Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): Everybody longs for deep lasting love. But strong relationships don't just happen by accident. Today on Pastor Rick's Daily Hope, we're continuing our series called Finding and Keeping the Love of Your Life. Rick Warren will share practical biblical wisdom for building healthier, stronger, Christ-centered relationships.

So, whether you're single, dating, engaged, or married, this series will help you grow in love, communication, and lasting commitment. So let's join Rick and listen to part one of a message called "Growing a Love That Lasts."

Pastor Rick Warren: Over your lifetime, there's a lot of things that are going to change in your life, some for good, some for bad. But there's one thing that is never going to change in your life, and it is God's unconditional, unrelenting, undiminished, everlasting love for you. That is what you can build your life on. That's a foundation for a stable life. God's love is reliable, it is unchanging, it is consistent, it is dependable, it's steadfast, it's unwavering, it's enduring.

The fact that God will never love me any more than He does in this moment, and He will never love me any less than He does in this moment, means that God's love for you and for me is everlasting. That's the way God loves you. But He doesn't stop there. He then says this, and here's the hard part: I want you to love everybody else the exact same way. I want you to love with a love that lasts on and on.

John chapter 15. If you pull out your message notes, the very first verse, Jeremiah 31, verse 3, God says, "I've loved you with an everlasting love." I loved it in the message paraphrase: "I've never quit loving you, and I never will." You can build your life on that verse right there. But then here's the hard part. John 15: "I command you to love each other in the same way that I love you." How in the world do you do that? How do you practice everlasting love? Is it even possible to have everlasting love?

Today in America, the divorce rate is 41 percent for first-time marriages. It's 60 percent for second-time marriages, and the divorce rate for third-time marriages is 73 percent. The track record gets worse. Now, the truth is, anybody can fall in love. It's like falling in a ditch. Anybody can fall in love, but it takes a whole lot more to stay in love. It's a whole lot harder to stay in love than to fall in love.

The reason is because it includes choices. You have to make some tough choices in order to stay in love, and you have to make those choices over and over. I mean, is it even possible to have a love that lasts an entire lifetime? Let me just take a little survey here. If you have been married 25 years or longer, would you stand up right now? Look at this. 25 years or longer. Congratulations. I honor you. Now, if you have been married over 40 years, stay standing. Look at this. 40 years. Thank you.

If I were to ask each of these people who have been married 40 years or longer, "Was it easy?", what do you think they'd say? Of course not. Kay and I last year had our 40th anniversary. I rolled over in bed in the morning and said, "I'm proud of you, honey." She said, "I'm tired of you, too." Mark Twain said, "You don't really know the depths of real love till you've been married 25 years." You can get along on good looks for five or six.

I'm no prophet, but I can tell you two things about the people who just stood. Number one, their love has been tested by doubt, depression, despair, differences, disagreements, disappointments, and defeats. Their love has been tested by distance and it's been tested by delays, dead ends, debt, disease, and by demands on their life. It's not easy to stay together. These are what I call the big Ds: doubt, despair, death, disease. But they avoided the biggest D: divorce. They made it over that one.

The reason they made it over that one is because they made some tough choices. These choices are not always popular. They're not always easy. They're certainly not convenient. But the fact is, and I've told you this many times, love is a choice. Love is not a feeling. Love produces feelings, and it produces some great feelings, but love is not a feeling. If love were a feeling, God could not command it because you can't command a feeling. It's like telling a little kid who's crying, "I command you to be happy." You can't force a feeling. Feelings are just there.

Love is a choice. You choose to love. And if you stop loving, that's your choice. Don't blame anybody else. You chose to stop loving. Love is a choice. And you choose to love or you choose to not love. Now, if you want to make a love last, this church is committed to helping people find the love of their life, those who want to marry. It's committed to helping you stabilize and strengthen your relationships whether you ever marry or not: friendships, partnerships, marriages, families, and all the other kinds of relationships there are.

You can't live in a world without love, whether you ever marry or not. But if you want to learn to love in ways like God loves, the everlasting kind of love, you're going to have to learn to make four very important choices. We're going to look at them this weekend. Now, of course, the great chapter in the Bible on love is First Corinthians chapter 13. It's called the love chapter. And we're going to look at what God says are the four choices I must make in order to make it to the finish line, in order to have a love that lasts a lifetime.

First Corinthians chapter 13, verse seven, says four things about love, four choices we need to make. Love never stops being patient, never stops believing, never stops hoping, and never gives up. That's everlasting love. That's the kind of love God has for you, and it's the kind of love God wants you to have for other people. And so this weekend, Tom and I want to share with you these four choices. Let's get right into it. Number one: The first choice for a lasting love is that lasting love extends grace.

I want to spend the most time on this point because the longer you are married, the easier it is to become ungracious. You just start getting a little bit more critical as time goes on and taking each other for granted. Every day, if you're going to have a love that lasts, you've got to choose to be merciful, choose to be loving, choose to be gracious, choose to forgive, choose to be patient, and choose to cut people slack. No relationship is going to last without grace, without forgiveness, without acceptance and patience.

In any long-term relationship, you have to put up with a lot. Now, let's just admit it. It's easy to show grace one time. You hurt me one time, that's no big deal. I can forgive you for that. But it's that thing that goes on and on and just irritates you no end. The Bible says love never stops being patient. The Message says, "Love puts up with anything." The Bible says love patiently accepts all things. Love is always ready to make allowances.

