Selfish Love

Mar 1, 2011 by desiringvirtue

I can’t believe he is doing it again. How many times is he going to talk to me like that, with that tone? He doesn’t deserve my respect. Honor? Ha! Not right now buddy, right know you deserve to get at peace of my mind, so here it is…

Why do we have such a difficult time loathing our own sin and forgiving the sins of others? More often than not, we pass over our own shortcomings and nit pick at the sins of those closest to us, those we love the most. Their failings agitate us, anger us, and embitter us. Yes, we know that we are the most sinful people we know, yadda yadda yadda, but really when it comes down to it, it is just so hard to overlook their sins and focus on fixing our own.

I love my husband.

I love my husband.

But I am realizing more and more that my love is a selfish, sinful love.

An Unexpected Conviction

A couple weekends ago, Richard and I took the most wonderful trip down to San Antonio to see Wicked. Tickets to this amazing show had been my Christmas present and now we were going to spend a romantic, peaceful, kid-free night on the River Walk. While packing, I suggested that we download an audio book to listen to on the way down there. We chose a book by Paul David Tripp, titled: What did you expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage. Personally, I have never been attracted to this book due to its (in my opinion, lame) cover graphics. But, I absolutely adore anything that Paul Tripp writes, so I was very excited to maximize our drive time with this book on “redeeming our marriage”.

Somewhere between Montgomery and San Antonio I realized I was a selfish lover.

Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to overlook your husband’s faults? How did this person who used to be your exciting, intoxicating escape from reality become your every day, run of the mill, person who lives with you and can’t seem to do anything right? Why is it that no matter how much you pray for God to help you focus on your own sanctification, you can’t stop thinking about the need for him to be sanctified first?

Maybe it is because instead of loving him, you are loving the him you want him to be.

By nature we are selfish people. We want to live in a world that causes us the least possible pain and gives us the most possible joy. The same is true of our personal relationships, of our marriages. We want our husbands (and I know they feel the same way) to give as much pleasure as possible to us while minimizing the amount of suffering they bring into our lives.

At first this isn’t a problem because during the wooing stage of a relationship you are both presenting the best possible sides of yourselves. You constantly bow to the other’s wishes and look for ways to make each other’s lives happier. You make sure to always look your best for each other, never burp at the dinner table, you pay attention to the tiniest of details, so on and so forth. You know your future spouse is a sinner (intellectually) but in your heart of hearts you can’t possibly imagine that he would ever sin against you. Your love is so deep and so strong that your mutual sinfulness could never cause a drift in your relationship, it could never come between you.

But then life sets in, and your sinful natures begin to creep out.

Suddenly, as Paul Tripp puts it, “Your former escape from reality becomes your day to day reality” (that is a rough quote because I can’t currently look at the book… being an audio book and all). Living every day with someone is very different from spending your best hours together. There is no hiding sin when you are sharing the same bed.

Your husband begins to let his guard down (as do you) and makes mistakes. He forgets a special day, he talks to you in a perturbed tone, he spends too much time watching sports, hanging out with friends, or playing video games rather than tending to your desires. The list could go on and on. Whatever the particulars are the point is, sin shows itself. It isn’t new sin, no, it was always there, you just hadn’t had the opportunity to see it yet. Maybe your sweet heart was on his guard or maybe you were in such a state of euphoria that you simply didn’t notice, in either case it didn’t bother you, not like it does now. Now that it is your problem.

You love your husband so much and you know that you too are a sinner, that you must hurt him as much as he hurts you, but you just can’t stop thinking about all the things he needs to fix. They affect the way you view him, the way you talk to him, the way you look at him. You love him so much, but know that if he would just change X, Y, and Z your marriage would be so much happier, so much more cohesive, so much more God honoring. Your life would be so much better if he would just…

You don’t love him, you love the him you want him to be.

You love the him you dated, the one who lived to make your life perfect. I’m not saying you don’t feel love for him. There is no one I love as much as I love my husband. He is the greatest blessing in my life and I am so thankful to know that we will spend the rest of our lives together. But practical love is hard. 1 Corinthians 13 love is painful. Daily love, in action, toward another sinful human is not natural to me. We can feel love and not live it. This is the difficulty we face as our relationships mature.

We came to the altar full of emotional love, but we left promising intentional, sacrificial, daily love. One is natural, the other is unnatural.

When your practical love wains do to the sins of your husband you may not realize it, but your love is conditional. Your love is conditioned on whether or not your husband is the man you want him to be. It is like you are saying, “Yes dear I love you, I love you as long as you do everything I need you to do in order to make me happy.”

This is the nature of selfish love. What I am realizing is that this is the kind of love I practice. This is the toxic love that I let seep into my marriage. This is sin.

This kind of selfish love will ruin a marriage. If it doesn’t end in divorce, it will daily grow more empty, emotionless, and unsatisfying.  Realizing that your love is imperfect and insufficient may seem like a really depressing thing, but like so much of the Christian life, it is the starting point of something beautiful. Like every other aspect of our sinful lives, our marriages are in need of redemption. No matter how much you love your husband, your love will always fall short because you are a sinful human being. But God, being rich in mercy is the God who loves to make something beautiful out of something disgusting. He is the same Jesus who said, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” He is the physician who specializes in bringing dead souls to life and the only one who can create true love in a selfish heart.

True love loves him for him, not the him you want him to be.

It is the love that Jesus has for your husband. The same love that he demonstrated on the cross when he suffered and died for him, knowing every single minute sin he would ever commit. True love sees the sin he struggles with (even when it affects you), sees the Lord’s sanctifying hand at work and desires to be a help in triumphing over it, not avenging it.

It is the same love you yearn for from him, love that will gently, and understandingly forgive, encourage, and empower. You desire for him to remember that you are a sinner in progress, who makes so many, many mistakes. Shouldn’t he have the same from you?

But you can’t love him like this when you are loving a mirage, when your love has strings attached.

So I am learning that my love is selfish, but more importantly I am learning that Jesus can cut the strings that bind my heart and infuse it with his perfect, life changing, powerful, practical love that will make our marriage more wonderful than I could have ever imagined it-even on the first day he slipped a ring on my finger.

That is the beauty of our God.

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