Ephesians 5:25-28 — Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.

So, while I’m looking at Ephesians 5, here’s another verse that doesn’t get enough attention.
What does it mean to love my wife as Christ loved the church?
Christ loved His church so much that He set aside His position and devoted Himself, day by day, to her good … even going so far as to suffer a humiliating death, more painful than we can truly imagine. So must we husbands be prepared to set aside our lives to serve those we love. The dying part is, I hope, not compulsory — but the willingness is not!
That still leaves open the question of “how”? What does it look like to our wives? One good starting point is provided by an old Puritan, Paul Bayne, who wrote a monumental commentary on Ephesians. Love, he said, makes a husband:
1) Willing to listen to his wife,
2) Provide the things she needs,
3) Imagine what those things might be,
4) Entrust things to his wife, for her to take care of,
5) Allow her more of life’s comforts than he takes himself,
6) Patiently overlook any little failings,
7) Share with her in any grievances.
Phew! And that love, he says, is marked by three things — by its chastity, its sincerity and its constancy.
That is wonderful advice — but how do you know when it’s working? How do you know what love looks like to your wife? A much more modern expert on Biblical love, Dr. Gary Chapman, wrote in his 1995 book “The Five Love Languages” that there are five primary ways in which we give and receive love. They are “gifts”, “quality time”, “words of affirmation”, “acts of service” and “physical touch”. The tricky issues are that we all have different primary languages, and that of the husband and wife often differ. In my case, for instance, my primary love language is “words of affirmation” and it’s closely followed by “physical touch” . For my lovely wife, her primary is “acts of service”, and the other is “quality time”. So does that ever give us challenges? Of course. Over the years we’ve learned what works, and we try to deliver. One of us doesn’t always succeed …
For a Christian husband there is a bottom line to this. Yesterday I wrote about the notion of submitting each to the other. For the husband that means submitting his life to the cause of loving his wife. It is the self-sacrificing “agape” love that is a foundation for three other kinds of love for his wife: Passion (eros), satisfaction (stergo) and affection (Phileo). Does that sound like a big challenge? It is — it’s a full time, life long commitment!