God's Prescription for Lasting Relationships

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4 Steps in God's Prescription for Lasting Relationships
From the book Love, Sex & Lasting Relationships
by Chip Ingram


1. Instead of looking for the right person, become the right person.
The first command in Ephesians 5 tells us to be imitators of God by reflecting the way he loves us.  Our love for others flows out of our sense of being deeply loved.  Instead of constantly looking for the right person, God tells us to become the right person.  Instead of looking for love, God tells us to realize that love has already found us!  God loves as no one else ever can.  The best way for us to demonstrate that we have understood and accepted God's love is to learn to imitate him as closely as possible in the way we treat others.  (Ephesians 4:32)

Imitating God means that in relationships we are to be kind, tenderhearted, empathetic, discerning, willing to make allowance for people's mistakes, and consistently forgiving.  It means we want good for them.  We're gentle toward them even when our needs don't get met or when we're angry. That's when we go back to square one and forgive them.  We let them off the hook.  Why?  Because we are superstars or spiritual giants?  No we forgive because we realize that we must pass on to others what God has given us.  We who have been freely forgiven must, in turn, freely forgive.  That's how we imitate God.

Our problem, however, is that loving isn't easy.  You and I simply don't have the power to always forgive or be consistently kind.  Our love, strength, will, and understanding don't stretch that far.  We don't have the power to love this way unless we are so filled with God's love that we recognize that our deepest needs have already been met, and we're no longer expecting another human being to "complete" us.  We will not be able to imitate God in our love for others unless we know that we are blessed, valuable, and significant - that we are loved.

2. Instead of falling in love, walk in love.
If you refer again to Ephesians 5:1-2, you will see I added parentheses around the phrase, just as Christ also loved you and gave himself up for us.  This phrase explains how the command to walk in love works.  Walk in love means something much deeper than taking long strolls on the beach or wandering hand-in-hand through the mall.  In fact, walking in love means that we love others in exactly the same way that Christ loved us.  How did Christ love us?  The phrase supplies the answer: He gave himself up for you.  So, here's the deeper application: Walking in love is about sacrificial commitment.

Love is a sacrificial, other-centered action that provides what's best for the other person.  God's way is very hard on the feelings, but it's very healthy for the soul.  It works wonders in relationships where both parties find their ultimate identity in Christ. 

That's why the second step in God's plan for relationships involves genuine love.  Don't fall in love, God tells us, walk in love.  Genuine love isn't a passive, quivering mass of good feelings; genuine love is a deliberate, intentional, honest, and even painful giving up of self-preservation for another person's good.  The love that walks is an other-centered love.  It says, "I'm going to give you what you need," and then follows through.  No manipulation, no games, and no power play.  And, interestingly enough, it's when we love in this way that we actually fan the flames of romance and those good feelings we all long to enjoy.  As we consciously take these first two steps in God's plan, they lead us directly to step 3.

3. Instead of fixing your hopes and dreams on another person, fix your hope on God and seek to please him through this relationship.
In the Hollywood version of a wedding ceremony, the couple stands face to face before their gathered friends.  The couple basically declares, "You are the most important person in my life.  You complete me.  You are my perfect mate, the answer to all my dreams."

In a wedding that honors God's presence and role, the two people also face each other, welcoming God's blessing and fully acknowledging that they expect God to help them keep the promises they make.  But their view of one another could be expressed this way, "You are not the most important person in my life - Christ is.  And because Christ is the most important person in my life, I'm going to treat you even better than I could treat you if you were the most important person in my life.  Christ will help me love you more than I could ever love you in my own strength alone."

I want to make this point very clear.  When we go the other route and make our personal fulfillment the goal of every relationship, it never works out.  And then we wrongly assume the problem is the other person, so we go and find someone else.  We see extreme forms of this behavior played out on prime-time television in many of the so-called reality shows.  Those shows reveal and tease our selfish wishes.  How do we break this ingrained self-centered cycle in our lives?  How do we address these narcissistic desires and our personal need to be center stage?  How do we stop expecting the world to revolve around us?

The answer involves a completely different approach.  Instead of trying to find out what's wrong with the other person, instead of continually expecting him or her to conform to our needs, we must ask God to make us who he wants us to be and to help us to walk in love, giving sacrificially what the other person needs.  God is inviting you into a life of thoughtful, sacrificial love in your relationships.  The by-product of God's approach to relationships is the very kind of intimacy, love, sex, and lasting companionships you and I have always wanted.

4. If failure occurs, repeat steps 1, 2 and 3.
Interestingly enough, the fourth step in both the Hollywood formula and in God's prescription are identical but for radically different reasons.  Both steps recognize an inevitable feature of human relationships - failure.  Even if we are utterly convinced of the truth of God's way, do you think we can follow these steps flawlessly from this day forward?  Of course not.  When it comes to failure in a relationship, the real question isn't if, but when.

Do you see what a radically different approach this is?  Do you see how looking in the mirror shifts your focus off your natural tendency to blame you partner and on to what you can do about making things better?  The truth of the matter is that blaming or trying to get our mates to change is usually counterproductive anyway.  But by contrast, how much control do we have over changing the person in the mirror?  One hundred percent.  How much responsibility do we hear for our actions and choices?  One hundred percent.  How much do our relationships gain when we try to manipulate our mates, or try to make them into some other kind of person?  Not very much.  This becomes one of those moments when we calmly and honestly face a failure.  Step 4 of the prescription takes over.  God tells us to start over on step 1 - choose to become the right person.  We should make that our focus.  We walk through the steps: imitate God, walk in love, fix our hope on God, and seek to please him in every one of our relationships.  If failure occurs (and it will), we go back to square one and take the steps again.