Last week Sunhee and I had a lunch meeting with a young, dating couple. We were in a cafe, and I was about to order food for us. When I asked her what she wanted, she said, “Don’t order me anything, just let me have a couple bites of your sandwich.”
I immediately protested: “No, baby; let me order you your own sandwich, and whatever you don’t eat, I’ll eat.” But she insisted, “No, I don’t want my own sandwich, and I definitely don’t want you to eat two sandwiches. Just let me have a bite of your sandwich.” Simple enough, right? But I said, “No.”
What? She can’t have a bite of my sandwich? What the heck is wrong with me? Am I on crack or something? When I told Pastor Daniels about this, he said, “You know, Benjamin, you are so good at wanting to do big things for your wife . . . taking her to New York, buying her a car . . . but what she is longing for is the little things. You say that you’re willing to lay down your life for her, but you’re not even willing to give her a bite of your sandwich!”
What I realized through this experience was that I still have a long way to go before I can say that I love my wife the way Christ loved the church. In this season, God is requiring that I learn how to truly lay down my life for my wife, and I think the surrender of the sandwich is as good a place to start as any!
I’ve recently discovered the deeper meaning of 1 John 4:18, which says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear . . .” I used to think that it meant that when I experience fear its because I don’t know how perfectly I am loved. Being perfected in love in this sense means knowing in the deepest way possible that I am eternally loved by my Father, and that there is nothing I can do to escape the grip of that love. But now I see this verse in a different light.
Fear is the anticipation that someone will take from me something that I am not willing to give. Perfect love is the willingness to lay down my life for others . . . it is essentially the act of complete self-surrender. If I walk in love, then I walk in self-surrender; there is nothing that I am not willing to give, because I have already given my all. I have been crucified with Christ, as Paul says, and I no longer live. Perfect love, or mature love, is a life-style of self-surrender . . . it is the refusal to live for the purpose of self-preservation.
Jesus said that if we try to save our lives, we’ll lose them. This is true on a number of levels. I find that the arguments I’ve had again and again with my wife have always been the result of my desire to get something from her that she was not willing to give, or preserve something for myself that I feared that she would desire to take from me. So much fear has gone into my interactions with my wife, and that fear is the reason why she has walked away from these interactions feeling unloved.
No fear in love; love without fear. You don’t have to take anything from me; I freely lay it down. I can freely give because I’ve freely received, and because I know the freeness of his indescribable gift, I don’t have to fear losing anything. I can give, and give, and give, and not be diminished in any way, because he gives more grace, and his grace is greater than my sacrifice.
I’m learning to be a real husband now. Next, I’ll learn to be a real shepherd, because (as Pastor Daniels says so often), these are the two realms in which God requires a man to lay down his life; first as a husband, and then as a shepherd.
Love = the surrender of the sandwich. What is the sandwich in your life that you struggle to lay down?
