All We Need is Love & Respect
Do you remember the Beatles song: All You Need is Love. Here is the chorus…
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
According to God’s Word love is absolutely vital when it comes to relationships because God is love (1 John 4:16). The Apostle Paul said, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13). But there is another part that can really make a drastic impact in our relationships that makes that song only half true. Love is a vital element in our life and our relationships as Christ-followers, but so is respect.
The Bible tells us that we should honor or respect everyone in 1 Peter 2:17
“Show respect for all people: Love the brothers and sisters of God’s family”
Every human being bears the image of God, and therefore we are called, and should, respect others if only because of that. As a Christ-follower we must know that the Bible teaches us to love others, “Do not owe people anything, except always owe love to each other” (Romans 13:8). Jesus makes it clear in who those people are we are to love in the story of the Good Samaritan in which He explains they are the people who God has placed right in front of us (Luke 10:29–37).
We are called to love everyone (including enemies), but we will drastically change a relationship when we respect them simply because of who they are. Imagine how that could drastically change all of our relationships if ‘love and respect’ became the baseline of what all of our relationships were built on.
Both love and respect are potent individually, but together can restore even the most damages and broken relationships. The Bible teaches that God’s kind of love is efficacious, and this kind of respect is powerful. Maybe that is way Paul emphasizes this idea of love and respect when it comes to a marriage relationship…
“This is a profound mystery–but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” Ephesians 5:32-33
Dr. Emerson Eggerichs book, Love and Respect, is talks about this biblical truth. He says, “Men run on respect, and wives run on love. In saying this, remember that we are talking about emphasis. On a basic level, everyone needs to be loved and everyone needs to be respected. But when Scripture singles out husbands and wives living together, the men are told to love and the women are told to respect. Flip this around, and you see that men should remember that their wives need to be loved, and their wives should remember that their husbands need to be respected. In the same way that a woman longs to be loved, a man longs to be respected. In fact, if a woman feels loved she will likely respect her husband. And if a man feels respected, he will naturally show love to his wife.”
Begin to empower and change your spouse through love and respect. As we would begin to show love (agape, active, no strings attached love) along with respect for others (for who they are not if they agree with you), then we will begin to build relationships in light of the cross and the reason Christ came.
