Marriage Matters Quotes

“A lack of love should prompt us to not just look more closely at our marriage but at our relationship with God.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“The bad news: your love problems are bigger than you think because love problems are God problems. The good news: the solution is bigger than you think because God cares and is involved. Having more love in your marriage means having more of God in your marriage. Having trouble loving is evidence either that you don’t know God or that something is interfering in your relationship with God.1”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“You need faith that Jesus will help you every step of the way, but you also need to take concrete action.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“If Jesus were to evaluate your relationship with God based on the way you treat your spouse, how would you score?”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Based on what we hear on the radio, see on television, or read in magazines, we might get the idea that love is a wonderfully indescribable something that happens to us, an uncontrollable and unpredictable thing that comes and goes. That makes for great romance novels, but it doesn’t offer much hope for our marriages.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Marriages change when we’re willing to love in practical, Christlike ways, especially in the difficult moments”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“God is love” is much more than a nice thought. Your ability or willingness to love your spouse says as much about your relationship with God as about your relationship with your spouse.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“At some point in marriage, you have to realize that you can’t make your spouse change. If your happiness hinges on your ability to control your spouse, you doom yourself to the frustration and hopelessness of trying to do the impossible.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“don’t just wish things were different. Don’t just look for the easy way out. Don’t let go until you get every blessing that God is trying to give you through this.” I pray that you’ll hold on and wrestle well and that God will bless you with more than you’ve dared to ask for.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Your actions, regardless of their effect on others, always change you, either leading you to become a more loving person or a more hardened, manipulative one.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“To the extent that you use authority to manage your own fears and feed your own desires, you’re subverting Jesus’ authority and enthroning yourself.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“It’s as if we believe the general duties of love are fundamentally different from our specific duties as husbands and wives.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Inviting others to change by reminding them of their true identity is God’s trademark. If we expand our study of Ephesians beyond chapter 4, we see that the entire letter is organized around the principle of asking people to become who they really are.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“We sometimes refer to our spouses as our other or better half. The expression suggests that our spouses complete us. Although a sweet idea, it isn’t God’s view. Jesus is the One who completes you as a person created for a life of love.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“the most critical ingredient of an intimate relationship is trust. You have to know that the other person means what he or she says, won’t let you down, and wants what’s best for you and not just what’s convenient for them. Jesus is eminently trustworthy, and a relationship with him requires trust in who he is.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Marriages change when we’re willing to love consistently, over time, not because our spouses change but because we’re in a growing relationship with God”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“The danger isn’t simply that you’re unhappy or that your marriage is less than it could be; it’s that God becomes increasingly irrelevant to your marriage, the relationship that defines your life more than any other.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“The Bible, however, offers a radically different picture: Jesus is the framework. He determines what fits in the picture and what doesn’t. His framework is the only one that makes sense out of love. Learning to love well by worshipping Jesus gives us our best hope for having a thriving, happy marriage, but we must accept that Jesus intends to work through our marriages in many ways to shape and change us, and that won’t always feel good or produce the results we want.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“God encourages his people, not by denying the beauty and grandeur of the previous temple but by pointing them to how he intends to use the one they just built. What makes the new temple glorious is how he will use it to draw all nations to himself. Their wealth and devotion will flow to the new temple, and in that, God will be glorified. Though not explicitly stated, this temple was certainly more beautiful than the last because it was a sign of God’s redemptive love. It was a temple built by the hands of a people humbled and repentant and brought back home by God. No matter why you married, no matter what sins damaged your marriage, God’s restoration will make it beautiful, not by hiding the past or camouflaging the scars but by helping you to see God’s faithfulness and love in it and even using it to draw others to himself.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“But the way we exercise authority and define our marital roles often doesn’t seem informed by a biblical understanding of love at all. Some of the most basic elements of love drop out of the picture once we start talking about marital roles.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“We need to be careful not to read the challenges of our own hearts, our personal assumptions, and our cultural assumptions about gender into the Bible, creating roles that don’t reflect the wisdom and love of Christ.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Notice that God “places enmity” between Satan and Eve’s offspring. We struggle against sin, hating it in ourselves. If God hadn’t placed enmity between the seed of the Serpent and the seed of the woman, we would be given over to our sinfulness, willing slaves to Satan’s evil purposes. But God blesses us by giving to us and preserving in us a hatred for what is evil. God gives us new hearts when we put our trust in Jesus, but we still must battle the sin nature that remains. The fact that there’s a battle at all is a result of God’s grace and part of his plan to eradicate the enemy. We can all agree with the Bible that conflict is painful, sometimes destructive, and not to be entered into carelessly. Conflict, far from being a sign of moral or marital failure, is God’s chosen means of rescuing his people and destroying sin.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Jesus didn’t just tolerate the sinners that thronged to him; he reached out and touched them. He visited tax collectors in their homes; invited prostitutes to follow him; touched and cured the lepers, the blind, and the lame, all of whom were considered unclean. A holy Jesus reached out and touched these broken and rebellious image bearers, not to punish but to rescue. Their unholiness didn’t contaminate him; rather his holiness invaded their hearts and they were changed; they became clean. God solves the problem, not by destroying us, but by destroying our sin. We no longer need to hide behind fig leaves. We no longer need to cover ourselves to avoid the truth that we live naked and defiled in the world of a holy God. In Jesus, God says, in effect, “I see you and I don’t want you to be afraid. I’ll make you new again. You no longer have to hide. I’ll cover your sinfulness and shame with my Son’s perfection. Step out and be seen.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Because we’re made in God’s image we can’t fully escape knowledge of ourselves, and of God’s purity, holiness, and wrath. We were made to be like him and at the deepest level, at the level of your spiritual DNA, God is hard-wired into your system. When you look at yourself in the mirror you can’t help but be reminded of who God is and what he is like. All of your thoughts, feelings, and observations are imprinted with reminders of God. They all, in some way, point to him. Do you become angry when mistreated? So does God. Are you sad over loss and pain? So is God. Do you enjoy the good things of this world? God created them. Even in your sinfulness you bear the family resemblance.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Remember what sin and idolatry are really about: attempts to play God, to make everything and everyone serve you and your desires. To sin is to treat people as objects. It simply isn’t safe to live openly before someone who’s willing to reduce you to a thing that exists for his or her pleasure. You need protection from someone like that. Imagine what it must have been like for them to move, in the blink of an eye, from a state of complete openness and safety to one of shame and fear.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Jesus’ purpose in helping us to understand God’s law isn’t to urge us to try harder. He knows we’re incapable of keeping the law. That’s why he explains that he’s come to fulfill “the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus has come to keep the law on our behalf, meeting all of its requirements, so that we wouldn’t be condemned by God’s justice.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“We’re accustomed to thinking about love as an emotion or an experience that happens to us, but the Bible teaches us that love isn’t a what but a who. In Jesus, love has walked, talked, and touched us. Although we can’t physically see him now, we can see him as he shows himself to us in the Bible. Sometimes our idols make it difficult for us to see Jesus or to love clearly. We’re tempted to recast both Jesus and love in the image of our personal desires.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“The bad news: your love problems are bigger than you think because love problems are God problems. The good news: the solution is bigger than you think because God cares and is involved. Having more love in your marriage means having more of God in your marriage. Having trouble loving is evidence either that you don’t know God or that something is interfering in your relationship with God.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“Marriages change when we recognize God’s agenda for so-called ordinary moments”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments

“The path to change in your marriage is built on this truth: God is involved in every moment of your marriage.”
― Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters: Extraordinary Change through Ordinary Moments