How to See More Deeply into Your Spouse’s Heart

Picture yourself in an antique store.

You’re standing before an old chair, its wood dinged up and the varnish dirty and worn. At first, you have trouble seeing past the grime and scratches to appreciate its craftsmanship.

But what if, just as you turn to leave the store, you discovered the chair belonged to Abraham Lincoln? Suddenly, instead of a banged up old relic, you’re looking at a piece of history.

What happened? The chair didn’t change. Your perspective did, which enabled you to look past the chair’s flaws and appreciate its deeper value.

I believe the same thing happens in marriage when we learn to see beyond our spouse’s quirks and idiosyncrasies to something deeper.

Every couple has differences that keep them from seeing eye-to-eye with their significant other. Maybe they talk too much – or not enough. They feel hot while we’re shivering cold. Or maybe we can’t leave early because they’re always running late.

If we allow them to, these differences will agitate us and become a wedge that pushes our relationship apart.

Or we can change our perspective.

What if we chose to see our spouse’s quirks, not as a nuisance, but as a window we look through to see deeper into who they are? If we’ll change how we see our spouse, instead of inhibiting our relationship, those differences can become the foundation for it.

Like the chair whose dings and scratches add to its character and significance, so loving our spouse as a whole person, warts and all, can be the basis for creating deeper intimacy.

As you’ll hear on today’s broadcast, “Healthy Manhood and Womanhood in Marriage,” God designed us that way on purpose. He put us together in marriage to accomplish something much greater than we could ever achieve on our own.

Dr. Greg Smalley, our vice president of Family Ministries, will be joining me in the studio to discuss my latest book, “Marriage Done Right: One Man, One Woman.”

Dangerous messages about men and women are being propagated by the culture. One of the worst is that men and women are the same. It’s hard to overstate the insidiousness of that belief. Many marriages struggle and fail because of confusion about what true manhood and womanhood looks like.

We’ll talk about that, the beauty of God’s design for marriage, as well as the pain couples sometimes have to work through to have the relationship they desire.

Tune in on your local radio station, online, or on our free phone app available for download.