Do You Love Your Wife?

We had our first men’s group meeting since I’ve been back in Kosele today. I think that men’s meetings are an integral part of church life and have a strong commitment to them. It’s great sharing life with the men in our church. Unsurprisingly the same issues come up for us men wherever we are meeting.

Today we were looking at a scripture that is well know to many people – including non-Christians and people of other faiths. It’s a scripture that I like a lot because it is very short and easy to remember. In the Book of Mark chapter 12 vs 29-30 Jesus is dealing with the tricky question of what the most important commandment is. He tells the assembled crowd “The most important one is this ……. Love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second most important commandment is this: ‘Love your neighbour as you love yourself.’” This idea is the basis of the Golden Rule which enjoys massive popular support all over the world. Whether you have a faith or not it is very hard to disagree with what Jesus is saying here.

The two questions I wanted the guys to think about today were:

Do you love God? 

and 

How do you know?

To make it easier to answer the question our starter for 10 was the question “Do you love your wife?” (Most of us are married so it wasn’t a hard or unfair question.) Everybody who had a wife, obviously, said “Yes.” The “how do you know?” question was a bit trickier. One of the guys came up with an absolutely fantastic answer. He said:

“Your neighbours will say ‘I can see you love your wife.’” Simple. But incredibly powerful.

The same answer is true for the question about loving God. “Your neighbours will say ‘I can see that you love God.’”

In just the same way that marriage has its ups and downs so does our relationship with God. In the end though we live our lives out in a public arena. We can put on a front in our marriage and in church but people aren’t fooled and neither is God.

I hope my neighbours would say “I can see that you love your wife and love God” more days than not.