Responding in Love
June 27, 2017
The impression you get from some girls today is that they start out as soon as they’re able, and they chase the boys until finally they run one down and marry him. And then we wonder why those marriages don’t work out. I risk being thought archaic for saying this, but I believe it is still the prerogative of the man to do the chasing. The man is always the deliverer, and the woman is the receiver. God made them that way. And that’s why He says to the man, “Husbands, love your wives” (Ephesians 5:25).
He didn’t turn that around and instruct the wife to love the husband. Somebody asks, “Well, isn’t she supposed to?” Of course she is, but she’s a responder. She is to respond to him. If he loves her, then she will love him. If he treats her harshly and cruelly, she will become cold and indifferent, and love will die.
As a man chooses a woman for his bride, and as Boaz claimed Ruth, so Christ came to this earth for His bride. He is the One who demonstrated His love by dying for us. And we are the responders—we are to respond to His love. We are to receive Him as Savior, then come to know Him. Oh, friend, that should be the ambition of every Christian—to know Him!
It is sad that a great many people make a trip to Bethlehem once a year and look in a manger. He’s not there, friend. Although He did come as a baby, He hasn’t been a baby for a long time. Then at Easter they go look in an empty tomb, and He’s not there either. He’s the man in the glory today. Paul wrote that his ambition was to “know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). Oh, that we might know Him, our Kinsman-Redeemer, and love Him because He first loved us.
--Dr. J. Vernon McGee, from Edited Messages on Ruth