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. All right, I can't wait to get started. Here's part two of a message called Growing a Love That Lasts.

Rick Warren: Extend grace when their flaws and their faults irritate you. Extend grace when their words or actions hurt you. Then, the third time you show grace is when they sin. And your marriage partner is going to sin. Sometimes against you, sometimes just against God, sometimes against others.

First Peter 4:8 says this: "Let your love for one another be intense because love covers over a multitude of sins." It doesn't make a big deal about it; it forgives. Colossians 3:13: "Put up with each other and forgive each other as quickly and as completely as the Lord forgave you."

A great marriage is simply the union of two great forgivers. Kay and I have a great marriage. Why? She's a great forgiver. I've learned to be a great forgiver. And a great marriage is not a perfect marriage; it's a marriage of two great forgivers.

I want you to write this down: I must choose to extend grace over and over. It's a daily thing. It's not like once in a lifetime; it's over and over and over. Once you write that down, I want you to think of maybe a name you might show that to this week.

Who could you show grace to whose falls and faults irritate you and whose words or actions have hurt you or they've sinned and you just need to let it go? Lasting love extends grace. Now, the second thing God teaches us from First Corinthians 13 is that lasting love expresses faith.

What am I talking about here? I'm talking about that when you really love somebody, you believe in them. You have faith in them. You trust them. You build their confidence. You relieve their fears. Your trust causes them to blossom. Faith causes people to blossom. Again, this is a choice. You have to choose to trust people.

Love never stops believing, the Bible says. Love always trusts, the Bible says. Love never loses faith, the Bible says. You see, faith and love are intertwined. In fact, love is built on trust. If you can't learn to trust people, you will never learn to love and you will never learn to be loved because love and trust go together.

A lot of people think they have a love problem. What you really have is a trust problem. Love and trust go together. Love is trust. When you trust people, you are loving them. And the Bible says love always trusts, love always believes, love expresses faith.

Delilah got a lot of things wrong, but she did get this one right. Judges chapter 16, she says to Samson, "How can you say I love you when you don't trust me?" She got it. Love and trust are two sides of the same coin. If you're going to build a love that lasts forever, you've got to learn to trust people. You've got to learn to be more trusting.

There are three kinds of people in the world. There are gullible people who trust everything. They believe everything they're told. There are cynical people who believe nothing. They don't trust anybody. And then there are loving people who give you the benefit of the doubt. That's love.

Do you think it's wise or do you think it's foolish to trust people? That's going to say an awful lot about your future happiness. It's a question that was asked many years ago in the magazine Psychology Today in an article called Trust and Its Consequences.

Dr. Julian Rotter of the University of Connecticut spent years studying the impact of trust on your behavior, your personality, and your relationships. He studied it for like 35 years. He developed a very famous scale to determine a person's level of trust and then he cross-referenced it to 10 different kinds of patterns in life.

Here's what he discovered: Genuine trusting people, not skeptical people, not gullible people, not cynical people, but genuine trusting people are consistently less gullible than distrusting people, have a higher IQ than distrustful people, are far better adjusted psychologically than distrustful people, and live much happier lives.

Studies have shown over and over again that it's actually better to be too trusting than it is to be too distrusting. You'll actually harm yourself less by being too trusting than by being too distrustful. Why? The Bible says love always trusts. It expresses faith.

One of the most interesting verses in the Bible is Mark chapter 6, verse 5 and 6. Jesus had gone to this town and it said: "Jesus could not do many mighty works there because of their lack of faith." I'm talking about miracles, healings, things like that.

Notice this is really interesting. It's not Jesus' lack of faith that prevented the miracles. It's not Jesus' lack of faith that prevented the healings or all these good blessings from happening. It was the lack of faith of the people who were there. It was their unbelief. It was their lack of trust.

If that's true of Jesus, the Son of God, it's really true of you. When people don't trust you, you can't do as much. When you don't feel the trust of other people, you're not as empowered, you're not as liberated, you're not as blossoming. And when you don't trust other people, you limit them. You hold them back.

If this is true of Jesus, it's certainly true of you and it's certainly true of me that we are held back by the distrust of other people. When people don't believe in us, when people don't trust us, when people don't show confidence in us. And yet the Bible says love trusts.

You want a love that lasts forever? You need to trust your mate. You need to build their confidence. You need to build their faith. You need to show faith in them. When somebody believes in you, it is amazing what you can do.

Kay and I have been a pretty effective team in our lives. One of the big reasons is not that we're talented; it's that we really believe in each other. I believe in her and she believes in me. When Kay and I first got married, she was so shy that she would not do a Bible study in a small group.

Now she speaks before thousands and millions of people. She's spoken before Congress, the United Nations, and things like that. She goes all over the world speaking. But when I first met her, she was shy, retiring.

The first little Bible study she did in this church, she said her knees knocked the whole time for 45 minutes as she was teaching five or seven women in our little apartment. But I believe in my wife. All of my life, I have decided that love believes. Love encourages. Love says you can do this.

I've watched her do what she thought she could not do and I've watched her become a world-class leader and speaker. It's her love and trust in me. You know that famous story from Fort Worth, 35, 36 years ago, when I walked into the bedroom of the little house we were renting in Fort Worth and said, "Hey, honey, I think God's calling us to go to the Saddleback Valley."

"I think we should move to Southern California and start a church with no money, no members, no friends, no building, and I don't know anybody, and I've never been a pastor. What do you think?" And the famous line of my wife was, "Well, I believe in God and I believe in you, so let's go for it."

She actually said it this: "It scares me to death, but I believe in God and I believe in you, so let's go for it." And how would history be different if my wife hadn't said, "Let's go for it"? It just causes me to wonder what your loved one might have accomplished in life if you had believed in them more.

