Outserve Each Other

Married life is waking up early to preheat your spouse’s car in the winter (and then taking ten dollars out of their wallet as a tip for your services).

“Be ready to do whatever is good.” “Use whatever gift you have received to serve others.” “Serve one another humbly in love.”1

Our contemporary culture holds a dim view of service — we’d rather be served than serve — but

• at some gut-instinct level, we know that putting our spouse’s needs ahead of our own makes for a healthy and enjoyable marriage.

Paul’s counsel to husbands and wives to “submit to one another” sounds like the right thing to do.2 But knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it are two different things. Which is why, just a few verses earlier, Paul gives us the critical how-to: “Be filled with the Spirit.”

Being filled with the Spirit allows us to love others in ways that don’t always come naturally. It empowers us to let go of our self-centered desires and live lives marked by things like patience, goodness, gentleness, and self-control.3 And it marks us with the same self-sacrificing humility that Jesus displayed, whether He was washing His disciples’ dirty feet or, as Philippians 2:8 puts it, humbling Himself and becoming “obedient to death — even death on a cross!”

This Philippians passage, with its call to “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (2:5) — loving as He did, pursuing unity as He did, putting others first as He did — offers a template for our relationships.4 Early in our marriage, Robbie and I heard Dr. Tony Evans talk about what this pattern looked like in his own marriage. Having purposed to value each other’s interests ahead of their own, Evans and his wife began going out of their way to help each other. At some point, Evans said, it became a contest — one he found himself losing.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Evans said with a laugh. “She was outserving me. I had to figure out how to catch up!”

Evans’s message took hold in our hearts, and Robbie and I began looking for opportunities to honor each other. Robbie likes things tidy, and while I knew I couldn’t match his mother’s “get the dust off the top of the refrigerator” talent, the kids and I began playing “beat the buzzer” every night before he came home. I’d set the kitchen timer and we’d scramble to pick up toys and clean the counters. On my good days, I’d even rummage in my purse to find the lip gloss as Robbie’s car pulled into the driveway. (And if I just lost half of the women readers, I’m sorry. But never once did I feel like I was caught in some 1950s time warp. Instead, I saw these little acts of service — and my lips, on some days — as, to use our friend Davis’s word, “beautiful.”)

For his part, Robbie began doing things like vacuuming my (dog-hair-and-Cheerios-infested) car or bringing me coffee — sometimes from an actual coffee shop, which he knows is my love language and counts double on the service scale, since a little part of him dies inside every time he pays for something we can get for free at home.

Somewhere along the way — we can’t pinpoint when — something shifted inside us. We began to truly enjoy these tangible ways to show love and respect. It became, like our friend Lisa says, a “pleasure and a delight.” And although I don’t feel deserving of Robbie’s tenderness, the word he uses for the way he regards me is cherish, and when I noticed that a book by that title had been published, I grabbed it.

“Millions of couples,” writes author Gary Thomas, “have pledged ‘to love and to cherish, till death do us part.’” Most of us understand the love part and the implied vow to serve and commit to one another, but it is the act of cherishing, Thomas says, that “turns marriage from an obligation into a delight. It lifts marriage above a commitment to a precious priority.”5

Serving your spouse — cherishing them as precious — looks different in every marriage. Bob took his children to garage sales on Saturday mornings, not because they needed more stuff, but because it gave his wife, Anne, a chance to have the house to herself at the start of the weekend. Whit turns the bed down every night and puts his wife, Susan’s, iPad on her pillow, since he knows she loves to read. I stopped wearing ruffles (after having an umpteen hundred of them on my puffball of a wedding dress) when I learned (later) that they don’t appeal to Robbie.

None of these things are “grand” gestures. They may go unmarked by everyone but our spouse. And yet

• in a social media age when everyone wants to be seen and noticed, it is exactly these little gifts of time, these self-sacrificing kindnesses, that kindle lasting love in a marriage.

“Real romance,” writes Ann Voskamp, “isn’t measured by how viral any wedding proposal goes — and viral is closely associated with sickness — but it’s the moments of self-forgetfulness: Setting the table at the end of a long day and rustling up some hearty dish for those who have your heart, and then — without any cameras rolling or soundtracks playing — clearing the plates to make your own love perfectly clear — this is the way of robust romance.”6

Robust romance. Isn’t that what we all want? The way to get there isn’t through grasping; it is through yielding. Yielding our plans, our desires, our very self — and submitting out of reverence for the One who is Love Himself to the one whom we cherish.

Remember

Serve one another humbly in love. — Galatians 5:13

Reflect

We love because God first loved us. The more we soak up this truth, the more our love will increase and overflow for our spouse. Think about your own awareness of God’s love for you. Do you sense His delight? Do you feel forgiven? Can you trace a link between your relationship with the Lord and your desire to serve and honor your spouse?

1. Titus 3:1; 1 Peter 4:10; Galatians 5:13.

2. Ephesians 5:18.

3. These traits and the other fruit of the Spirit are listed in Galatians 5:22–23 (ESV).

4. Philippians 2:5.

5. Gary Thomas, Cherish: The One Word That Changes Everything for Your Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 17.

6. Ann Voskamp, Waymaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of (Nashville: W Publishing, 2022), 71.

Excerpted with permission from Praying the Scriptures for Your Marriage by Jodie & Robbie Berndt, copyright Jodie Berndt.

* * *

Your Turn

Are you outserving your spouse? All of us want to have healthy, vibrant, joyful marriages and serving is a wonderful way to cherish your love and strengthen your marriage. What will you do today to show your husband or wife preference? Come share with us! ~ Devotionals Daily