A Different Perspective Official Podcast

Love is something that begins in the heart. So is hatred. In fact, just about everything we say and do on the outside, begins with what's happening on the inside. The same holds true for – worship.
One of the things that we all kind of know is that the great achievements that we have on the outside all start on the inside. Somewhere deep in her heart a little girl dreams of being a great athlete. She nurtures that dream. Every morning she's up at 4.00 am to go to training, day after day, month after month, year after year. It's that thing that's been going on in her heart that sustains her; it drives her to achieve her very best even when the odds are stacked against her.
Everything that happens on the outside, everything we do and say begins on the inside. It has its genesis in our hearts. It's true in every aspect of our lives, work and family and social and spiritual.
The heart is an important place. You know one of the most common things talked about right throughout the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, over 540 times is the heart. Several times Jesus made the point that who we are on the outside is a reflection of what's going on in our hearts. Matthew, chapter 12, verse 34:
For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.
And again in Matthew, chapter15, verse 18:
But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart and these make us unclean. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man unclean.
You see for me, here's the biggest danger in thinking about worship. "Well, I go to Church most Sundays, we sing songs therefore I worship then I go home." It's kind of like saying, "Well I live in the same house and I sleep in the same bed as my wife" or maybe your husband, "I peck them on the cheek each morning before I go to work. Once a week I make sure I tell them "Love Ya" therefore I love my wife or I love my husband."
See how crazy that is? My wife is not interested in ritual, she wants to know, does my husband love me with all his heart? And secondly, do I see that love reflected in what he says and how he responds to me? That's why Jesus, when He was asked the most important commandments said:
Love the Lord your God with all your HEART, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment.
It turns out that worship is something that begins in the heart, it lives there first and foremost but then it's meant to be reflected in our lives. If we just 'do' worship once a week that's a sham. I've been there, I've been standing in a Church on Sunday morning singing the songs with my mind wandering off somewhere else, that's not worshipping God anymore than a quick peck on my wife's cheek is loving her. Worship is something that comes from the heart; King David knew that, listen to what he writes in psalm 24: 
The earth is the Lords and everything in it, the world and all who live in it; for He founded it upon the seas and He established it on the waters. Who may ascend to the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in this holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false.
You see, David is saying here "God is above all and if I want to ascend to the hill of the Lord", what he meant there is going to the temple and worship God, "I need to have clean hands and a pure heart, a heart and a life that declare that I put Jesus first". Again in psalm 27, David writes this:
One thing do I ask of the Lord, this is what I will seek: That I will dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon His beauty and to seek Him in His temple..." "...My heart says of you, seek His face and your face Lord will I seek.
You see, what's going on here for David is that something is happening in his heart. Can I tell you? It's the truth, just quietly between you and me, don't tell anyone else.
I am besotted with my wife, like I adore her, I just worship the ground she walks on, you know I just love her. It's a thing that starts and lives, day after day, in my heart. Some days we're both tired, some days, just quietly I'm grumpy. Some days she's a bit scratchy but the thing in my heart just never goes away and that's how it is for worship for me.
There's something about God in my heart that overwhelms me. Like David, my heart says:
Seek his face and your face Lord, will I seek." "This one thing shall I ask, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.
There's this thing of the heart, a desire, a besottedness, an overwhelming urge just to be with God where He is.
I was recently travelling with the ministry for almost two weeks and the ministry that God has me involved in here at Christianityworks is such a blessing and such a delight and I get to meet so many people but can I tell you? Each time I have to leave my wife it's an incredible sacrifice. You see, I love her; I want to be with her. When we go out together, more often than not, we're wandering down the street or through the shopping mall, hand in hand. It's a closeness, there's a desire, there's a "want to be together".
Sometimes you know I go along to functions, you know a dinner or something like that and I watch other married couples, many of them don't ever sit next to each other at the dinner, you know something; we always do because we're close and that in a sense is what's going on in David's heart for God.
He's saying, "God, I just want to be close to you. I just want to dwell in your house all the days of my life and gaze on your beauty and seek you in your temple. My heart says of you seek His face and your face Lord, I will seek." There it is, there's the heart of worship, a holy desire for God Himself. Not what God can do, not all the blessings, just God Himself. What about you? What does worship mean to you?
You know, I went for a long time and I thought worship was just going along on Sunday morning and singing a few songs and coming home again but if that's how I treated my wife our marriage would fall apart.
