand how important your husband’s work is to him, you will take a giant step toward communicating respect and honor, two things that he values even more than your love.

Do you believe that there is a God who really loves you and wants to help you?

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

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

Do you give yourself grace and your spouse judgment?

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?

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

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

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

Positive changes flood a relationship immediately when both husband and wife cancel the blame game!

No one can really practice Love and Respect unless he or she does it as unto Jesus Christ.

Do you seek to understand or only to be understood?

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

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

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.

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

“With eyes of faith, envision Jesus standing just beyond the shoulder of your spouse and listening to every word you speak in every conversation, pleasant or tense. When you speak lovingly or respectfully to your spouse, you are speaking to Christ. Your spouse just happens to be there too.” This truth has sanctified the lips of many. Instead of giving their spouse a verbal whipping or choking on the idea of saying anything positive, now some spouses are motivated to speak words of unconditional love or respect.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all need love and respect equally. But, during conflict our felt needs are as different as pink is from blue.

Your spouse can have a need that you don’t have and that’s okay.

Assuming goodwill can be revolutionary in relationships.

A marriage relationship will be energized when couples learn how to motivate each other God’s way.

Unconditional respect, like unconditional love, is all about how one sounds (tone of voice and word choice) and appears (facial expressions and physical actions).

Your position in Christ is what counts, not your less-than-perfect performance.

Though the end can be worthy (to be loved and respected), when each uses unholy means (unloving and disrespectful words and actions), it will not achieve those ends. We must treat others as we expect them to treat us. To deny this makes us arrogant or fools, or both.

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

When you play the blame game your marriage never wins.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When you possess a forgiving spirit, words of Love and Respect will flow authentically from your lips- and realize that the Lord Himself is listening to you at moments like these. He knows you are not powerless, but actually full of power that He has granted you.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

You both forgive for one simple but profound reason: because you know Christ has forgiven you!

Here is the secret to marriage that every couple seeks and yet few find: Unconditional respect is as powerful for him as unconditional love is for her. It’s the secret that will help you achieve a brand new level of intimacy.

Don’t label each other as bad because you differ on how you solve your troubles.

Whether visiting a prison, feeding the hungry, giving the thirsty a drink or speaking a word of love or respect, everything is to be done to and for Christ.

She’s not wrong for not being male. He is not wrong for not being female. When you put pink and blue together, you get purple, the color of royalty; the color of God. Together, a husband and wife reflect God’s image.

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

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. Love and Respect reveals why spouses react negatively to each other, and how they can deal with such conflict quickly, easily and biblically.

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)

Both Judas and Peter denied Jesus Christ, but there is a huge difference between a Judas and a Peter.

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

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

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”?

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.

When a husband feels disrespected, it is especially hard to love his wife. When a wife feels unloved, it is especially hard to respect her husband.

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.

The more we are upset at something, the wiser it is to let twenty-four hours pass before responding.

When sorting out how to slow down the Crazy Cycle, it helps to remember that men are commanded to love because they don’t love naturally, and on the other side, women are commanded to respect because they don’t respect naturally.

As a husband, if you can grasp that you don’t always have to solve your wife’s problems, you will take a giant step toward showing her empathy and understanding.

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

When Jesus said “turn the other cheek,” He wasn’t saying to be passive wimps. He was teaching that physically people can control you but if you turn and give the other cheek, suddenly you’re in control and you’re making the choices.