Author Dwight Small made an eloquent application of godly love to marriage: "Godly love is not born of a lover’s need, nor does it have its source in the one loved. God’s love empties itself to give what the other needs.
"Its motives rise wholly from within its own nature. Godly love lives in order to die to self for the blessedness of caring for another, spending for another, spending itself for the sake of the beloved."