If that's how I treat God, if I say, "Worship is just some ritual, some sham, it doesn't matter, there's nothing going on in my heart", how can you expect to have a vital, dynamic, exciting, besotted relationship with God.
Sometimes we get dry and we feel like we've wandered off and we feel like we don't have that desire, we all go there some days, stick with me during this week because we're going to, we're going to get together and look at what it means in our lives to worship God.

It turns out that we all worship something. Success. Money. God – whoever that might be. There's invariably something that dominates the way we feel, think and live.
I'm not much into religion per se, you know the whole structured ritual thing but one of the great spiritual concepts that sometimes gets tagged with religious baggage is this idea of worship.
Well when you hear the word worship, what does it mean to you? People who don't have any particular faith in God might see it as something that religious people might do in Churches or temples, maybe candles and incense or chanting and ritual, something that happens, well over there somewhere, not something that I do.
A Christian might say, "Well, worships what we do on Sunday morning at Church before the sermon. We sing songs, that's our worship time." What about you? What would you say that worship is? My hunch is that the notion of worship from where God sits is so much broader than any narrow view that people might have about it. Not some religious ritual, not just some musical event but something much more.
It is great to be with you again and we're doing a small series this week just talking about worship as being a way of life. You know, when we worship someone or something we put it above all other things. We pay homage to it, in fact it directs our lives.
We will sacrifice other things, even those that are very dear to us for the sake of the thing or the person that we worship. We all worship something you know, I used to worship money and success and recognition. These were the things that made my whole life go round.
My life was centred and ordered around those things, I sacrificed my health, my family, my rest, everything for these things that I worshipped and actually, when I look back, I was really worshipping myself.
We can all look at our lives and ask, "What's at the centre of my life? Who or what do I worship?" We'll know the answer to that question when we look at the sacrifices we make and ask ourselves, really and truly, "Who or what am I making the sacrifices for? What's at the centre of my life? Is it my career? Is it my family? Is it earning more money and having a bigger house?" Honestly ask ourselves, "What is at the centre of my life?" And to figure it out we just have to look at the sacrifices we make and that's who or what we're actually worshipping.
We all have lots of, I guess, elements or rooms in our lives, obviously we need to make some sacrifices sometimes. Being a parent, by definition, is about making sacrifices for our children.
Sometimes, to be sure, we have to make sacrifices for our jobs or careers but day after day, month after month, is there one thing that keeps rising above all of those others in terms of sacrifice? If there is, chances are that's the one that we're worshipping.
The notion that sacrifice is an essential part of worship is not something new. The very first time that the word worship is mentioned in the Bible is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham was a man that God called out of his comfort zone and Abraham went on a long journey and he was an old man, it took a long time but God promised Abraham that he would have many descendants.
Well Abraham and his wife Sarah were really old and they still didn't have a single child to their name. They never thought that it would happen, that they would have an heir but this was God's promise. And ultimately, after a quarter of a century, when they were really old, God gave them a son called Isaac.
You can imagine, this kid grows up and Abraham and Sarah had been waiting like a lifetime to have this child, they would dote on Isaac, they would just adore him and what God saw was that Abraham was putting Isaac before God Himself and so God went to Abraham and said, "I want you to sacrifice Isaac, you know like on an altar like they sacrifice animals."
What an incredibly painful thing and on that morning when they journeyed out to that place where Abraham felt called to sacrifice his son, Abraham said to his servant, "Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you." Imagine the tussle that was going on in Abrahams heart, "who is first in my life? Is it God or my son?"
You see, we can think we're worshipping God but then you go and look at your life and you ask some hard questions. How do I spend all of my time, my money, my energy, my passions, my dreams? And like Abraham we might get a real shock, let's read on:
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed in on his son, Isaac and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on Isaac spoke up and said to his father, "Father?" "Yes my son?" Abraham replied, "The fire and the wood are here" Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" And Abraham answered, "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering my son." And the two of them went on together.
When they reached the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took a knife to slay his son but the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven and said, "Abraham! Abraham!" "Here I am," he replied. "Do not lay a hand on this boy. Do not do anything to him because now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."
What God was doing here was testing Abraham's heart. Abraham, who do you worship? Who do you put first in your life God or your son? Now we might think this is just a bit extreme but I have to tell you, when I had to stop worshipping myself, you know give up this whole career and wealth and recognition thing, can I tell you? That was not an easy thing to let go of.
