I was talking with a young man yesterday who thought I was "whipped" when I shared with him that my job as a husband was to serve my wife. I tried to explain that once you get married it is no longer about what you can get, but rather about what you can give.

Love is laying down your life, like Christ, and serving the needs of someone else. Needless to say, judging by this young man's response, he didn't believe me. He felt, like many people feel frankly, that you can't allow people to take advantage of you. It sounds good to serve your spouse, but in the end, you'd better make sure your spouse is serving you back.

But I pressed forward with this young man, who is in his mid twenties, and asked him, "Which is more powerful, to take something or to give something?" I was starting to feel like a wise Chinese sage at this point in our conversation. Of course, he didn't know what I was getting at, and if I'm completely honest, I'm not sure I knew either.

The young man was convinced that I was being completely ridiculous to believe that you should serve people no matter how they treat you. I gave him another example in my life recently when someone got upset about an issue, and instead of getting back at them, I ended up turning the other cheek. I don't have a lot of these examples, so before I ran out of them I quickly turned to a much better example, and I want to share this with you, because I've never used it before, and it literally turned this young man's life upside down.

If you truly want to understand the lasting power and change of a servant's style of love, then all you have to do is look at the very different lives of two men with similar desires, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. Both men wanted liberty and equal rights for black people, but each man went about change in radically different ways.

Martin Luther King Jr. chose the path of unconditional love and peace while Malcolm X chose a more aggressive and violent approach. I explained to the young gentleman that Martin Luther King Jr. followed Christ's example of turning the other cheek. During an interview after being released from a hospital after a beating a reporter asked why he didn't fight back, and Martin Luther King Jr. basically said that he refused to replace one tyranny with another. He believed in what Christ taught and he applied that to his life and to what he taught his followers.

I looked at the young man and said, "Who do you learn about in school today when it comes to civil liberties for black people?" He answered somberly. "Who has a street named after him in every major town and city across this country?" He answered somberly.

Perhaps the best part of this illustration was, when I tried to get him to tell me at the beginning of my illustration who the other man was who was fighting for the rights of black people (i.e. Malcolm X), he couldn't think of his name! I simply looked at him smiling and said, "You're only helping me with my point."

When I finally climbed down from my sermon box, I highlighted history for him. The people we remember most, or at least celebrate the most, are the people who sacrificed the most. Christ leading the charge.

He got the point.

For more articles and advice from Michael Smalley please visit his website www.crashintolove.com.

© Copyright 2007 Smalley Relationship Center

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