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June 6 - June 6, 2025
single people today need a brutally realistic yet glorious vision of what marriage is and can be.
help single people stop destructively over-desiring marriage or destructively dismissing marriage altogether.
better idea of who he or she should consider as a prospective mate.
What God institutes he also regulates. If God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to his purposes for it.
If you came from an unusually stable home, where your parents had a great marriage, that may have “made it look easy” to you, and so when you get to your own marriage you may be shocked by how much it takes to forge a lasting relationship.
any kind of background experience of marriage may make you ill equipped for it yourself.
While marriage is many things, it is anything but sentimental. Marriage is glorious but hard. It’s a burning joy and strength, and yet it is also blood, sweat, and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting victories.
the Enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any “broader good” such as reflecting God’s nature, producing character, or raising children.
Marriage used to be about us, but now it is about me.
newer view of marriage actually puts a crushing burden of expectation on marriage and on spouses in a way that more traditional understandings never did.
unrealistic longings for and te...
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“For most of Western history, the primary and most valued characteristic of manhood was self-mastery. . . . A man who indulged in excessive eating, drinking, sleeping or sex—who failed to ‘rule himself’—was considered unfit to rule his household, much less a polity.
may be worth recalling that sexual restraint rather than sexual prowess was once the measure of a man.”
Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.
They are all looking for a marriage partner who will “fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.”35 And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry. This is the reason so many put off marriage and look right past great prospective spouses that simply are “not good enough.”
“Flaw-o-Matic.” It is “an inner voice, a little whirring device inside the brain that instantly spots a fatal flaw in any potential mate.”
more often than not this is a device that gives us an excuse to stay alone and therefore safe.
A marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low- or no-maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you.
our culture makes individual freedom, autonomy, and fulfillment the very highest values, and thoughtful people know deep down that any love relationship at all means the loss of all three.
But if you avoid marriage simply because you don’t want to lose your freedom, that is one of the worst things you can do to your heart.
Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For
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Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love . . .
We look to sex and romance to give us what we used to get from faith in God.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit do not manipulate each other for their own ends. . . . There is no conquest of unity by diversity or diversity by unity. The three are one and the one is three.
Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to
Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.
didn’t want to be in a position where I had to ask for something and receive it as a gift.
I wanted to serve, yes, because that made me feel in control. Then I would always have the high moral ground. But that kind of “service” isn’t service at all, only manipulation.
My reluctance to let Kathy serve me was, in the end, a refusal to live my life on the basis of grace. I wanted to earn everything.
Fulfillment is on the far side of sustained unselfish service, not the near side.
They get involved with others in an obsessive and controlling way because they are actually meeting their own needs,
us minimize our own selfishness.
determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem
and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s.
Spirit-generated selflessness—not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself but thinking of yourself less.
“Fear” in the Bible means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by something.
if any of these things is a greater controlling influence on you than the reality of God’s love for you, you will not be in a position to serve others unselfishly. Only out of the fear of the Lord Jesus will we be liberated to serve one another.
we should not please ourselves because, on the cross, Christ did not please himself.
when the Bible speaks of love, it measures it primarily not by how much you want to receive but by how much you are willing to give of yourself to someone.
If we think of love primarily as emotional desire and not as active, committed service, we end up pitting duty and desire against each other in a way that is unrealistic and destructive.
the Bible sees God as the supreme good—not the individual or the family—and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feeling and duty, passion and promise.
Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit—that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back—then we “cut our losses” and drop the relationship.
Love needs a framework of binding obligation to make it fully what it should be.
we are largely who we become through making wise promises and keeping them.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
The person living the aesthetic life is not master of himself at all; in fact, he is leading an accidental life. His temperament, tastes, feelings, and impulses completely drive him.
Our emotions are not under our control, but our actions are.
It is a mistake to think that you must feel love to give it.
He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.
the essence of friendship is the exclamation “You, too?”
