Motivating Your Man God's Way: Discover One Word that Energizes Him to Love

We have different vulnerabilities. We can pass judgment on one another all day long or we can say God made us different and that’s ok.

Unconditional respect, like unconditional love, is all about how one sounds (tone of voice and word choice) and appears (facial expressions and physical actions).

Husbands, to energize your wife give her face-to-face time, allowing her to talk and share her feelings.

Your marriage is a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and reverence for Jesus Christ. God is using your spouse to bring you an eternal reward.

As mature men, we need to take leadership and put this out on the table. We must acknowledge our feelings- we need to feel respected. However, as we do this we must acknowledge our wife’s feelings- she needs to feel loved!

Your hunger for God can create an appetite in your children.

Pink and Blue perceptions not only affect seeing, they affect hearing as well. Women hear with pink hearing aids and men hear with blue hearing aids. Even more important to understand as you and your spouse seek to gain better communication, you can hear the very same words, but each of you will hear different messages.

Research shows that 70% of the couples who were extremely unhappy in their marriage, but hung in there and worked through the tough time, identified themselves as being very happy five years later.

We blame people for the bad things we do, but take credit for the good things we do.

You’re the only person in the world who can meet your spouse’s deepest need for love and respect. After all, you alone are married to your spouse.

The parent-child relationship is as easy, and as difficult, as love and respect.

Thank God for joining you together and for allowing you to trust Him to help you, whatever the issue. God is there for you and expects you to look to Him to keep you together as a team, so ask Him for His help in the smallest of concerns. “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” (Matthew 19:6)

We have discovered that as women motivate their man God’s way, men are energized to love them better. It doesn’t matter if your marriage is good or seems like there is no hope. We have seen God move in powerful ways even when things looked hopeless.

Can you begin to trust that God feels love for you even when you don’t feel that love?

Truth will carry its own weight if delivered respectfully and lovingly.

He will feel appreciated when you disagree with him only in private and honor his authority in front of the kids.

Always remember that Pink and Blue have different wiring, different preferences. Assume your spouse has goodwill toward you, no matter what. Both of you can be right, while being different.

As you pray together, you will truly learn to love and respect together.

In the ultimate sense you marriage has nothing to do with your spouse. It has everything to do with your relationship with Jesus Christ.

How we react to a situation reveals more about us than about the other person.

A marriage relationship will be energized when couples learn how to motivate each other God’s way.

Avoid like the plague trying to punish each other as a means of “motivation.” Christ-followers instinctively know that this destroys any opportunity to act out of reverence for Christ. In all marital issues, love and reverence for Christ must be our primary motivation.

Do not live by the standards of Hollywood; trust what God says in His Holy Word.

Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative with lots of love and respect in between.

Do you give yourself grace and your spouse judgment?

Often the apparent issue isn’t the real issue; the real issue is always a matter of love or respect.

No one can really practice Love and Respect unless he or she does it as unto Jesus Christ.

Whose voice are you listening to: Hollywood or God’s Holy Word?

Do you believe that there is a God who really loves you and wants to help you?

This is the Rewarded Cycle: His love blesses regardless of her respect and her respect blesses regardless of his love.

Recognize your different gifts--how each of you (Pink and Blue) functions according to God’s perfect design.

When your wife comes to talk to you, listen to her. Realize she is coming to you because you matter more to her than anyone else. She has certain emotional needs and only you can meet them. Sometimes she may say things that don’t make sense to you and she is apt to misspeak and exaggerate when she is upset, but don’t put her down. Instead, listen to her heart. Give her a chance to express her concerns and, as she does so, don’t try to fix her. Don’t give her your solutions unless she asks for them.

Your marriage is really a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and reverence for your Lord.

To get offended is easy, but to forgive is within your power as you walk in His steps.

A major step toward a happy marriage is accepting differences and working them out with love and respect.

Do you understand that God feels compassion for you, no matter what you have done or what your circumstances may be?

He will feel appreciated when you recognize his problem-solving approach as his male brand of empathy.

Do you seek to understand or only to be understood?

At the very bottom of things, in every case and in every conversation, you can do your marriage a huge favor by assuming she is seeking to feel loved or he is seeking to feel respected and give your spouse some grace!

Men are solution oriented, they love to solve problems. They want to be helpful.

To stay the course in speaking words of Love and Respect, keep your heart in Scripture, trusting in and talking about His promises to help you.

You cannot use unholy means to achieve a worthy end.

Your spouse has a need only you can fill.

[Husbands] the most powerful weapons you have are your ears. Just listen to your wife, and she is much more likely to feel understood.

When others do not respond to our communication, we need to look first at our communication style. Is the other person incapable of hearing what we have to say? Or are we abrupt, brusque, and curt?

No matter how difficult your spouse may be at the moment, your spouse does not have control over your reaction; you do. You may be experiencing disappointment, frustration or anger, but you always have a choice. A wife can choose to be disrespectful or respectful. A husband can choose to be unloving or loving.

The moment we cry to Him for help, He is already pleased. He gives us strength to love our children.

If husbands and wives are to understand the Love and Respect Connection, they must realize that they communicate in code. And the problem is, they don’t know how to decipher the messages they send to one another.

When Jesus said “turn the other cheek,” He wasn’t saying to be passive wimps. He was teaching that physically people can control you but if you turn and give the other cheek, suddenly you’re in control and you’re making the choices.

The woman absolutely needs love, and the man absolutely needs respect. It’s as simple- and as difficult- as that.

