Love Like You Mean It: A Look at the “Love Chapter” With Bob Lepine

For over 25 years, Bob Lepine was my co-host of our daily radio program FamilyLife Today. He remains a good friend and a man who is “like iron sharpening iron” today in my life.  He recently wrote a book, Love Like You Mean It, and I interviewed him on my YouTube channel.  Take a look here and if you love this as much as I do, please subscribe to my channel “Inspiring Courageous Faith.”

Bob and Mary Ann Lepine had been married five years when he lost his job at an Oklahoma radio station. They had a three-year-old daughter, with another child on the way. They would have liked to continue living in Oklahoma, but Bob felt he wanted to work in Christian radio, and he knew they’d probably have to move if a job opened up. 

Sure enough, he was hired by a radio station in Phoenix. He ended up going there first, and while he started his new job he also looked for a new home ... by himself. When he found a home, he didn’t bring Mary Ann out to look at it; he just called and said, “I think I’ve found the place.” And when it came time for the move, he didn’t return to Oklahoma and help her close up the old home and then drive out with her.  So you get the picture … a “rookie” mistake five years into their marriage.

So Mary Ann arrived at a new home in the desert. She was following her husband, but she was definitely not happy, and can you blame her? Bob says, “She just shut down. She went into a hole. ... It was chilly in Arizona.” 

It was the biggest crisis of their young marriage. Bob remembers standing in their backyard one night, looking up at the stars, and thinking, “I understand why people get divorces.”

It was an important milepost in their marriage, “a significant mistake on my part and something I had to learn from.” Bob shared that story in that interview I did recently with him for my YouTube channel.  

Our interview focused on his book, Love Like You Mean It, an examination of 1 Corinthians 13, what many call the Bible’s “Love Chapter.” Growing up, Bob had watched his parents’ marriage and noted some mistakes he didn’t want to repeat whenever he got married. But he never had a picture or a plan of what he should do. 

In that way, he was typical of so many people today who grow up without a good model of a marriage relationship. “So you look at popular culture, you look at the movies, or you look around at other people and you try to pick up clues from all that.” But as a Bible-believing follower of Christ, you can “turn to the Scriptures and see what the Bible tells you about it.”

The core of 1 Corinthians 13 is a beautiful and impossible list of attributes and descriptors of love:

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails ...”

I call this list “impossible” because I know from experience that I’ll never be able to live up to such standards. Who could?

Well, one Person did, and that was Jesus Christ. Every one of those descriptions is a picture of His love for you and for me. And He gives us the strength to love others, in our own imperfect way. As 1 John 4:19 tells us, “We love because he [Christ] first loved us.”

The first descriptor of love in 1 Corinthians 13 is “love is patient.” In our interview, Bob laughed at this and said, “That’s not where I would have started. That’s not very romantic!”

Patience is needed in marriage because we provoke each other so easily. That’s what two people living in close quarters will do, no matter how strong their romance. “If you say you love another person, that [patience] is how that begins to manifest itself,” Bob said. “In face of irritability, in the face of unhappiness and unpleasantness, you endure. You suffer long. You are patient with that person. And if you’re not, you’re not demonstrating love.”

Bob compared this with God’s love for us. “He is long-suffering with us. God is patient ... God’s long-suffering patience with us when we mess up is the model for what our patience for one another ought to look like.”

To illustrate, Bob described how personal strengths become weaknesses when overused. “Mary Ann has high standards,” he explained. “Overused, it turns into a critical spirit. That can cause some irritation when I’m the object” of that critical spirit. 

In his book, he also provides a helpful (and convicting) list of questions to help you self-diagnose your tendency to become impatient in your marriage relationship:

·      Are you easily provoked?

·      Do you find yourself annoyed or angry when things don’t go your way?

·      Are there things your spouse does that are triggers for you? What are they?

·      When you are inconvenienced, do you become irritated?

·      Would your spouse say you can be demanding? In what areas?

·      What do you resent about your spouse?

·      Can you think of things you do that cause your spouse to become impatient or annoyed with you?

·      Are there things your spouse does that cause you to become anxious or nervous?

You may not always receive patience from your spouse, and you may not show it well in return. But “God is superabundant in His supply of love. And if you are out of love for your spouse, it’s because you have not stopped to contemplate God’s great love for you and asked Him to love your spouse through you. You have not allowed God to fill you up freshly with His love.

“When you are filled up with His love, when you’re filled up with His patience toward you, when you’re humbled by his patience toward you, then it enables you more easily to extend patience to someone else.”

That’s just a slice of what Bob Lepine said in the interview about 1 Corinthians 13. To hear more, be sure to watch our two-part interview, now up on my YouTube channel.  You can watch part one here and part two here.

You can order Bob’s book, Love Like You Mean It, at FamilyLife’s website.

Also, Bob and Barbara and I will all be part of FamilyLife’s “Love Like You Mean It” cruise in February. This will be the 15^th sailing of this popular cruise for couples—it’s full of great entertainment, daily worship sessions, and biblical teaching and encouragement for your marriage. And of course, you will explore several exotic Caribbean ports. You can book this unique cruise at lovelikeyoumeanitcruise.com.

This is the real “Love Boat”—hosted by a ministry that is all about helping you with your most important relationships (your marriage and family).  It's one of the best investments you could make in your marriage!