Helpful Bible Verses about Love and Marriage

Love and marriage are many things – complicated, beautiful, hard, and joyful. Each marriage is a world unto itself, and the couple in that relationship are shaped profoundly by it for the rest of their lives. There is no doubt that when God gave marriage to humanity as a gift, it was a good gift intended for our good. However, we would be naïve if we didn’t recognize that our lives beyond Eden makemarriage a complicated gift that takes deft hands to handle.

In a sense, a healthy and successful marriage can be boiled down to a few things. Mignon McLaughlin once stated, “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”

Falling in love must often be deliberate because many things conspire against enjoying one’s spouse and continuing to delight in them. We can find many pointers in the Bible about marriage and how best to handle this gift.

Bible Verses about Love and Marriage

How do you feel about yourself? We often have complicated relationships with our bodies, but a healthy relationship with ourselves will often entail taking care of our bodies, appreciating what our bodies can do, and avoiding unhealthy comparisons between our bodies and those of others. That idea can help couples consider an important aspect of what the Bible says about married life.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church –  ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband – Ephesians 5:25-29, 31-33, NIV

These Bible verses about love and marriage are dense and full of rich imagery and metaphors. One of the important things these verses point out is that marriage is a pointer toward a greater mystery, that of how Jesus Christ is committed to and relates to His people, the Church. Your marriage is about more than just you and your spouse – it’s pointing to a great cosmic reality. This is indeed profound.

That profundity is mirrored and reflected in how married couples should act toward each other. Husbands are to love their wives as they do their bodies. The care, appreciation, attention, and nurture that you direct toward yourself as a husband ought to be extended to your wife.

This echoes how Jesus loves His people, and it’s a lofty calling toward deep, self-giving love. For wives, your call is to respect your husbands and honor them asthe Church does Jesus Christ. This too is a lofty call, toward radical trust and making oneself vulnerable and open to being loved and cared for.

For husbands and wives, marriage may require different things from them in different seasons. Loving and respecting one another is a foundation that can help a couple as they weather tough seasons. They each require a sacrifice of a different sort, but they are indispensable for a healthy marriage.

Conclusion

No marriage is immune from hardship. Loving or respecting your spouse can be difficult for any number of reasons, but without them, no marriage can survive. We all want to be loved and accorded dignity, and that is a gift married couples can give each other daily. Your marriage may be in a place where love and respect are distant echoes. That present reality doesn’t have to determine your future – things can be turned around.

If you’re looking for additional support beyond these Bible verses about love and marriage, Christian marriage counseling can help a couple understand what lies beneath distrust, a lack of intimacy, or poor communication with one another.

Your counselor at Mansfield Christian Counseling in Texas can help unpack your feelings toward one another. He or she will assist you in building a vocabulary for expressing your emotions and concerns and provide tools to address those concerns.

Going through a tough season doesn’t mean the end of your marriage. If a couple wants to work on their relationship, they can rebuild their marriage stronger than before. Seek the help you need to strengthen your marriage and flourish as a couple.