When I Want God's Love to Be Seen in Me

Beloved, let us love one another,
for love is of God;
and everyone who loves is
born of God and knows God.
He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
1 John 4:7-8

How many times have we heard someone going through a divorce say, “We just fell out of love with each other”? True and lasting love is not a condition people fall in and out of, depending on the circumstances. A person may fall in love, but it’s not true love until a commitment is made.

The kind of love that makes a marriage work is sustained by God when an effort is made to commit to keeping love alive and growing deeper. That takes having the love of God in us, and it takes prayer. Because on those days when you don’t feel love—and even the greatest loving couples have times when they don’t feel love—you still have to show love. True love is not what you feel every moment of every day anyway; it’s what you commit to, and what you seek God for more of than you have on your own. God’s love is great and unconditional and unfailing. God’s love keeps a marriage together when our own love fails.

We who know the Lord have the distinct advantage of being able to love our spouse at all times—even when we don’t feel like it—because we are born of the God of love and His Holy Spirit of love resides within us. God’s unconditional and unfailing love can override our feeble and fickle love—the love we can fall in and out of if something doesn’t go the way we want. The love of God is fresh in you every day when you walk with Him. He can stir love in you that you didn’t know you were capable of having. And His love in you will manifest through you at times when your human love loses strength.

My Prayer to God

Lord, I pray You would fill me with Your unfailing and unconditional love. I thank You that You are the God of love and Your Spirit of love dwells within me. Fill me afresh with Your love so that it overflows to others—especially my husband. I pray You would pour out Your Spirit on my husband today and fill him afresh with Your love as well. With the weakness, frailty, and fickleness of our human love—which too often relies on feelings, circumstances, and whims—I know we cannot make our marriage successful. We need Your love to be the driving force.

Only Your love doesn’t waver. Only Your love forgives human failures. It is Your love that enables our love for each other to grow deeper. I confess any time I have not felt loving toward my husband and my words and actions have conveyed that. I know this is not pleasing to You, and it is certainly not pleasing to him. Forgive me and help me to deliberately show love to him in ways he can clearly see and understand. Help us to feel love for each other even in difficult times between us. Enable me to get beyond my own needs and become a conduit of Your unfailing love to him. May Your love be seen in me at all times.

In Jesus’ name I pray.

Adapted from: The Power of a Praying Wife Devotion © 2011 by Stormie Omartian. Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR. Used by permission.