When God comes along and finally tugs on our hearts and says, "do you realise you're worshipping something else?" It's almost impossible to admit let alone let go but at the end of this both God and Abraham knew the answer to the question, who do you put first in your life?
The angel of the Lord said to Abraham, 'Now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your only son'.
Can I ask you quietly yet deliberately? Who or what do you worship? When it comes to the crunch, the one thing on this earth that is most important to you, would you be prepared to lay it down for the Lord your God? All our hopes, our dreams, our future, our life, our career – everything!
Is God exalted above all other things in our lives? Because worshipping God is about adopting a God above all position in every part of our lives. Singing songs of worship is great but do we bow our lives down to God before anything or anyone else? In our hearts, do we truly worship God?
Worship is about a whole bunch more than some religious rituals or just singing songs. The crunch question is, do we worship God with our lives?

If only.  If only she'd want to hold my hand still.  If only she'd touch my cheek like she used to.  It's funny how as we get busier in life, we become less and less intimate in our marriage.
Here's a cold, hard, statistic – depending of course in which country you live in. Somewhere between 30 and 45% of all marriages end in divorce. In California the registry of births, deaths and marriages is now known as the registry of births, deaths, marriages and divorces.
Is it because people don't set out wanting to love one another? No! Is it because 30 to 45% of people are so horrible you can't possibly live with them? No! Is it because people don't want to grow old together? No! So what exactly is going on here?
My hunch is that one of the biggest issues that leads to divorce is that we just don't learn how to speak a love language that our wives or our husbands, as the case may be, can understand. This week on A Different Perspective we've been just stepping through Gary Chapman's fantastic book called, "The Five Love Languages".
Last week we went through a series called Having the Marriage you were Meant to Have, because you know something, I believe that marriage is the most amazing gift from God. Jesus said:
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife and the two shall become one flesh, they are no longer two but one flesh.
Jesus was talking about a blessing of intimacy and companionship, of life long relationship. Okay, marriage isn't for everyone. Being single or being widowed or being divorced are perfectly reasonable places to be. I'm not saying that everybody has to get married, but most people do.
Last week in that series, "Having the Marriage you were Meant to Have", we laid the foundation stones and if you missed those programs you can listen to them again on our website, www.christianityworks.com this week we're going through the nitty gritty, the real life stuff. What it means for us to communicate our love in marriage.
We're different, husbands and wives, in fact we're all different, and we all speak love and receive love in a slightly different way. That book I was talking about, The Five Love Languages talks about five. Words of Affirmation, the fact that some people the primary way they receive love is through words of encouragement.
Other people for them its Quality Time, for them its just having that time to focus on one another's husband and wife exclusively with no other distractions, and just talk and be together.
For other people they experience love mostly through Receiving Gifts, it's just that a gift is a tangible expression of a persons love.
And for others it's Acts of Service, some people just love serving and those people love to receive love by being served.
And finally today another one, a primary language of love is Physical Touch. Each one of us has one or two of those which predominately we would say is the way that we would like to be loved.
Do we want the others too? Sure we do, but there are one or two for each one of us that we say, "You know something, if my wife doesn't affirm me and encourage me I don't feel loved, or if my husband doesn't give me the odd gift or little bunch of flowers or something I don't feel loved".
For me without a shadow of a doubt my primary love language is physical touch. We all need physical touch, it's part of our nurture, I mean, its development as children. You've probably seen the experiments with primates where they isolated the young chimp at the beginning of its life and it receives no touch. And that chimp grows up to be incredibly maladjusted and violent and can't live in a social context with other chimps.
Sadly, we see that in people too who haven't received that nurture that you get uniquely from being touched by your parents and family. But I'm not talking about the general needs, I'm not talking about sex even. I'm talking about the specific need that some people have for a primary love language of touch. The gentle touch that says uniquely, "I love you."
Now it's hard for me to come to grips with the fact that my primary love language is physical touch. I grew up being a hard nosed businessman and I'm definitely not your touchy, touchy, kissy, kissy, sort of person. You know how some people meet you and they want to give you a big kiss and a hug. And my godmother used to do that when I was a kid, God bless her, and she'd leave this big thing of lipstick on my cheek. And I can remember thinking, "Oh yuck! That is not me."
And yet when it comes to my wife Jacqui whose primary love languages are acts of service and quality time, she can do those things to me until she's blue in the face, but unless she holds my hand or strokes my cheek or puts herself close to me I simply don't feel loved. Why? I don't know, it's just the way that God made me. And people who know me in ministry or in business would say, "You've got to be kidding, Berni, touch, no, no way!"
