3 Kinds Of Love You Need To Know by Pastor Kingsley Okonkwo: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Marriage is one of the most powerful things God has placed on the earth, yet many people either do not understand how powerful it is, or understand it a little and are still not maximizing it. The first thing God made Adam to be was a husband and a father. Everything else God had made up to that point, from the stars to the fish, he called good, but when Adam was alone, God said for the first time that something was not good, and the remedy he gave was marriage.

If church, politics, or education were what God believed would change the world, Adam would have been made a pastor, a president, or a professor. Instead, the first thing he was made was a husband and a father. Family always comes first, and even the disruptions of recent years proved it: schools, offices, restaurants, and even churches were shut down at different points, but family could not be shut down, and many marriages that survived on distraction were suddenly exposed to what had been avoided all along.

Study What You Want to Succeed In

Many people are successful doctors and lawyers with unsuccessful marriages, and there is no mystery to it. A person can spend seven years studying law and medicine and zero years studying marriage, and will naturally succeed where they studied and fail where they neglected. Anywhere a person is struggling is usually the area that has not received real attention, no matter how much that person has prayed, complained, or shouted about it.

Men and women carry out many of the same activities for entirely different reasons, and this is one of the biggest sources of friction. For instance, men generally talk for information; women generally talk for affection. A woman may talk to someone because that person matters to her; a man typically talks because he has something specific to convey. Understanding the motive behind an action, not just the action itself, is what allows two people to actually communicate.

Even remarkably intelligent, driven people fail at marriage for the same reason. Around 2019, nine out of the ten richest men in the world had been divorced, not because they were unintelligent, but because they had never given marriage the same disciplined attention they gave their businesses. Skill in one area does not transfer automatically to another; marriage, like any other serious pursuit, has to be learned and trained for rather than stumbled into.

Fake Love and Real Love Are Identical Twins

In 2 Samuel 13, Amnon, the son of David, fell in love with Tamar, his half sister, and became lovesick to the point of illness because she was unavailable to him. His friend Jonadab advised him to feign illness so that Tamar would be sent to care for him. When she came, he sent everyone else away, refused to eat unless she brought the food to his room, then seized her. She pleaded with him not to force her, telling him such a thing should not be done in Israel, but he was stronger than she was and raped her.

What follows the assault is the most telling part of the account: Amnon hated Tamar afterward with a hatred greater than the love he claimed to have felt for her, and told his servants to throw her out. Whatever Amnon called love was never love at all; it could not survive the moment it got what it wanted. This is why fake love and real love can look identical at the start. Almost no one enters a wedding believing they are marrying someone they hate; nearly everyone getting married believes, in that season, that they are in love. The real question is never whether a couple feels love, but which kind of love they are standing on.

There are more than three kinds of love in the broader sense, but three are central to marriage, and English makes them harder to tell apart because the same word "love" is used for a spouse and for a favorite food or football club. Other languages distinguish these clearly; English does not, and that confusion has cost a great many marriages.

The First Love: Attraction

The first kind of love is passion and physical attraction, the kind that makes a man notice a woman's shape or a woman notice a man's voice. It is not a bad thing. Without it, people would never be introduced to each other in the first place, and it is part of why the human race continues. But it was never designed to carry the weight of a marriage on its own.

This kind of love runs largely on brain chemistry, the sense of arousal and interest that makes a person feel completely certain they are in love, even to the point of losing their appetite or their ability to think clearly. That certainty feels real in the moment, but it is not a foundation. Once the underlying want, whether for physical intimacy or emotional reassurance, is satisfied, that chemical intensity naturally recedes, and clearer judgment returns, sometimes too late.

Scripture takes sexual intimacy far more seriously than casual culture does; it belongs to the covenant of marriage. In Hebrews, Esau is called a fornicator, not because fornication is only about premarital sex, but because he traded something of enormous value, his birthright, for something of very little value, a plate of food. Anyone who trades the value God has placed on sexual intimacy for something of far less worth, by having it outside of marriage, is engaging in the same kind of foolish exchange. This is not because God wants to withhold enjoyment; it is because he is protecting something precious from being devalued.

Attraction is real and it matters, but building a marriage decision on it alone, without getting to know a person's character, is building on the weakest of the three loves, because it is the one most easily lost.

The Second Love: Friendship

Titus 2:3-4 instructs older women to train younger women to love their husbands. In the original language, this word for love is different from the first: it is phileo, friendship. Older women, out of experience, were to teach younger women that a husband needs a friend as much as he needs a spouse.

Many marriages struggle because everything gets treated as emotional or romantic, when a husband often simply needs someone he can think out loud with, without every statement being read as a verdict on the relationship. A wife who can let her husband talk through an idea, even an impractical one, without immediately shutting it down, is giving him room to feel heard before she responds with wisdom later, as a partner rather than a critic in the moment.

Friendship is what outlasts attraction, because attraction can fade in a single day, the way it did for Amnon. A couple that has built real friendship still has something to hold onto on the days physical attraction is not what carries the relationship: conversation, shared history, and comfort being fully known by each other. Marry your friend. Build friendship before marriage rather than hoping to develop it afterward, because friendship, not chemistry, is what remains when the first fire of attraction cools.

The Third Love: Sacrifice

Ephesians 5:25 says, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for it." This is a third and different word again: agape, sacrificial love. Where attraction is about being drawn toward what a person wants, and friendship is about mutual enjoyment, sacrificial love is about giving without needing something back, and it does not come naturally. Every human being is more self-interested than they realize, often not discovering it until marriage requires them to set that interest aside.

This kind of love has to be deliberately learned. One practical expression is understanding what each spouse needs most. Many men value acceptance highly: being received as they are in ordinary, non-toxic ways, rather than constantly corrected, builds enough trust that a man becomes willing to grow in the areas that genuinely need to change. Many women value focused attention highly, not a spouse's entire day, but a spouse's full presence in the time they do have together. A husband who is physically present but visibly distracted, phone in hand, is not actually giving the attention a wife's spirit is asking for, and much of what looks like nagging in a marriage is really an unmet need for that attention.

Talking Across the Difference

Sacrificial love also shows up in how a couple communicates through conflict. For a woman trying to reach a man, confrontation rarely works, because many men experience face-to-face confrontation as something closer to a declaration of war rather than an invitation to talk. Raising a hard topic gently, from the side rather than head-on, tends to land far better than a direct challenge. In the same way, leading with what a husband is doing well, rather than what he is failing to do, tends to make him want to do even better; leading with criticism tends to make him dig in and defend himself instead.

None of these three loves is optional, and none is sufficient on its own. Attraction draws two people together, friendship gives a marriage its everyday joy and depth, and sacrificial love is what keeps two imperfect, naturally self-interested people committed to each other for a lifetime. Knowing which one is missing, and deliberately building it, is often the real work behind a marriage that lasts.