1. Be humble.
Humility isn’t thinking poorly of yourself. It’s not a matter of lowering your self-esteem or making self-deprecating comments.
Real humility is intentionally shifting your focus away from yourself. It’s having a realistic picture of 1) who you are, 2) whom God is, and 3) how important other people are.
Pride typically goes before the fall of any relationship, especially marriage. When life becomes about me having my way, asserting my right to be right and struggling for power over another, we’re uprooting ourselves from love and we’re living in selfishness instead.
Humility can be chosen. It can be developed, prayed about, and nurtured.
2. Be gentle.
The word here can also be translated as meek. And meekness isn’t weakness. Real meekness – the kind Jesus embodied – is best defined as strength, under control. It’s power, placed properly in submission to authority and in service to others.
Meekness involves the laying down of our need for power over our spouse and the developing of a kind of power under them. It’s serving. It’s sometimes silence when the temptation is to talk louder.
It isn’t appeasing, pleasing, or going soft in the sense of taking abuse. Rather, gentleness is the practice of forcing our emotions into submission to more holy and healthy interactions with our spouse.
3. Be patient.
To be patient is, quite literally, to suffer long. It’s about more than mere waiting. It’s about walking in partnership even in the middle of conflict and tension.
Guess how patience gets developed? Yep. Like any of the fruit of the Spirit, patience is developed as we’re placed in situations that require us to use it.
When you’re truly in love, you hang tough through sickness and health, for richer and poorer, for better or for worse. Again, patience is not about taking abuse or tolerating destructive behavior. But it does involve making allowance for each other’s faults and weaknesses.
4. Bear with one another.
The two words Paul uses for patience and forbearance are very similar, but have different shades of meaning. While patience has to do with enduring suffering, forbearance has more to do with the weight of the things we carry together.
To bear with one another really means, to partner with another person to help them hold up whatever burden is weighing them down. It’s working in tandem to carry the load.
A spouse who is in love stays by the hospital bed, walks through job losses, figures out the financial potholes, and shares the heaviness of grief when the other partner suffers a loss.
When I look at this list, I first see my own glaring need to grow. I haven’t, by any means, mastered them. I can recall far too many moments when I’ve asserted my right to be right, when I’ve lost my attunement with my wife’s pain, and when I’ve been unwilling to sustain gentleness and have chosen anger and defensiveness instead.
I also see the reality about my wife. Angie has been willing to bear with me and exercise patience through all kinds of idiotic seasons and episodes of my life.
Why would she stick it out? Keep showing grace? Demonstrate meekness on repeat? Because I am firmly convinced she’s in love with me, not because she says so, but because she proves it again and again.
And I’m in love with her. I still often feel those familiar warm, fuzzy feelings when we’re together, but far deeper than that, by the grace of God, we’re mutually cultivating a kind of love that outlasts any difficult season.
If you’re married, do an inventory. Check your own heart for these qualities. Where do you need to practice repentance? Where do you need to cultivate love in your heart and in your posture toward your spouse?
And if you’re not married yet, here’s the cool thing… Paul wasn’t actually writing these words for married couples. He wrote them for every believer, in every age, for all time. So when you become these virtues, you’re preparing yourself for stronger and healthier relationships for the rest of your days.
This article originally appeared here.
