Daily Verse
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Christlike Love in the Home
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Sunday's Reflection
Ephesians 5:25 — Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.
The home is where love either proves itself or exposes itself. It is easy to be kind to strangers, patient with colleagues, generous with people we want to impress. The people who live with us see something different. They see us before coffee. They hear the tone we use when we are tired. They notice what we do when no one else is looking. The home is not where we perform love — it is where we actually practice it.
Paul sets a standard for love in the home that is not merely nice or warm or polite. He sets it at the level of Christ. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church — and gave Himself for it. That is not affection when convenient. That is sacrifice. That is putting another person's wellbeing so consistently ahead of your own that it costs you something real. And while Paul addresses husbands here directly, the principle runs in every direction — parents toward children, children toward parents, brothers and sisters toward one another. The home is meant to be the place where the love of Christ takes its most visible, most daily, most costly form.
This week we will look at what that actually looks like — in a man who gave up his career to push his wife's wheelchair, in a woman who crossed a border out of loyalty to her mother-in-law, in a mother who prayed for her children one by one in a chaotic household, and in Paul's famous description of what love looks like when it is the real thing. The question is simple and uncomfortable: does the love of Christ actually show up in how we treat the people closest to us?
"Home should be made all that the word implies. It should be a little heaven upon earth, a place where the affections are cultivated instead of being studiously repressed. Our happiness depends upon this cultivation of love, sympathy, and true courtesy to one another." (Ellen G. White, The Adventist Home, p. 15)
Prayer: Father, convict us gently where love has become a performance we save for outside the home. Give us the grace to treat the people closest to us with the same love Christ showed the church — sacrificial, patient, and real. Amen.