Jesus

Jesus is portrayed as both the model and the measure of love in Gary D. Chapman’s account: his teachings move from the demanding ethic of loving enemies to the ordinary work of serving others, while his death and resurrection become, for Chapman, the ground of love that can persist without reciprocity. Most concretely, a passage from Jesus’ sermon in Luke shapes a six-month counseling experiment for Ann, whose husband has refused to work on their marriage.

Identity and Place in the Account

Chapman introduces Jesus through Luke’s orderly account of his teachings and way of life, written in the first century. He turns to that account while considering Ann’s situation: she is deeply religious, attends church regularly, and is struggling to imagine loving a husband whose repeated criticism and condemnation have drained her emotional energy and nearly destroyed her self-esteem. Jesus enters the account not as a participant in the couple’s present-day story, but as the source of a moral challenge Chapman believes may offer Ann direction.

The challenge is not framed as easy consolation. Jesus’ instruction is to love enemies, do good to those who hate, bless those who curse, pray for those who mistreat, and treat others as one would wish to be treated. Chapman emphasizes the difficulty of applying this standard inside a marriage in which one spouse feels treated as an enemy. The teaching therefore functions at once as religious authority and as a question about what love can require when affection has collapsed.

Teaching Put to a Practical Test

Chapman converts the sermon’s command into a counseling hypothesis rather than promising a result. If Ann could identify Glenn’s primary love language and speak it consistently for six months, Chapman proposed, Glenn’s emotional need for love might begin to be met; he might then reciprocate. The initiative, he explicitly cautions, would rest with Ann, since Glenn was not trying to improve the marriage. The experiment tests a possibility, not a guarantee.

To explain the limits of that proposal, Chapman invokes Jesus’ teaching that giving will be returned in good measure. He interprets it as a general principle: kindness and love tend to elicit kindness and love, but no person can be made to respond. People remain free to reject love or walk away from it. In this reading, Jesus’ words guide Ann’s conduct without turning her care into a mechanism for controlling Glenn. The distinction matters because the hoped-for change in her husband remains uncertain even if she follows the proposed course.

The counseling conversation also connects Jesus’ teaching to the particular strain in Ann and Glenn’s relationship. Ann reports that sexual intimacy has been rare and that she has felt used when Glenn seeks it while otherwise ignoring her. Chapman explains that, for many wives, desire for sexual intimacy grows from feeling loved, whereas the absence of that sense can make intimacy feel instrumental. He presents loving someone who is not loving in return as contrary to natural inclination, and suggests that Ann may need to draw on her religious faith and revisit Jesus’ teaching about loving those who hate or mistreat. The account uses the teaching to frame her effort, not to deny the hurt that makes it difficult.

Service as an Example of Love

Jesus’ instruction is also embodied in a practical gesture: washing his disciples’ feet. Chapman recalls the custom of a household servant washing guests’ feet when they arrived from dusty roads in sandals. Jesus takes a basin and towel and performs the servant’s task himself, then encourages his disciples to follow his example. The scene makes love visible through an act that requires service rather than status.

Chapman links this episode to Jesus’ broader teaching that greatness in his kingdom belongs to those who serve, in contrast to societies where the great exercise power over the small. He also cites the apostle Paul’s summary, “Serve one another in love.” In the book’s account of acts of service as a way to express love, the foot-washing scene supplies a scriptural model: care is made legible through practical action undertaken for another person’s good.

Faith, Love, and the Limits of Reciprocity

Chapman’s personal account gives Jesus a further role. During his own marital struggles, he says, he rediscovered his need for God. Trained as an anthropologist to examine data, he investigated the historical accounts of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, came to regard the death as an expression of love and the resurrection as evidence of power, and committed his life to Christ as a believer. He says this faith provides the inner spiritual energy to love when love is not reciprocated.

That conviction distinguishes spiritual capacity from a promised marital outcome. Chapman encourages readers to investigate Jesus, recalling that, as he died, Jesus prayed for those who killed him: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Chapman calls this the ultimate expression of love. In the wider argument, Jesus’ example gives moral force to loving service and forgiveness, while the counseling experiment remains an uncertain human undertaking. The distinction preserves both the demand of the teaching and the freedom of the person asked to respond.