It's not always self evident. In fact a lot of people, especially men, probably wouldn't even be aware that their primary love language, the way that they really want to experience love, is through the medium of physical touch.
If you're someone who doesn't feel loved, ask yourself this question, "How much difference would it make if your wife or your husband, whatever the case maybe, touched you more often?" You might be surprised at the answer.
There's a beautiful picture in Mark's Gospel Chapter 1 verse 40, if you have a Bible, of a man who was a leper. Now in the first century lepers suffered social isolation. They couldn't go near people who didn't have leprosy. If someone who didn't have leprosy came close to them within 60 or 70 feet they had to yell out "Unclean! Unclean!" They couldn't go to the synagogue with the other people, they couldn't even live in the city walls with the other people, they had to live on the rubbish dump outside the city walls.
And this leper comes to Jesus and says "Lord, lord, if you are willing you can make me clean," because he'd seen Jesus heal other people. And Mark records it this way, he says:
Jesus was moved with compassion and He reached out and He touched the leper, and He said, 'I am willing, be made clean.'
Isn't that awesome! The law forbade lepers from touching people who weren't lepers, and when this leper comes to Jesus and asks for healing, the compassion in Jesus' heart causes him to reach out and to touch the untouchable.
What do you think that communicated to the leper? Maybe the lepers primary love language was touch, I don't know, we will never know that. But what an awesome picture of God the Son reaching out and touching the untouchable.
If God can touch the leper, if God can do that, why is it that if we have a wife or a husband who wants to receive touch, what is it in us that doesn't do that? It costs nothing to touch yet it so beautifully expresses love in a marriage, the intimacy, the kindness the gentleness of physical touch.
This week we've looked at five different languages of love, words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Can I encourage you to figure out which one or two of those are your primary love language and your soul mate's primary love language and then the two of you sit down and talk about it, explore it.
What is it that each of you need? You know we so often don't talk about that in a marriage. We get angry with each other, we get frustrated with each other but we don't talk about it. And when you figure out that your wife or your husband has a different way of receiving love from you let me tell you its going to be unnatural to give love that way.
So it has to be planned, it has to be deliberate, it has to be learned, it has to be sacrificial. It'll be hard some days and it'll be inconvenient some days but the fruit of loving your wife or your husband in the way that they want and they need is the most wonderful blessing from God in marriage.

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.

That Neil Diamond song "You Don't Send me Flowers Anymore" says it all in some marriages.  What happened to those unexpected gifts?  What happened to the love?
This week on A Different Perspective we're taking a look at how to express our heartfelt commitment to our soul mates, our wives, or our husbands as the case may be. Imagine; boy meets girl, she only speaks Swahili, he only speaks Japanese, they get married but they still can't speak one another's languages, what sort of a marriage are they going to have?
Well there are two options; they either decide to learn one another's languages or things are going to fall apart because unless they learn to communicate, the frustration and the isolation would just tear them apart. That's how it is with different languages and love.
Gary Chapman's written a great book called The Five Love Languages, the last couple of days we've looked at the first two of those, Words of Affirmation and Quality Time, today we're going to look at the third, Receiving Gifts.
Anthropologists are a funny lot, they love to study human patterns of behaviour across different cultures, and in fact right down through history. And they look for common themes and patterns of behaviour. One of the most basic, one that appears in every culture is the notion that love is about giving.
My hunch is that in the garden of Eden Adam used to go out looking for flowers for Eve and pick them, and give them to her, no doubt, and we know for a fact that she loved picking fruit for him to eat! Well I guess no one's perfect! So over the last few days we've looked at the first few languages of love that Chapman talks about in his book, The Five Love Languages.
The first was Words of Affirmation. Some people's primary way of experiencing love is through words that other people say to them that affirm them. So a man who needs words of affirmation will need his wife to say, "Darling you look great in that suit. Darling, thank you so much for doing that." And a woman who needs words of affirmation will need exactly the same thing from her husband.
The second of those was Quality Time. It's a happy buzz phrase isn't it? But quality time is more than just sitting in front of the box and just being in a safe space together. Quality time is focusing our attention exclusively on one another, and there are some people whose primary way of receiving love is through the knowledge that their husband or wife spends quality time with them.
The third one, which is the one that we're going to look at today, is Receiving Gifts.
