The subject of love! About 635 times, the word finds itself in quotations from around the world (Bartlett, John. Familiar Quotations. Edited by Justin Kaplan, 16th ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992, pp.1110-1114).
I have a 1977 poster by Jan on the wall of my office. It pictures an older sister and younger brother standing at the school bus stop in the pouring rain. The older sister is holding an umbrella for her younger brother so he won’t get soaked. The caption on the poster reads, “Love is something you do.” Here is one meaning of the word, love.
The word group love is used 374 times in the Bible. And the meaning fits exactly the caption on Jan’s poster. That’s probably why the poster is on my office wall.
However, the secular world has defined love in other terms: feelings, affection, and passion. Those word groups appear six, five, and three times respectively in the Bible—few, if any, in the context of love. You can readily see from the comparison of word frequency between the secular and biblical that biblical love is distinctly different from secular love.
In fact, one might be surprised to know that nowhere in the New Testament is a wife commanded to love her husband despite what popular secular-marriage vows exchanged at marriage ceremonies promise. Husbands, on the other hand, are commanded to love their own wives.
From personal observation, I believe strongly that believing wives do love their own husbands—even though not directly commanded to do so. How does this happen?
Quite simply, really. The believing wife is commanded to be filled with the Spirit, i.e., to be under the control of the Spirit. And we are told that the fruit of the Spirit (His ministry in us) is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, meekness, and self-control. So a believing wife does, in fact, love her own husband with God’s love by virtue of the Spirit’s activity within her.