Committed love is learned by practice, not by having the right feelings first. You decide on commitment before the feeling arrives, and you rehearse it in friendships and families where less is on the line, long before a marriage asks for it. Over four sittings you will look at the model of love you inherited, test it against Scripture and against a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and BJ Thompson, and try one concrete discipline each week.
You can work through it alone with a notebook or with a small group meeting four times. Each sitting has a reading, a short piece of the conversation to think with, a practice for the days in between, and questions to discuss. Thompson has been married fifteen years, has three children, and works with singles and couples on becoming healthy people and healthy partners. He says plainly that his own first five years of marriage were hard. Nobody needs a perfect history to begin.
First sitting: the picture you were handed
Before you read anything, take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write what I saw. List three or four relationships you watched closely growing up: parents, grandparents, an aunt and uncle, neighbors, a couple at church. Write one concrete thing you remember about how each pair handled a hard moment. On the right, write what I concluded. Next to each memory, write the lesson about love you absorbed from it, even if nobody ever said it out loud. Keep this sheet. You will return to it in the fourth sitting.
Now read Ephesians 5:31-32. Paul quotes Genesis and then says, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). Notice what the verse assumes. It uses something visible, a husband and wife joined as one flesh, to explain something invisible, the bond between Christ and his people. A comparison only teaches if the reader has seen the first half of it.
Lisa Fields named that problem when she opened the conversation: “a lot of people haven’t seen a lot of healthy marriages, so they don’t have a point of reference even for that passage to make the connection.” Whatever your sheet shows, it does not decide whether you are able to love well. The point is not to grade your family. It is to see which conclusions you are carrying without having chosen them.
Thompson describes his work with singles the same way. He asks people what they learned from home and from the wider culture, so that what is off can be corrected and what is healthy can be affirmed. “Until you deal with what’s behind you, you can’t actually move forward in a healthy way,” he says. Looking back is not wallowing. It is how you find out what you are building on.
Practice for the week. Thompson recalls a mentor’s line: “You’ll only become what you behold.” His advice is to “get yourself around a person in real time.” So this week, ask one person whose marriage or long friendship has lasted to tell you about a season when staying was hard. Ask what they did, not how they felt. Listen more than you talk, and do not press for anything they would not want to share.
For discussion:
- Look at the right-hand column of your sheet. Which conclusion about love do you most want to keep, and which one are you least sure is true?
- Paul explains Christ and the church by pointing to marriage. If a reader has rarely seen a healthy marriage, what else in Scripture or in life could fill in that first half of the comparison, and what might be lost if nothing does?
If you lead a group, make clear that nobody has to read their sheet aloud or name a family member. Someone may discover that the right-hand column is mostly loss. Let that be said without rushing to fix it.
Second sitting: when the feeling leaves
Begin by reporting back. What did you hear from the person you asked? Did anything in their account surprise you?
Then read Ephesians 5:25: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” Paul is describing how a husband loves, but notice the measure. It is not intensity of emotion. It is Christ giving himself. Some Christians read this verse mainly as a command about the husband’s role; others stress what it shows about the shape of all Christian love. On either reading, the model is self-giving that holds whether or not the beloved is easy to love that day.
Thompson’s answer to whether love is enough to keep a marriage together follows the same order. “You have to be committed first before you feel a feeling of love,” he says. He admits that some days he is taken with his wife and other days he does not want to be around her, and he names the trouble plainly: “the problem with what I feel is what I feel changes from day to day, it changes from moment to moment.” If the feeling decides, it will eventually walk him out of the room.
Lisa Fields adds an idea worth testing: “unconditional love is on the other side of forgiveness and reconciliation.” Commitment is what keeps two people present long enough to reach the other side of a real wrong. Without it, love never gets the chance to stop being conditional.
Thompson also says money is rarely the root of couples’ fights. “I think it’s pride that breaks up couples,” he says, and under the argument about the bill he hears a question about whether the other person is actually committed. When someone asks about leaving, he turns them inward first: “you focus on you, you focus on what it looks like for you to grow in a season.” Test that carefully. Looking at your own pride and immaturity is not the same as accepting blame for another person’s harm. It is honest self-examination in an ordinary, difficult marriage, not an instruction to absorb mistreatment.
That is why one boundary belongs here. Thompson’s examples concern the ordinary swings of affection, selfishness and stress. He was not describing abuse, and nothing in this sitting asks anyone to stay in danger or to fix themselves before they are safe. If a relationship involves fear, threats or violence, the right next step is safety and trusted help. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. A leader who hears this kind of disclosure should set the guide aside, care for the person privately, and connect them with a pastor or licensed counselor.