Now a gift, I used to think, "Well how can someone experience love by receiving gifts, isn't that kind of tacky and cheap and materialistic?" Truly that's what I used to think. But when you think about it, a gift is something tangible. You can hold it in your hand, you can look at it and say "he loves me", or "wow she loves me" and you'll look at it again, and again, and again.
It's a tangible tactile physical expression of the giving part about love, that thing that anthropologists discover is common to every culture that they've analysed. It's a symbol of a thought. We've heard the saying, "it's the thought that counts."
It's not the actual gift, it's not how much it cost, it's the fact that the gift represents something and it represents love, or friendship, or whatever. So this visual symbol of love is more important to some people than it is to other people.
Let me tell you about Berni. A gift to me will fail to express your love or your friendship to me precisely 100% of the time. If I never receive another gift in my life it'll be too soon. If nobody ever remembers my birthday again in my life it'll be too soon. When we were first married, Jacqui and I, Jacqui thought, "Ah I'll go and buy my husband a tie, or clothes, or aftershave," and I was absolutely horrified.
I buy my own ties, I buy my own clothes, I buy my own aftershave. And Mum, my last birthday, she said "Berni what would you like for your birthday?" And I said "Truly Mum, give the money to charity, I just don't want a gift". So actually she gave a donation to the ministry of Christianityworks.
For me gifts simply don't say I love you. Yet Melissa, our daughter, it's one of her two primary languages of love. Gifts are really important to her. When I went to India last year, she loves silver, and so I saw an Indian silver necklace and earrings, and I bought that for her.
And at night time my wife Jacqui and I go for walks and we walked past this store that has this beautiful silver beaten jewellery and I'm always thinking and planning, "now I wonder which one of those I can get for Melissa's birthday".
And just recently, last Christmas, one of the things that teenagers in her age group in her culture, all want, is they want an iPod, right, that's what's happening amongst young people today, she's 15. And so we saved up our money and bought her an iPod Nano. And on the back, if you buy them online on the Internet, they'll actually inscribe whatever you ask them to inscribe, machine inscribed, beautifully done. And so we had it inscribed on there 'Melissa Dymet loved, cherished and adored'. And that spoke volumes to her because receiving gifts is one of her primary love languages.
The other morning I was out for a walk and she'd gone the bus stop waiting for her school bus and the frangipani's were out,(they're my favourite flower, they smell so nice) and I thought "you know when I come around the corner I bet you she's still at the bus stop". So I picked up just one frangipani flower that had fallen down and I walked up to her at the bus stop and I said, "Here, this is for you". Just the one flower. Well, her face just lit up because receiving gifts is one of her primary languages of love.
King Solomon, in Proverbs Chapter 18 verse 16, way, way back when King Solomon was alive he wrote this
A gift opens the way for the giver and ushers him into the presence of the great.
You see gifts to people for whom receiving gifts is their primary love language, gifts open the door into their hearts. Things are just things to me. Possessions are just servants they're nothing more. I'm not sentimental about those things.
But I'll tell you one gift, the one physical thing that I possess that I prize above all things is my wedding ring because it's a symbol of my wife's love for me. And I could be starving and have no money, I still would not sell this wedding ring. So even for the most hardened anti-gift person I have my price, you know what I mean?
Now when I used to think that gifts and giving were a bit superficial and a bit materialistic. Actually the symbolism of the gift is how some people experience and receive love. Have you ever heard a wife say, "He never brings me flowers anymore." Now think about it, flowers die in a few days but they are a symbol of romantic love.
Gifts can be purchased, gifts can be found, gifts can be made. "Oh but I'm not a gift giver." Congratulations, welcome to marriage. This is a lesson of love; we need to learn to give love in a way that our husband or wife can accept love. And if your soul mate receives love through the receiving of gifts, it is time for you to make a list of all the things that seem to push their buttons and we don't have to wait for special occasions.
We don't have to wait for birthdays, or Christmases, or anniversaries because for someone who receives gifts as love, just the little things, just the little frangipani flower that you pick up on the spur of the moment that you find on the street, can say I love you. And when you receive a gift from such a person, like my daughter Melissa did a painting at school and she brought it home and she gave it to me, that gift, that painting has pride and place in my study because when she gives me a gift she is saying something that goes beyond what I may interpret the gift to be.
We do all the other things, we can work, provide, clean, cook, make love, everything but if you're soul mate's primary love language is receiving gifts and you don't give them gifts, they will feel like their marriage is dead.