Rick Warren - Growing a Love That Lasts—Part One

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.

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's never, never, never, never,

never going to change in your life. And it is

God's unconditional, unrelenting, undiminished, everlasting love for you. That It's

what you can build your life on. That's the foundation

for a stable life. God's love is reliable. It is unchangeable.

It is consistent. It is dependable. It's steadfast. It's unwavering.

It's enduring. The fact that God will never, never, never

love me anymore than he does in this moment, and

he will never, never, ever love me any less than

he does in this moment means that God's love for

you and for me is everlasting. 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. Hello? What? No, no, no,

I want the conditional love for me to give out.

You gotta earn my love. No, God says, I want

you to love with a love that lasts on and

on and on. John chapter 15, if you pull out

John 15 · chapter mention

your message notes, The very first verse, Jeremiah 31, verse three,

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, by

the way, in the same way that I love you. Hmm. Hmm.

How in the world do you do that? How do

you practice everlasting love? I mean is it even possible

to have everlasting love? Today in America the divorce rate

is 41% for first time marriages. It's 60% for second

time marriages. And the divorce rate for third time marriages

is 73%. The track record gets worse. It gets worse.

Now the truth is, anybody can fall in love, you know,

it's like falling in a ditch. I fell in love.

Anybody can fall in love, but it takes a whole

lot more to stay in love. Everybody wanna agree with

that one? Okay, it's a whole lot harder to stay

in love than to fall in love. And 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 and over

and 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? Okay, look at this, 25 years or longer,

look at this. Okay. Congratulations. I honor you. Now, if

you have been married over 40 years, stay standing. Look

at this, 40 years. All right. Thank you. Now, if

I were to ask each of these, you may be seated.

If I were to ask each of these people who've

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. I said, I'm proud of you, honey.

She said, I'm tired of you too. The hearing is

the first thing to go, you know. 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 was their love. If they've been

married 25 years or longer, their love has been tested

by doubt and depression and despair and differences and disagreements

and disappointments and defeats and their love has been tested

by distance and it's been tested by delays and dead

ends and by debt and by disease and by demands

on their life because it's not easy to stay together

These are what I call the big Ds, doubt, despair, death, disease,

all these things. But they avoided the big D, divorce.

They made it over that one. And 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, whoo-hoo. Yeah,

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.

I'm trying, Daddy. You can't force the feelings. Feelings are

just there. You can't command a feeling. Love is not

a feeling. It produces feelings. 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, and I know you do, and as

your pastor, 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're ever married or not. Friendships, partnerships, marriages, families,

all the other kinds of relationships there are. You can't

live in a world without love, whether you're ever married

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 1 Corinthians chapter 13. It's called the love chapter.

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

And we're gonna in just a minute look at what

God says are the four things, 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. 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse seven says this.

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

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. 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. Choice for a lasting love is that

lasting love extends grace. Lasting love extends grace. I wanna

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, taking each other for granted. Every day,

if you're gonna have a love that lasts, you've gotta

choose to be merciful, choose to be loving, choose to

be gracious, choose to forgive, choose to be patient, choose

to cut people slack. No relationship, whether it's marriage or

any other, no relationship is gonna last without grace, without

a little bit of forgiveness, without a lot of acceptance

and a lot of patience. In any long-term relationship, you

have to put up with a lot, right? I saw

some elbows jab just then. 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. I'm a big enough guy. It's no big

deal to forgive a person, to show grace, to show

patience one time. It's that thing that goes on and

on and on and on and on and just irritates

you no end. But the Bible says this. Love never

stops being patient. The message says love puts up with anything.

The Bible says love patiently accepts all things. The Bible

says love is always ready to make allowances. Now, when

do I need to extend grace to the people in

my life? Three important times. You need to write these down.

Three important times you need to work on. This is

a choice you're going to have to make every day

of your life. You're going to have your relationships last.

Showing grace. The first time is I'm gonna have to

show or extend grace when their flaws and their faults

irritate me. I heard a murmur in the land just now.

When their flaws and their faults irritate me. Now 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 gonna 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, coworkers, and on and on and on. We

need grace. Proverbs 17, verse nine. Disregarding another person's faults

preserves love. I love that. I remember hearing one time

a lady talking to another lady in church and she said,

do you remember when your husband did that? And 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. I distinctly remember forgetting

that event. Why? Because love disregards. 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? You'd say probably, yeah, I do.

Do you consider yourself to be a humble person? Yeah,

I just wrote a book on it, it's a bestseller.

How to be humble like me. Do you consider yourself

to be a gentle person? Well, the truth is, you're

none of those if you're critical of other people's faults

and flaws. You are not humble if you are critical

of other people's faults and flaws. You are 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. These people need something better

than this. Surely somebody could teach this better than me.

Why don't you get somebody who really knows how to

do this? And I'm always going through this every week going,

you know, pre-message syndrome. And then the other time she

shows grace is on Monday when I'm recovering. Huh. 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 do things, 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. We're not paying attention to other people's lives.

You might write this on your outline. Grace listens. Grace listens.

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. You know 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 listen.

When you look at people in the eye and you

listen to them with your ear, you're saying, I value you.

And that says, I love you. And it makes you gracious.

The problem we have in all our relationships is we

talk too much and we listen too little. You know,

I grew up in the country and we actually had

a lake behind our house and it was filled with

French frogs who would croak every night. Did you know

that bullfrogs, when they croak, they have a muscle up

in their throat that when they croak, that muscle 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, talking, talking, talking,

and we're not listening, and we can't even hear it. Now,

I used to do marriage counseling. I can't do it

anymore because our church is just so big. But when

I did, the single most important marriage advice I could

give you for the rest of your life is the

next verse. James chapter one verse 19, it's up here

on the screen. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow

to speak, and slow to become angry. If every married

couple followed that verse, 95% 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. It's not a convenient choice.

But that's a loving choice. It's an unselfish choice. And

if you wanna have a love that lasts forever, you

gotta learn how to be quick to listen and slow

to speak. So slow to have, instead of being angry.

Now if you want a love that lasts, You can't

hold on to those anchors. 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 not

only stockpile, they not only remember every hurt they've done,

they categorize them. They inventory them. They get them all

ready so then later when they do a mistake, they go, well,

you did this, but you did this, but you did this,

but you did this, but you did this, but you

did this. I was talking to a lady the other day,

and she said, man, you know, I did something wrong,

and my husband got historical. I said, you mean hysterical?

And he said, no, no, historical. He told me everything

I've ever done wrong. The Bible says love keeps no

record of wrongs. You gotta let it go. Proverbs 17,

verse nine, love forgets mistakes, nagging about them parts the

best of friends. If you want your marriage to last,

you gotta eliminate nagging. It doesn't work. It's never changed

into anybody, which is, by the way, why I don't

nag you. 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, because I

know it. I see you. I read your mail. And

I could get up here, and I could just nag

you every week. Has nagging ever changed anybody? No, it doesn't.

It's worthless. It doesn't work in church. It doesn't work

at home. It doesn't work at school. It doesn't work

at work. It doesn't work anywhere. Nagging parts the best

of friends. The Bible says love forgives all offenses. And

there on your outline, Proverbs 19, 11, when someone wrongs you,

it is a great virtue to what? Circle that. Ignore it.

Just ignore it. That's extending grace.

Hey, thanks for listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Here's

Rick with an important message.

You know, 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, everybody, and please be sure to join me

next time as we look into God's Word for our

Daily Hope.

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