Rick Warren - Growing a Love That Lasts—Part Two

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.

You extend grace when their flaws and their faults irritate you,

and you extend grace when their words or actions hurt you,

and 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 four verse eight says this. Let your love

for one another be intense. 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,

look at the next verse, 313. 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, watch, 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 there on your outline.

I must choose to extend grace over and over. I

must choose to extend grace Over and over and over

and over. It's a daily thing. It's not like once

in a lifetime. It's over and over and over. And

once you write that down, I must choose to extend

grace over and over. 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, turn your outline over, and

on the back of the outline, the second part is

that lasting love not only expresses or extends grace, it

expresses faith. That's the second thing God teaches us from

1 Corinthians 13. Lasting love expresses faith. Now, 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. See, faith and love

are intertwined. In fact, love is built on trust. Now

I want you to listen real carefully. 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

got a love problem. What you really have is a

trust problem. Love and trust go together. And love is trust.

And when you trust people, you are loving them. And

the Bible says love always trusts. Love always believes. Love

expresses faith. You know, Delilah got a lot of things wrong.

That was the girlfriend of Samson. But she did get

this one right. And the next verse, Judges chapter 16,

Judges 16 · chapter mention

she says to Samson, how can you say I love

you when you don't trust me? Well, she got it.

Love and trust are two sides of the same coin. Now,

if you're gonna build a love that lasts forever, you

gotta learn to trust people. You gotta learn to be

more trusting. Now, there are three kinds of people in

the world. There are gullible people who trust everything. They

believe everything, everything that's told them. They believe in everything.

Gullible people. There are cynical people who believe nothing. They

don't trust anybody. They're cynical. And then there are loving

people who give you the benefit of the doubt. That's love. Now, question.

Do you think it's wise or do you think it's

foolish to trust people? That's gonna say an awful lot

about your future happiness, how you answer that question. It's

a question that was asked many years ago in the

magazine Psychology Today, and they did a article called Trust

and Its Consequences. And there's this guy, Dr. Julian Rotter

of the University of Connecticut. And this guy spent years

studying the impact of trust on your behavior, on your personality,

and on your relationships. And he studied it for like

35 years. The impact of trust on your behavior, your relationships,

and your personality. And he developed a very famous scale.

It's quite well known now. to determine a person's level

of trust, and then he cross-referenced it to 10 different

kinds of patterns in life. And here's what he discovered.

The genuinely trusting people, not skeptical people, not gullible people,

not cynical people, but genuinely trusting people are number one,

consistently less gullible than distrusting people. Two, have a higher

IQ than distrustful people. Three, are far better adjusted psychologically

than distrustful people. And four, live much happier lives. Studies

have shown over and over and over again that it's

actually better to be too trusting than it is to

be too distrustful. 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. You know, to me,

one of the most interesting verses in the Bible is

this next verse on your outline. Mark chapter six, verse

five and six, and it says this. Jesus has gone

to this town and said, Jesus could not do many

mighty works there in this town. I'm talking about miracles, healings,

things like that. Jesus could not do many mighty works

there because of their lack of faith. Now 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. It's not Jesus' lack of faith from

preventing 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. You see,

if that's true of Jesus, it's really true of you.

When people don't trust you, you can't do as much.

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,

the Son of God, 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.

you know, 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. If somebody believes in you,

it is amazing what you can do. Kay and I

have been a pretty effective team in our lives And

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. And I remember

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 and the United Nations

and things like that. And she goes all over the

world speaking. But when I first met her, She was shy, retiring,

and 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. And

all of my life I have decided that love believes.

Love encourages. Love says you can do this. And I've

watched her do what she thought she could not do.

And I've watched her become a world class leader and speaker.

And 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 Saddleback Valley.

You've never heard of it. But we're gonna, 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? 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. Yeah.

She actually, 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?

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 wanna love that lasts forever, you wanna love

that lasts forever, you gotta extend grace because we all

need it. But you've also gotta express faith. 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.

Let us always be seeking the ways in which we

can support each other. I know what some of you think. Rick,

they've let me down so many times. The Bible says

love never loses its faith. Okay, they'll let you down.

Love never loses its faith. Coaches, any coach will tell

you the best way to restore confidence after a guy

has dropped the ball or fumbled the ball is 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 say,

my husband's not trustworthy. My wife's not trustworthy. 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. I believe you could do this. Now, I

know what some of you think. You say, 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. 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 gonna 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 eight, 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 problem. Don't

tell him to your boyfriend, your girlfriend, or whoever that is,

guy at work. Tell him to God, because God is

your protection. And God specializes in miracles. And God can

transform anything. And I've seen it thousands of times in

this church. You know, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the famous poet, said,

whoever loves believes the impossible. Why? Because love not only

extends grace. Love extends. 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 people, somebody 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. Love, real love, lasting love, everlasting love,

extends grace and expresses faith. The third thing this verse says,

1 Corinthians 13, seven, it's all in one verse, is

that lasting love expects the best. Lasting love, everlasting love

expects the best. 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. And 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 self-fulfilling prophecy. You're setting them up. Study after

study after study after study has shown that we tend

to act in ways that the people we most value

think we're gonna 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.

university up in the northwest. And when he got there,

they said, we're giving you two English classes and they're

advanced placement classes. He goes, 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 he goes well I

sure hope I get those classes again next year and

one of the other professors said what classes? Oh 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.

Hey, 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.

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

from Jesus Christ. Well, you know, that little devotional grew

and grew and grew, and today, Daily Hope is one

of the largest email devotions in the whole world. And

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. Now, here's the best part.

It's absolutely free, okay? 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. Now, you know,

in a world that's more distracted and uncertain than ever,

I want to help you start your day centered on

what never changes. And what never changes is a God's love,

his unconditional love for you and his promises to you.

You know, 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 and

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

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