Acts of Service // The Five Love Languages, Part 4

She’s flat out running the kids around, cleaning, cooking, all the stuff she thinks she should do. And he’s just lonely. She never has time for me. He never helps me!

This week on A Different Perspective we’re taking a bit of a look at what it means to communicate our love for one another in the context of marriage. You know I believe that marriage is just one of the most amazing gifts that God can bless us with, but sometimes husbands and wives get so frustrated because they don’t know how to love one another. And that is just so frustrating because you’re doing your best.

You think to yourself, “Man, I couldn’t possibly be trying any harder to love my husband, or love my wife and yet they say they don’t feel like I love them.” And so often it’s because we’re speaking our love to them in one language but they need to hear it in another.

So this week we’re working our way through the fantastic book by Gary Chapman, it’s so insightful, it’s called The Five Love Languages and today, today we’ll be looking at the fourth of those, Acts of Service.

Jesus was visiting two sisters Mary and Martha. Now these young women were really quite different from one another. If you’d like to read the story you can, it’s in Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 10 beginning at verse 38. Jesus comes into their home and Martha, well Martha is working flat out, she’s cleaning the house and cooking the dinner and doing all the things you need to do when you have a guest come into your home.

Mary her sister, on the other hand, Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to what he has to say, she’s glued, she’s riveted and Martha gets pretty frustrated, she says to Jesus, “Don’t you care that Mary’s just sitting there and leaving all the work to me?” Now that’s fascinating because then you see a conflict between two sisters.

Mary obviously loves spending quality time; she’s sitting there with Jesus and she’s doting on what he’s saying. Mary’s primary love language is probably spending quality time with someone.

On the other hand Martha, Martha’s gifting clearly is in Acts of Service. She’s just one of those people who like to do all the busy things and to serve people. Some people are just hard wired doers, they jump up, they help, they cook, they cater, they clean, at home, with friends, at church, at the club, whatever they do, they express their love by serving them.

Now we should all serve. Jesus said it himself, “I’ve come to serve, not to be served” right. But Mary and Martha are clearly wired differently, somehow in their DNA, deep in their character, in their persona, they’re quite different and that’s life, we’re all different.

This week so far, we’ve looked at three primary love languages, that is, that we all receive love in slightly different ways, for some people it’s Words of Affirmation, they experience love when their husband or their wife encourages them and says, “you look fantastic, that was a great meal, thank you so much for doing that for me”.

The second is Quality Time; it’s what we see in Mary, some people experience love most when they and their spouse simply spend exclusive time with each other and focus exclusively on one other, and that quality time is how they drink in one another’s love.

The third one, which we looked at yesterday, is Receiving Gifts. And each one of us has maybe one of the five that we’re looking at this week, which is the main way that we receive love.

Today we’re looking at Acts of Service, and the picture of Mary and Martha is a great one. But imagine if they were Max and Martha, imagine if they were husband and wife. And Martha is your hard wired acts of service type. For her to love is to serve, for her to love is to cook and to clean, for her to love is to do stuff.

But Max, Max is your gentle type, he’s one that loves to spend time together. He doesn’t care if the dishes don’t get done. “We’ll do that later, let's just spend some time together now that the kids are in bed and we’ll do the dishes later.”

You can see how the chips would fly. Martha on the one hand would resent the fact that he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t love me because he doesn’t do stuff, he doesn’t clean up the kitchen, he doesn’t wash up, he doesn’t sweep up, why doesn’t love me? And Max would say, “you know Martha never sits down, she never stops, she’s always doing and rushing, she never has time for me.”

It doesn’t matter how much Martha does for Max and it doesn’t matter how much time Max spends with Martha, neither of them will feel loved, neither of them will feel fulfilled in their marriage relationship. They can do what they do until they’re blue in the face but the other one will still feel unloved.

Let’s get a revelation! That’s because they’re doing and giving the type of love that they need, instead of the type of love that the other one needs. Hello are we listening? This is so blindingly, glimpsingly obvious isn’t it? But we all naturally get this thing wrong. We all naturally try and give the type of love that we want to receive. Natural!

Martha gives love by serving; she wants to receive love by serving. Max gives love by sharing quality time; he wants to receive love by sharing quality time. And if they both just give the sort of love that they want to receive, they will be like ships passing in the night and they will never connect.

My wife Jacqui is hard-wired for Acts of Service, that’s her primary love language and her secondary one is Quality Time. Those are the two that are most important to her, they speak love to her. So in order to do that I have to serve her. Now, Berni is not your acts of service type of person so what do I do? I have to learn, I actually have to learn.

So there are a few things that I’ve done just in the context and I’m going to share these things with you because your context’s different. If you’re married to someone who is an acts of service person and you’re not, you’re going to have to figure out your own. You’re going to have to figure out what works in your family and in your relationship. Here are some of the things that I’ve done.

I thought right early on in our marriage, I could see that Jacqui is someone who serves and I thought, “How can I regularly serve her in a way that matters?” And you may have heard me say this before, so every night when we go to bed, I bring Jacqui a cup of tea in bed every night, very, very rarely we don’t do that. I make a cup of tea for her, I serve her.

And in the mornings I get up very early. I work generally about 6 o’clock in the morning, I’ll go down the stairs, I’ll make her a cup of tea and bring it up to her in bed, and she is woken up with a cup of tea in the morning. Now am I saying that Berni is a fantastic guy? No, I’m not. All I’m saying is that that is one way that I have discovered, that twice a day (at least twice a day) Jacqui is served by me, and you know something? I delight in doing that. That’s from me to her, and no one else can share that, and she is served.

Jacqui ends up doing most of the cooking in our family because I work very long hours. But I love cooking. I love getting in the kitchen. And so once a week I try and get in there and cook her a really nice meal, something she would never think of cooking herself. It’s fun for me and she’s being served.

And every now and then I try and look at something and think, she needs a hand with this, or I can help here, or I can do this and pitch in, and help her unexpectedly. And those things are practical expressions of love that speak to her in a language she understands.

Now in this society of house working kids and house working Mums and changing role of men, it’s not easy to come to grips with this whole service thing. But are you married to someone who’s like this? It’s time to look at what they do. Are they super critical of people who don’t help in practical ways, maybe this is a person who receives love through acts of service?

Specific, regular and unexpected acts of service are what we need to do for a husband or wife like that, in order to say I love you. God wants us to love one another, God wants marriage to be the most amazing blessing. But we have to learn what it is that blesses the soul mate that God has given us.