More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 17, 2023 - May 20, 2024
Christian friendship is not simply about going to concerts together or enjoying the same sporting event. It is the deep oneness that develops as two people journey together toward the same destination, helping one another through the dangers and challenges along the way.
Marriage, of course, can add the power of romantic love to the natural and supernatural bonds of friendship, and this is what can make marriage the richest of all human relationships.
He will bring the work to completion. Slowly but surely, by the power of the Spirit, we will put on our “new self, created to be like God” (Ephesians 4:24).
Even (or especially) the sufferings we experience can make us wiser, deeper, stronger, better.
For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
In his redemptive work, Jesus is both Friend and Lover, and this is to be the model for spouses in marriage. Husband and wife are to be both lovers and friends to one another as Jesus is to us.
Ephesians 5:28 directly links the purpose of every marriage to the purpose of the Ultimate Marriage.
But such goals do not create deep oneness, for eventually you reach them (or you don’t), and then what?
What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have.
Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, “I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!’”
Each spouse then should give him- or herself to be a vehicle for that work and envision the day that you will stand together before God, seeing each other presented in spotless beauty and glory.
But if you don’t get excited about the person your spouse has already grown into and will become, you aren’t tapping into the power of marriage as spiritual friendship.
“Well done, good and faithful servants. Over the years you have lifted one another up to me. You sacrificed for one another. You held one another up with prayer and with thanksgiving. You confronted each other. You rebuked each other. You hugged and you loved each other and continually pushed each other toward me. And now look at you. You’re radiant.”
What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.
The simple fact is that only if I love Jesus more than my wife will I be able to serve her needs ahead of my own. Only if my emotional tank is filled with love from God will I be able to be patient, faithful, tender, and open with my wife when things are not going well in life or in the relationship. And the more joy I get from my relationship with Christ, the more I can share that joy with my wife and family.
Your spouse has got to be your best friend, or be on the way to becoming your best friend, or you won’t have a strong, rich marriage that endures and that makes you both vastly better persons for having been in it.
Look for someone who understands you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them.
Your marriage will slowly die if your spouse senses that he or she is not the first priority in your life.
Your marriage must be more important to you than anything else. No other human being should get more of your love, energy, industry, and commitment than your spouse.
When some good thing becomes more engrossing and important than your spouse, it can destroy the marriage.
If your spouse does not feel that you are putting him or her first, then by definition, you aren’t. And when that happens, your marriage is dying.
But you can also fail to leave your parents if you resent or hate them too much.
But this means you are being controlled by your parents.
Don’t let your bad relationship with your father control how you relate to your partner. You must leave it behind.
Look carefully to see whether you are insisting that you do things exactly the way your parents did them.
When you marry, you commit to becoming a new decision-making unit and to developing new patterns and ways of doing things. If you rigidly impose the patterns that you saw in your own family rather than working together with your spouse to create new ones that fit both of you, you haven’t “left home” yet.
Arguably, over-commitment to children is even more of a problem.
is right to consider parenting a very high and important calling in life.
But if you love your children more than your spouse, the entire family will be pulled out of joint and everyone will suffer.
A strong marriage between parents makes children grow up feeling the world is a safe place and love is possible. Also, her daughter was not learning from observation how a good marriage worked or how men and women can relate together well. By putting her daughter before her husband, she was harming her daughter.
“The best way for you to be a great mother to your daughter is by being a great wife to your husband. That is the main thing your daughter needs from you.”
But children are children. They shouldn’t be expected to give you the friendship and love that a spouse can.
Salvation is a fresh start. Old things have passed away—behold, the new has come.
Marriage won’t work unless you put your marriage and your spouse first, and you don’t turn good things, like parents, children, career, and hobbies, into pseudo-spouses.
Paul is referring to the fact that your health is foundational to everything else you do.
In other words, if you think you can put your “happiness” ahead of your health, you actually won’t be happy at all.
When you marry, you’ve gotten into something that was invented by God.
Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won’t matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength. However, if your marriage is weak, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are marked by success and strength, it won’t matter. You will move out into the world in weakness.
the key to giving marriage that kind of priority is spiritual friendship.
Is all this a lot of work? Indeed it is—but it is the work we were built to do.
So if we want to be happy in marriage, we will accept that marriage is designed to make us holy.
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.
You wake up to the realization that your marriage will take a huge investment of time just to make it work.
Your first response will be to tell yourself you made a bad choice and failed to find someone truly compatible.
What if, however, you began your marriage understanding its purpose as spiritual friendship for the journey to the new creation? What if you expected marriage to be about helping each other grow out of your sins and flaws into the new self God is creating? Then you will actually be expecting the “stranger” seasons, and when you come to one you will roll up your sleeves and get to work.
The basic answer is that you must speak the truth in love with the power of God’s grace.
Speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. (Ephesians 4:15)
As we use each power in the life of our spouse, we will help him or her grow into a person who not only reflects the character of Christ but who also can love us and help us in the same way.
You may be a perfectionist, with a tendency to be judgmental and critical of others and also to get down on yourself.
You may be a highly independent person, who does not like to be responsible for the needs of others, who dislikes having to make joint decisions, and who most definitely hates to ask for any help yourself.