To not forgive is to shoot yourself in the foot and put extra gas in the Crazy Cycle.

Although the Crazy Cycle is not what God intends for any marriage, all couples get on it at times from one degree to another.

She’ll feel at peace with you when you let her vent your frustrations and hurts and don’t get angry and close her off.

Your spouse can have a need that you don’t have and that’s okay.

In your marriage be the first to “seek peace and pursue it” (1 Peter 3:11)

The Love and Respect message is not about a husband earning his wife’s respect by being more loving any more than it is about a wife earning her husband’s love by being more respectful. Always love or respect is given unconditionally according to God’s commands.

Unconditional love or respect is never wasted. Hang onto this promise: “Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary” (Galatians 6:9).

When we feel crippling discouragement by the sinful choices and outcomes of our kids, we must not let this permanently deter us from parenting God’s way.

When you’re truly Christ-centered, instead of child-centered, you will be a more effective parent in the long run.

It is hard to be negative while being thankful.

Your marriage is a test of your devotion to Christ.

The key to motivating another person is meeting their deepest need, especially during conflict.

Money squabbles don’t undermine love and respect; they simply reveal unloving and disrespectful attitudes, which are the real reason why a marriage can start to wobble on the Crazy Cycle.

As a wife, if you can start to understand how important your husband’s work is to him, you will take a giant step toward communicating respect and honor, two things that he values even more than your love.

Words of wisdom for all husbands and wives are these: We easily see what is done to us before we see what we are doing to our mate.

There is a plan to parent God’s way, even when our children may seek to go their own way at time. The secret is to follow this plan regardless. When you do, I believe you succeed in His eyes.

Your spouse may meet many of your needs, but your deepest dependency should be on your Lord.

The Lord made women (Pink) and men (Blue) with differences, and He expects us to recognize and deal with those differences in a loving and respectful way.

Positive changes flood a relationship immediately when both husband and wife cancel the blame game!

Often both spouses have goodwill but are not deciphering each other’s code. She criticizes out of love, but he “hears” only disrespect. He distances himself to prevent feelings from escalating, which is the honorable thing to do, but she “sees” only his failure to be loving!

Trusting and obeying God’s Word because we love and reverence God never, ever makes us a hypocrite! When the alarm goes off in the morning, we get up, even when we don’t feel like it getting up. Because we do what we don’t feel like doing, does that make us hypocrites? No, it’s a sign we are responsible people. Showing respectful behavior when we don’t “feel respectful” is evidence of maturity.

Your spouse has a need that you don’t have. Are you going to say there is something seriously wrong with them or will you say “Viva la Difference”?

When you come home after you have been apart, the first few moments of reconnecting will set the tone for the rest of the evening.

“With eyes of faith, envision Jesus standing just beyond the shoulder of your spouse and listening to every word you speak in every conversation, pleasant or tense. When you speak lovingly or respectfully to your spouse, you are speaking to Christ. Your spouse just happens to be there too.” This truth has sanctified the lips of many. Instead of giving their spouse a verbal whipping or choking on the idea of saying anything positive, now some spouses are motivated to speak words of unconditional love or respect.

When a husband feels disrespected, it is especially hard to love his wife. When a wife feels unloved, it is especially hard to respect her husband.

Self-interest should never come ahead of your spouse’s interests.

Responding to offensive words or actions with your own offensive words and actions is damaging and unproductive.

Let the Lord change you, but don’t try to change each other.

Refuse to let evil turn you into a contemptuous and hateful person.

Thank the Lord for all the trouble-free moments in which you and your spouse enjoy Him, each other, your family, your ministry and life as a whole. Ask Him for the strength to accept your measure of trouble, and the wisdom to deal with the annoyances and irritations by loving and respecting each other with new commitment. (You may also want to pray about troubles at work, at church, with the children…) “But those who marry will have trouble in this life” (1 Corinthians 7:28)

When one of you makes a mistake, control any anger you may feel and trust God completely, no matter what happens.

Most marriages will succeed when obeying the command to Love and Respect.

When a wife asks, “Do you love me?” She is not trying to put her husband on the spot. She is simply looking for reassurance.

Your wife will feel esteemed when you speak highly of her in front of others.

Don’t conclude that your spouse is wrong when he/she is seeking to do the right and righteous thing.

The difference between successful couples and unsuccessful couples is that successful ones keep getting up and dealing with the issues.

Though the end can be worthy (to be loved and respected), when each uses unholy means (unloving and disrespectful words and actions), it will not achieve those ends. We must treat others as we expect them to treat us. To deny this makes us arrogant or fools, or both.

A man has a natural, inborn desire to go out and “conquer” the challenges of his world – to work and achieve.

You have to become proactive, rather than just trying to stop the reactive.

We can all have moments of anger, but this does not mean we have to lose control and sin.

We easily see what is done to us before we see what we are doing to our mate.

We might say that every negative action in the family has an equal and opposite negative reaction.

Marriage is a tool and a test to allow God’s will to be revealed in our lives.

Ladies, be careful. “A nagging wife goes on and on like the drip, drip, drip of the rain” (Proverbs 19:13).

It’s true that women have intuition and that men should listen to them. It’s also true that women have blind spots and need the insight of their husbands.

Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean the other person is offensive.

God’s commands are there to help us, not to hinder us or hold us back as male and female.

Be quick to listen and understand and you have a much better chance of being understood.

Assuming goodwill can be revolutionary in relationships.

A parent needs to feel respected, especially during conflicts...A child need to feel loved, especially during disputes.