Weekend Kindness
Reaching Others Through Kindness

The Complete Husband
By Lou Priolo

Love is more than a feeling, it?s a choice.  When you took your vow to love your wife, you did not vow that you would have the feeling of love until death, but that you would choose to love her until death.

This choice means that you would prefer her over all others, and it means that whether it was easy or whether it was hard you would still choose to love her.

That is why there are 7 things that you may not do when she sins against you:

1. You may not retreat.
2. You may not surrender.
3. You may not give up.
4. You may not throw in the towel.
5. You may not wimp out.
6. You may not allow her evil to prevail against you.
7. You may not allow her sin against you to provoke you to sin against her.

The problem is that none of these are easy.  When we get into a fight with our spouse, when relations are tough it?s a whole lot easier to let the whole situation alone, batten down the hatches, and wait for the storm to blow over.

That?s not biblical.

As a bonus, here?s 8 symptoms of battle fatigue that will show you that you?ve been overcome by evil instead of overcoming evil:

1. Telling yourself things like, ?She?ll never change,? or, ?I just can?t live with this woman any longer.?
2. Permitting yourself to become bitter at her.
3. Relinquishing your spiritual leadership (?After all, she won?t let me lead anyway?).
4. Unnecessarily limiting the scope of communication with her because of unsuccessful attempts to resolve conflicts in the past.
5. Allowing anger to keep you from confronting her biblically.
6. Allowing yourself to become sinfully angry, anxious or depressed about the hurtful things she does to you.
7. Allowing your ?hurt feelings? to keep you from fulfilling your biblical responsibilities as a husband and/or father.
8. Resorting to sinful, retaliatory actions such as: gossip, withdrawal, slander, name calling, pouting, temper tantrums, sulking, threatening, quarreling, abusive speech.

In our next installment, we?ll take a look at some of these, and ways that we can effectively deal with a breakdown in communication.

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