My wife Janet and I are normal human beings. And, as a married couple, we sometimes have some pretty strong disagreements. That’s just part of being married for over 26 years!
In fact, we’re still adjusting and working on our relationship because good relationships don’t just happen. You have to work at them. But what I can tell you is our marriage is better now than it was 26 years ago. And if Jesus tarries, we’re expecting it to grow richer with every passing year.
Yes, a good marriage takes work. It takes understanding. And to help us make it all it can be, God has given us a blueprint in His Word about how to make a marriage really work.
I don’t have space here to go into everything God says about how to make a marriage truly exceptional. But what I do want to do is give both husbands and wives some principles that will go a long way in turning up the flame of romance in your marriage. These timeless truths are found in the Old Testament book, the Song of Solomon.
The Song of Solomon is all about romance in marriage. Among other things, it very clearly shows that God intends for sexual intimacy in marriage to be rich, exciting, and fulfilling.
What I want to look at first are two different passages from the Song of Solomon that apply to men. The first is found in chapter 2.
In this chapter, Solomon is courting his lover and showering his new love with compliments. But what’s most important to understand is that these compliments don’t stop with this chapter. In fact, at the end of the book, Solomon is still showering his love (who by this time is his wife) with compliments!
Even though they’re married, Solomon is still showering his lover with the same expressions of love and affection that he did when he was courting her. And I think we guys could take a cue from that!
But there’s another truth that is equally powerful. Solomon shows us that in a healthy marriage we must not only say the same things we once did, we must also continue to do the same things.
In Song of Solomon 2:6, the woman says, “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me.” Then in chapter 8, at the end of the story when a lot of time has elapsed, and they are married and their relationship has matured, the woman says, “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me.”
Men, if you want your marriage to be sweet, you need to do the same things and say the same things you did when you were trying to win your wife. It doesn’t stop!
We need to work harder at this and not take our girls for granted. We need to encourage them… love them with our words… and go back and do the first works. We need to do some of the things we did when we were trying to win their love if we want to keep our marriages fresh!
Now ladies, I have a word of encouragement for you as well.
In Song of Solomon chapter 7, we find the Shulamite woman putting a lot of thought into her and Solomon’s love relationship. She says, “Come, my beloved, let us go forth to the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine has budded, whether the grape blossoms are open, and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love. The mandrakes give off a fragrance, and at our gates are pleasant fruits, all manner, new and old, which I have laid up for you, my beloved” (vv. 11-13).
Here we see that the wife has done some advance-planning for a little love retreat!. What she’s saying here is, “I’ve put some thought into this. I’m going to give my love to you when we have some private time away.”
My encouragement to the wives here is this: don’t let your romance with your husband get old, stale, predictable or boring. I know guys are supposed to be the godly aggressors and pursuers in a relationship, but there are a lot of creative ways you can respond to that.
Like I mentioned before, there’s a lot more I could share from God’s Word about intimacy in your marriage. It’s my prayer that you will let these truths from the pages of Scripture fan the flame of romance with your spouse… so that your marriage can be everything God intended for it to be!
Answers with Bayless Conley broadcasts practical teachings of the Bible to its viewers in a non-religious way. For years, Bayless Conley struggled with drugs and alcohol while searching for answers. It was not until he was more than 20 years of age that a 12-year-old boy showed him the powerful reality of a relationship with Christ. Since 1979, the Lord has opened the television airwaves to the Answers program, which currently airs each week in more than 100 nations around the world.