More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 17, 2023 - May 20, 2024
No one else is as inconvenienced and hurt by your flaws as your spouse is.
The first part of making your marriage into a relationship that enhances growth is to accept this inherent feature of married life.
Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself.
If you are in denial about some feature of your character, that feature will control you.
Give your spouse the right to talk to you about what is wrong with you.
For the first time in her life, she couldn’t run from a damaged person.
To be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in the world.
The world tells us about our faults, and we know they are there, but God’s love for us covers our sins and continues despite them. So Jesus has the ability to overcome everything anyone has ever said about or to you.
Sometimes you spouse’s affirmation imitates Jesus’s love and stimulates us to more fully believe and accept the love we have in Christ.
In the same way you learn to give your spouse love in the way he or she finds most emotionally valuable and powerful. That is the only way to bring the remaking and healing power of love into your spouse’s life.7
This is why, so often, love is being sent in a marriage but is not received.
Sometimes a particular form of love is more valuable because some significant person in your life was particularly inept at it. Sometimes a particular form of love is more valuable because some significant person in your life was particularly adept at it. Perhaps a form of love is crucial now because of your life circumstances.
We should do this for our spouses because God did this for us.
First, realize you have a “filter” on. You tend to only “hear” certain kinds of love language. For example, your spouse may be working hard to provide you with material things, but you wish he were more verbal. There is a tendency to say, “He doesn’t love me!” because he is not communicating love in your most valuable language. Take off your filter and recognize the love your spouse is giving you.
Instead of thinking about the other person, “He (she) is so selfish,” each should think, “He (she) is feeling particularly unloved.”
forgiveness without a shred of superiority, without making the other person feel small.
forgiving grace must always be present, and if it is, it will, like salt in meat, keep the anger from going bad. Then truth and love can live together because, beneath them both, you have forgiven your spouse as Christ forgave you.
If you have trouble forgiving someone, it is at least partly because deep in your heart you are thinking, “I would never do anything like that!” As long as you feel superior to someone, feel like you are a much better kind of person, you will find it very hard if not impossible to forgive.
If you are very down on yourself, if you struggle with self-loathing, then it may be far too important for you to have your spouse always pleased with you. You will not be able to bear to have your spouse upset with you at all, and that will mean you will not be able to criticize your spouse or explain how much he or she hurt you. You won’t be able to confront and forgive.
But we are so loved and valued that he was willing to die for us.
Our sins hurt Jesus infinitely more than your spouse’s sins hurt you.
He saw our sin and covered it.
I don’t know of anything more necessary in marriage than the ability to forgive fully, freely, unpunishingly, from the heart.
Not if you are committed to the adventure of spiritual companionship, to partner with God in the journey to the new creation.
For our slight momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
“As great as you look today, someday you will stand with me before God in such beauty that it will make these clothes look like rags.”
The Christian teaching is that sex is primarily a way to know God and build community, and, if you use it for those things rather than for your own personal satisfaction, it will lead to greater fulfillment than you can imagine.
In love they donate themselves, wholly, to the other.
because you have given up your freedom and bound yourself in marriage.
Indeed, sex is perhaps the most powerful God-created way to help you give your entire self to another human being.
“I belong completely, permanently, and exclusively to you.”
You must not use sex to say an...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But though a marriage covenant is necessary for sex, sex is also necessary for the maintenance of the covenant.
Philippians 2:1–3 tells all Christians to look not to their own interests but to the interests of others. They should always submit their own desires for the good of others and the community.
But it does mean that anyone who is living unselfishly and having an increasingly satisfying marriage is getting some help from God, whether they know it or not (James 1:17). I am referring here to what Christian theologians have called “common grace.” It refers to the understanding that God generously gives gifts of truth, moral character, wisdom, and beauty to all kinds of people, including those who do not acknowledge him, as a merciful way to restrain and moderate the effects of human sin and selfishness on human life.
Christians who are weighing divorce, if they want to live with their consciences and their God for the rest of their lives, should not make these decisions all by themselves.