What your wife could have accomplished if you had trusted her more. What your husband could have done in life if you had said, "I'm behind you 100% on this. Scares me to death, but I believe in God and I believe in you. Let's go." We limit people by our unbelief. That is unloving.

If you want a love that lasts forever, you've got to extend grace because we all need it. But you've also got to express faith. To be trusted is the greatest gift of love. You want to show love this week? Trust people.

Romans 14:19: "Let us always be seeking the ways that lead to peace and let us always be seeking the ways in which we can support each other." I know what some of you are thinking: "Rick, they've let me down so many times." The Bible says love never loses its faith. Okay, they've let you down. Love never loses its faith.

Any coach will tell you the best way to restore confidence after a guy has dropped the ball or fumbled the ball is to give him the ball on the next play. Get right back out there. Show you trust the guy. He just made a major fumble; hand him the ball on the next play and let him show that it was just a fluke.

Everybody stumbles, everybody screws up, everybody messes up. Hand him the ball again. Say, "I believe in you. Let's go for it." How do you make somebody trustworthy? You trust them. How do you make somebody a leader? You let them lead. People blossom when you trust, when you say, "I believe you could do this."

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Rick, you don't know my situation. My spouse has violated every rule of trust in the book. What do you do when you cannot trust your spouse? Here's what you do: You trust God.

When you can't trust your spouse because they have violated every rule known to mankind, you trust God. And you say, "God, you're greater than my spouse and I'm going to trust you to work in her or his life."

And before you give up on the relationship, give God a chance. Give God a chance to change you and give God a chance to change your spouse. Psalm 62, verse 8: "Trust God all the time. Tell him all your problems because God is your protection." Your spouse is not your protection; God is your protection.

Trust God all the time. Tell him your problems. Don't tell them to your boyfriend, your girlfriend, or whoever that is, the guy at work; tell them to God because God is your protection. God specializes in miracles and God can transform anything. I've seen it thousands of times in this church.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the famous poet, said, "Whoever loves believes the impossible." Why? Because love not only extends grace; love expresses faith. It never stops believing. It always trusts. It never loses faith.

I want you to write down: I must choose to express faith in people every day. You want to be a great lover? I must choose to express faith in people every day. Every time you express faith in someone around you, you are showing love to that child, to that coworker, to that spouse, to that friend.

I must choose to express faith in people every day. And then you might want to write down a name that you can practice that with this week. Real love, lasting love, everlasting love extends grace and expresses faith.

The third thing this verse says, First Corinthians 13:7, all in one verse, is that lasting love expects the best. Lasting love, everlasting love expects the best. It's hopeful. It's forward-looking, it's optimistic. It's not stuck in the past.

The Bible says love never stops hoping. The Bible says love always expects the best. The Bible says love always looks for the best. Here's the problem: The longer you're in a relationship with an imperfect person, you tend to expect the worst, not the best, because you know their downside better than anybody else.

And when you start expecting the worst of your husband, you start expecting the worst of your wife, you are setting yourself up for a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're setting them up. Study after study has shown that we tend to act in ways that the people we most value think we're going to act.

In other words, people tend to fulfill what we think they expect us to think of them and they fulfill that expectation. It's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. This has been told in a thousand stories, My Fair Lady, Pygmalion, and every other one.

I've got a friend Bruce Wilkinson, who wrote the book The Prayer of Jabez. Many years ago, Bruce was hired as a first-year professor at Multnomah University up in the Northwest. When he got there, they said, "We're giving you two English classes and they're advanced placement classes."

He thought, "Oh, this is great. I get the brightest kids. I get the sharpest kids." And he said, "You know what? It was true. These kids were sharp as a tack." He said they asked great questions, they had great answers. They were smart. They thought things through.

At the end of the semester, everybody in both of those classes got A's or B's. He said it was amazing how great these kids were. And he said on the last day of school, I went in and sat down in the faculty lounge and said, "Well, I sure hope I get those classes again next year."

And one of the other professors said, "What class?" He said, "The two advanced placement classes." He said, "Bruce, there are no advanced placement classes in this school." It had all been a setup.

Because he thought they were advanced placement, he treated them that way and when he treated them that way, guess what? They rose to the occasion. People tend to rise to the level of expectation.

What are you expecting from your husband? What are you expecting from your wife? What are you expecting from your kids? What are you expecting from yourself? We tend to fulfill the expectations.

Guest (Male): Thanks so much for being with us today and listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. I hope that you were just as blessed as I was from today's broadcast. Right now, here's Pastor Rick with a special message.

Rick Warren: You know, when I started Saddleback Church over 40 years ago with just a handful of people in our living room, I also began writing a simple devotional, just for the people in our church, to help them start each day with hope and with truth and with peace that comes through Jesus Christ.

Well, that little devotional grew and today Daily Hope is one of the largest email devotions in the whole world. Each day people all around the globe are reconnecting with God's promises and finding fresh strength in his word to face whatever comes their way.

Here's the best part: it's absolutely free. We don't have any charge for this. Every day you'll get a quick devotional read and a podcast that you can listen to on the go. In a world that's more distracted and uncertain than ever, I want to help you start your day centered on what never changes.

What never changes is God's love, his unconditional love for you and his promises to you. If you'll just spend just a few minutes a day in the morning with the Lord, it can bring so much more clarity, more purpose, more peace to everything that happens in your day.

Particularly psychologists have said that what you do with the first five minutes of your day pretty much sets the tone. So, friend, you were never meant to go through life alone. I want to personally invite you to just sign up for the Daily Hope devotional. Do it today. I think it's going to bring fresh encouragement to your walk in God.

Guest (Male): If you'd like to sign up for the daily devotional, it's easy. Just go to pastorrick.com. That's pastorrick.com. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.