Love and Respect Part 1

Love and Respect By Emerson Eggerichs

God has used this book to drive home some points He has been trying to teach me. I HIGHLY recommend it! I’d like to share some excerpts with you! We MUST respect our husbands UNCONDITIONALLY.

Ephesians 5:33 Let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband






Paul isn’t making a suggestion, he is giving a command from God!

Wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the chaste and respectful behavior of their wives. 1 Peter 3:1-2





Peter is not calling wives to feel respect, but to show RESPECTFUL BEHAVIOR.

Wives are made by God to love and want love and expect love. Husbands were made to respect, to want respect and to expect respect.
Without love from him she reacts without respect, without respect from her he acts without love. The author calls it the "crazy cycle".

It is rarely the content of what is being said, but the manner of delivery that causes the problems. Wives need to work on how they say things as much as they focus on what they say.

Give your husband unconditional respect in tone and expression.Even if he deserves contempt, that wont win him anymore than anger and harshness will win your heart.

The key to creating fond feelings of love in a husband towards his wife is through showing him unconditional respect. Respect does something to the soul of a man. God made him that way. The way to fully love a husband is to respect him in ways that are meaningful to him.

When a problem arises and something feels unloving, the wife instinctively moves toward the husband to share her feeling. Her goal is that both of them will apologize and embrace. Her heart longs to resolve things, then reconcile. Her husband matters ore to her than anyone else on earth. She truly thinks her confrontation is a compliment ( a way to help him be even better). She thinks "oh, if he could only see my heart".

We easily see what is done to us before seeing what we have done to our mate.




Just because you may feel unloved, it does not mean your husband is trying to send you that message.

Trusting and obeying God’s word because we love and reverence God never, ever makes us hypocrites. When the alarm goes off in the morning we getup, even if we dont feel like it. Does that make us hypocrites? No, it shows we are responsible. Showing your husband respectful behavior when we do not feel like it is maturity, not hypocrisy.

When men hear negative criticism, it doesn’t take long for them to start interpreting that as contempt for who they are as men…he starts to think "I dont deserve this kind of talk, everybody respects me but you. You’re just picking a fight. I wish you would just be quiet." When the husband can take it no longer, he gets up and walks out without a word.
The wife sees this as "he might as well have screamed at the top of his lungs "I don’t love you". She criticized out of love, but he hears only disrespect. He distances himself to prevent things from escalating, which is the honorable thing to do, and all she sees is his "failure to be loving".

Men want to avoid conflict, but leaving a conflict unresolved only upsets a wife more. The husband needs to know the wife MUST talk about what is eating her. As she vents her feelings, she is not trying to attack her husband personally, she is trying to make the marriage work. if you stay with her as she does this even though it is uncomfortable for you, she will calm down. If you shut her down and stonewall her, she will become more edgy and the conflict will escalate.

More to come soon. I feel this book is a valuable tool for all marriages!