My wife and I just spent a few days camping and hiking in the Big Pine area near Bishop, California. Along the way we dreamed together, worked on a bucket list together, talked about ideal vacation scenarios, and just got to enjoy eighteen years of marriage together. I want that for everyone. I want everyone to enjoy what we get to enjoy. I think she is way better at working on the marriage than I am, but that is kind of the point: we are working at it. There are many situations where I sit down with a couple and he says, “But I am showing love. She just never appreciates what I am actually doing.” The two books I am going to go through in today’s video helped unlock for me the verse that says, “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” That was Ephesians 5:28. Hello, church. As I said, in today’s video I want to go through these two books, which are very similar to one another. One is Christian and one is not, and we would not agree with them on every point, but with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day behind us, I wanted to highlight a couple of books from our resource desk that I believe would help your marriage. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. We do weekly videos here on the YouTube channel to try to bring the Bible home. That is our church theme; we want you to continue with the teaching throughout the week, not just on Sundays.
The Five Love Languages
The first book I want to look at is The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. It has been one of the most popular marriage books ever written. I remember hearing about it in college, and I was kind of resistant to it until I actually worked my way through it myself, and I said, “Hey, that was pretty good.” The basic idea is that people tend to express and receive love in different ways. Chapman identifies five basic love languages, and Harley, in the other book, identifies ten in a different way. Chapman’s are, first, words of affirmation: encouraging words, compliments, verbal expressions of love, saying it out loud. Then acts of service: practical ways of serving one another, getting coffee for one another in the morning, or working on the house. You may not say much out loud, but you do a lot of things to show your love. Another is receiving gifts. That is a lot of gift giving, always bringing flowers, always thinking of you, and “Oh, I spent so much money on her; how come she does not appreciate that?” That kind of thing. But the gift giver gives thoughtful gifts that communicate love and consideration. Then quality time: focused attention, meaningful time together. It is not just quantity time; it is a regular date night, long walks together. And the last one he focuses on is physical touch: affection and the appropriate physical closeness that comes through marriage. Some are very clingy, some very touchy, and that is its own language. The strength of the book is that it helps couples realize they often communicate in very different ways. Many marriage problems are not necessarily because they do not love each other; it is because they misunderstand how love is communicated to the other.
His Needs, Her Needs
The other book, His Needs, Her Needs (this is the workbook version, the shorter one; the full version is maybe fifty percent longer or so), comes at it from a slightly different angle. Instead of focusing on five love languages, Harley argues that husbands and wives have certain emotional needs specific to them, and when those needs are met, the marriage grows stronger, and when they are not met, the marriage grows weaker. The ten needs he discusses are affection, sexual fulfillment, conversation, recreational companionship, honesty and openness, admiration, financial support, domestic support, family commitment, and an attractive spouse. I have talked through these specifics in our church before, but I think the strength of this book is that it helps couples think specifically about how they can make their spouse feel loved, which goes back to my original premise: how we show love is not always how it is received. That is Ephesians 5:28: so ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. And verse 29: “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church.” So put yourself in your spouse’s shoes: how would you want to be loved if you were them? You do not nourish and cherish according to how you define nourishing and cherishing, but according to how they define it. That really helped unlock for me, at least, what nourishing and cherishing actually look like, and both of these books give specifics in those areas, as we have discussed.
As Christians, we would not place emotional needs above biblical commands. When we talk about love, biblical love is really an action, not a feeling; it is an act of obedience to God. But both authors give good human-relationship advice, and that is good. When the Scripture teaches us to love one another, or tells husbands to dwell with their wives according to knowledge and to love them as their own bodies, these books really help with practical ways to accomplish those biblical truths. So if you have not read them, I think they will be worth your time and worth adding to your marriage reading list, and I encourage you to do so. I think in the next video we will take a broader look at the other resources at our resource desk on marriage, but these are two I wanted to go through in specifics. God bless you. We will see you in the next video.