When do I need to extend grace to the people in my life? There are three important times. You need to write these down because this is a choice you're going to have to make every day of your life if you're going to have your relationships last. The first is I'm going to have to extend grace when their flaws and their faults irritate me. The longer you love somebody, the more you know their flaws, and you can either be critical or you can be gracious. You can be picky or you can be kind. You can be a perfectionist or you can show mercy.

The reason why grace is essential in any relationship is because we're both in that relationship, imperfect. You're a sinner, they are a sinner. Together, two sinners can't create a perfect relationship. It is impossible and foolish to think that two imperfect people could create a perfect relationship. It isn't going to happen. So, grace has to be at the foundation of every single human relationship. Between parents and children, brothers and sisters, moms and dads, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, employees and employers, co-workers, and on and on.

Proverbs 17, verse 9: "Disregarding another person's fault preserves love." I remember hearing one time a lady talking to another lady in church, and she said, "Do you remember when your husband did that?" She was talking about a bad thing that happened. And I loved what this woman said. She said, "I distinctly remember forgetting that event." That's a choice. Why? Because love disregards another person's fault. That preserves love.

Ephesians 4:2: "Be humble and gentle by being patient with each other, making allowances for each other's faults because of your love." Circle the phrase "making allowances." Now, notice it says, "Be humble, be gentle," and it says, "Be loving because of your love." Do you consider yourself to be a loving person? Do you consider yourself to be a humble person? Do you consider yourself to be a gentle person?

The truth is you're none of those if you're critical of other people's faults and flaws. You're prideful. Every time you criticize somebody's faults and somebody's flaws, you are being prideful. You are not being gentle, and you certainly are not being loving because love is patient. Love puts up with anything. Love patiently accepts all things. Love is always ready to make allowances. Everybody needs an allowance. The rest of your life, you're going to need a grace allowance in all of your relationships.

Kay knows that there are two times of the week when she needs to make special allowance for me. The first is Saturday afternoon when I get PMS: Pre-Message Syndrome. I'm just going, "Oh God, this is not good enough. Surely somebody could teach this better than me." I'm always going through this every week. And then the other time she shows grace is on Monday when I'm recovering after all of the multiple services of the weekend. But she makes allowances. When other flaws and faults irritate me, then I need to extend grace.

Another time is when their words or actions hurt me. Now, the truth is, because we're human beings, we hurt each other, sometimes intentionally. But the truth is a lot of times we hurt each other unintentionally. We say things we don't mean. We say things off the cuff. We're not thoughtful. We're thinking about ourselves. We're not intentionally trying to be hurtful, but often we're careless with our words and with our actions.

And the reason why we're careless is because we're not paying attention to other people's lives. You might write this on your outline: Grace listens. The reason why we hurt each other is because we're not really listening to each other. God gave you two ears and one mouth. That means you listen twice as much as you talk. The first duty of love is to listen. I'll say it again. The first duty of love is always to listen.

The number one organ for showing love is your ear. It's listening. When you look at people in the eye and you listen to them, you're saying, "I value you," and that says, "I love you." And it makes you gracious. The problem that we have in all of our relationships is we talk too much and we listen too little. I grew up in the country, and we actually had a lake behind our house, and it was filled with bullfrogs who would croak every night.

Did you know that bullfrogs, when they croak, they have a muscle in their throat that cancels that frequency to their brain? They can't hear how obnoxious they are. We're a lot like bullfrogs. We don't realize how obnoxious we are when we're talking and we're not listening. Now, I used to do marriage counseling. I can't do it anymore because our church is just so big. But the single most important marriage advice I could give you for the rest of your life is the next verse.

James chapter 1, verse 19: "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry." If every married couple followed that verse, 95 percent of all the arguments wouldn't happen. Usually we're quick to speak and we're slow to listen, and then we're fast to anger. Now, if you do the first two, the third is automatic. If you are quick to listen and if you are slow to speak, you will be slow to get angry. That's a choice. It's not an easy choice, but that's a loving choice. It's an unselfish choice.

If you want to have a love that lasts forever, you got to learn how to be quick to listen and slow to speak, and slow to be angry. Now, if you want a love that lasts, you can't hold on to those angers. You can't hold on to your hurts. A lot of people, when they get hurt in a relationship, they stockpile them for ammunition. They remember every hurt they've done, they categorize them, and they inventory them.

They get them all ready so then later, when they make a mistake, they go, "Well, you did this, and you did this." I was talking to a lady the other day, and she said something wrong and her husband got historical. I said, "You mean hysterical?" "No, historical. He told me everything I've ever done wrong." The Bible says love keeps no record of wrongs. You got to let it go. Proverbs 17, verse 9: "Love forgets mistakes. Nagging about them parts the best of friends."

If you want your marriage to last, you got to eliminate nagging. It doesn't work. Nagging doesn't work in the home, it doesn't work from the pulpit. Every week, I could get up here and tell you everything you're doing wrong, but has nagging ever changed anybody? No. It's worthless. It doesn't work in church, it doesn't work at home, and it doesn't work at school. Nagging parts the best of friends. The Bible says love forgives all offenses. Proverbs 19:11: "When someone wrongs you, it is a great virtue to ignore it." Just ignore it. That's extending grace.

Guest (Male): Hey, thanks for listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Here's Rick with an important message.

Pastor Rick Warren: I just want to take a quick second to say thank you, everybody. Thank you for listening, for sharing this broadcast, and for your faithful prayers and especially your financial support. God is using you in a mighty way to get the message of hope out to a world that's desperately in need of Jesus Christ. Thanks for listening today, and please be sure to join me next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope.

Guest (Male): This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.