Practice for the week. Choose one close relationship: a spouse, a sibling, a friend, a roommate. Each evening for seven days, write two short lines. First, how warm you felt toward that person that day. Second, one thing you did for them or with them. At the end of the week, compare the lines. On which days did your actions run ahead of your feelings? On which days did a cold feeling quietly cancel something you would otherwise have done?
For discussion:
- Think of a recent conflict in any close relationship. What were you arguing about on the surface, and what question about trust or pride might have been sitting underneath it?
- Thompson puts commitment before feeling. Where does that order seem freeing to you, and where does it seem risky? What would make the difference?
Third sitting: practice where less is on the line
This time, start with a task before any reading. Take two minutes in silence. Write the name of one friendship, family relationship or roommate situation where a small friction has gone unaddressed. Under it, write one sentence you could say to open a repair conversation, naming your own part first. Keep both lines; you will use them this week. Then glance back at your two-line log from the last sitting and note whether that same relationship showed up there.
Now read Luke 16:10: “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.” Then read Matthew 25:14-30, the parable of the talents, and look at verse 21, where the master says, “thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.” Both passages are about stewardship in God’s kingdom, not marriage directly. Thompson applies the principle to relationships, and the application is a reasonable one: faithfulness is trained in small trusts.
He puts it in a phrase: “how we practice is how we play.” Unresolved conflict with a roommate or friend does not vanish at a wedding. It travels. The sentence you just wrote is that kind of practice.
Next read 1 Timothy 5:1-2: “Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger men as brethren; The elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity.” Paul assumes men and women in the church relate as family. Thompson says the church has often missed this: “we’ve only taught one gear of love,” the romantic one. He admits he once kept such strict distance that he did not know how to be around a woman except as a husband. Now he keeps clear boundaries while treating women as family: “I’m literally engaging you as my sister. I’m not crossing the boundaries.”
He names the cost of getting this wrong: “we starve one another of healthy affirmation.” People who never hear honest, non-romantic honor can mistake the first compliment from anyone for something far bigger, which leaves them exposed to people with bad intentions. Thompson also reads Matthew 22:30, “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven,” as a sign that the family of God outlasts marriage. Jesus’ main point there answers a trick question about the resurrection, so treat this as an inference, but a careful one: marriage belongs to this age, and brotherly and sisterly love goes on.
Practice for the week. Have the repair conversation you drafted. Speak with humility and aim for repair rather than winning. Then tell one brother or sister in Christ something specific and true you admire in their character, such as their patience, honesty or courage. Keep it plain and clearly non-romantic. If you are married, it is fine to mention your spouse.
For discussion:
- How do you usually handle friction with a friend: repair it, avoid it, or drift away? What would that habit look like if it carried into a marriage?
- What makes honest affirmation between men and women in your church feel natural, awkward or risky? What boundaries would make it feel safe and still warm?
Leaders of mixed groups should expect some laughter and some discomfort here. Keep the conversation on what healthy affirmation sounds like, not on anyone’s dating life.
Fourth sitting: enough before any status
Report back briefly on the repair conversation and the affirmation. What did each one cost you? What did you notice in the other person’s response?
Read Luke 10:17-20. The disciples return thrilled that demons submitted to them, and Jesus redirects them: “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). Their worth rests on what God has done, not on what they have achieved. Thompson applies this to single people who feel unfinished: worth, value and love are already given because of what God has already done.
He does not erase the difference between singleness and marriage. He calls them different kinds of sanctification, and says marriage adds a visible person through whom God shows you yourself. But the goal is shared: “The punchline is, do you look more like Jesus?” Lisa Fields points out that Jesus and Paul, two figures Christians look to most, were both single.
Now take out the sheet from the first sitting. Read the right-hand column again. Beside each conclusion, write what you now think is true, based on three weeks of reading and practice. Some lines may not change. That is honest too. At the bottom, write one sentence describing the kind of love you intend to practice next, whether you are single, dating or married.
For discussion:
- Which line on your sheet changed most over these four weeks, and what moved it: a passage, a conversation, or something you did?
Lisa Fields closed the original conversation by tying all of this to defending the faith. If you cannot love your friends or family, she said, you may need to stop rehearsing the right information and “go actually practice it, because that’s gonna be a better defense for the Christian faith.” Where people have seen too little covenant love up close, an ordinary friendship that holds through repair supplies part of the missing picture.