The Meaning of Marriage Quotes

“To be part of a whole, to become part of a greater unity, you have to surrender your independence. You must give up the right to make decisions unilaterally.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God's image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God's glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, "Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 16:25). He is saying, "If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Is the purpose of marriage to deny your interests for the good of the family, or is it rather to assert your interests for the fulfilment of yourself? The Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfilment and sacrifice but rather mutual fulfilment through mutual sacrifice.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Jesus's sacrificial service to us has brought us into deep union with him and he with us. And that, Paul says, is the key not only to understanding marriage but to living it.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“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 marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is... learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“According to the Bible, God devised marriage to reflect his saving love for us in Christ, to refine our character, to create stable human community for the birth and nurture of children, and to accomplish all this by bringing the complementary sexes into an enduring whole-life union.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Whatever God's reasons for such diversity, creativity, and sophistication in the universe, on earth, and in our own bodies, the point of it all is His glory. God's art speaks of Himself, reflecting who He is and what He is like.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Only if you have learned to serve others by the power of the Holy Spirit will you have the power to face the challenges of marriage.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Marriage does and should somewhat limit the extent of friendships you have with others of the opposite sex. In Christian community, however, singles can have a greater range of friendships among both sexes.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Eventually you can instinctively identify the way your spouse would react to a situation, assess its wisdom in this situation, and adopt it sometimes in a way that you never would have been able to pre-marriage. Let’s call this “cross-gender enrichment.” In this way, male and female “complete” each other and reflect the image of God together (Genesis 1:26–28). But this is not something that only married people can do. It happens quite naturally in strong Christian community,”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Just as Christian singles find their “heirs” and family within the church, so do brothers find their sisters and sisters find their brothers.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Only if you commit yourself to loving in action, day in and day out, even when feelings and circumstances are in flux, can you truly be a free individual and not a pawn of outside forces.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“The reason marriage is so painful and wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us. 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 us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to ad rest in God's mercy and grace.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“We have been exploring marriage as a means to help one another become the glorious, unique persons God is making us. Marriage partners can say, “I see what you are becoming and what you will be (even though, frankly, you aren’t there yet). The flashes of your future attract me.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“We should be glad of success, but not overly glad, and saddened by failure, but not too downcast, because our true joy in the future is guaranteed by God. So we are to enjoy but not be “engrossed” (I Corinthians 7:31) in things of this world.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“It is not surprising, then, that after children leave home, many marriages fall apart. Why? Because while the parents treated their relationship with their children as a covenant relationship—performing the actions of love until their feelings strengthened—they treated their marriages as a consumer relationship and withdrew their actions of love when they weren’t having the feelings. As a result, after two decades, their marriages were empty while their love for their children remained strong.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“when someone says, “I don’t need a piece of paper to show love,” you might say, “Yes, you do. If you love the way the Bible describes the love of two people who want to share their lives together, you should have no problem making a legal, permanent, exclusive commitment.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“En virtud de Su obra redentora, Jesús es a la vez nuestro Amigo y nuestro Prometido, y ese es el modelo que ha de imperar en el matrimonio cristiano. Marido y mujer tienen que ser al mismo tiempo amantes y amigos, en imitación a Cristo.”
― Timothy J. Keller, El significado del matrimonio: Cómo enfrentar las dificultades del compromiso con la sabiduría de Dios

“Hay que aprender, pues, primero a servir a los demás, ayudados por el Espíritu, para poder hacer frente así con éxito a los retos y dificultades del matrimonio.”
― Timothy J. Keller, El significado del matrimonio: Cómo enfrentar las dificultades del compromiso con la sabiduría de Dios

“La doctrina bíblica del pecado explica por qué el matrimonio, más que cualquier otra empresa humana, es algo tan difícil de conseguir que triunfe.”
― Timothy J. Keller, El significado del matrimonio: Cómo enfrentar las dificultades del compromiso con la sabiduría de Dios

“Un matrimonio que se basa no en la negación del propio yo, sino en una autorrealización, exigiría una pareja que apenas necesitara atención personal y que satisficiera todas las necesidades propias sin esperar nada a cambio. Dicho de forma sencilla, hay quien espera demasiado de su pareja.”
― Timothy J. Keller, El significado del matrimonio: Cómo enfrentar las dificultades del compromiso con la sabiduría de Dios

“I believe this particular part of 1 Corinthians 7 is an important practical resource. Each partner in marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it. In short, the greatest sexual pleasure should be the pleasure of seeing your spouse getting pleasure. When you get to the place where giving arousal is the most arousing thing, you are practicing this principle. When I was doing research for this chapter, I found some old talks that Kathy and I did together. I had forgotten some of the struggles we had in our early days, and some of the notes reminded me that in those years we started to dread having sex. Kathy, in those remarks, said that if she didn’t experience an orgasm during lovemaking, we both felt like failures. If I asked her, “How was that?” and she said, “It just hurt,” I felt devastated, and she did, too. We had a great deal of trouble until we started to see something. As Kathy said in her notes:   We came to realize that orgasm is great, especially climaxing together. But the awe, the wonder, the safety, and the joy of just being one is stirring and stunning even without that. And when we stopped trying to perform and just started trying to simply love one another in sex, things started to move ahead. We stopped worrying about our performance. And we stopped worrying about what we were getting and started to say, “Well, what can we do just to give something to the other?” This concept also has implications for a typical problem that many couples experience in their marital relationship—namely, that one person wants sex more often than the other. If your main purpose in sex is giving pleasure, not getting pleasure, then a person who doesn’t have as much of a sex drive physically can give to the other person as a gift. This is a legitimate act of love, and it shouldn’t be denigrated by saying, “Oh, no, no. Unless you’re going to be all passionate, don’t do it.” Do it as a gift. Related to this are the differences that many spouses experience over what is the most satisfying context for sex. While I am not saying this is universal, I will share that, as a male, context means very little to me. That means, to be blunt, pretty much anytime, anywhere. However, I came to see that that meant I was being oblivious to something that was very important to my wife. Context? Oh, you mean candles or something? And, of course, Kathy, like so many women, did not mean “candles or something.” She meant preparing for sex emotionally. She meant warmth and conversation and things like that. I learned this, but slowly. And so we learned to be very patient with each other when it came to sex. It took years for us to be good at sexually satisfying one another. But the patience paid off. Sex”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“I have had homosexual friends, both men and women, tell me that one of the factors that made homosexual love attractive to them was how much easier it was than dealing with someone of a different sex. I have no doubt this is true. A person of one’s own sex is not as likely to have as much Otherness to embrace. But God’s plan for married couples involves embracing the otherness to make us unified, and that can only happen between a man and a woman.22”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Some years ago, a man who regularly listened to my preaching made a shrewd observation. He said, “When you are well prepared for your sermon, you cite a great variety of sources, but when you aren’t well prepared, you just quote C. S. Lewis.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“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. Paul”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“But 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.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Her parents’ marriage, the “creation of time and will,” was indeed more interesting than her fleeting romance, however passionate. Some”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“There is a conservative approach to marriage that puts a great deal of stress on traditional gender roles. It says that the basic problem in marriage is that both husband and wife need to submit to their God-given functions, which are that husbands need to be the head of the family, and wives need to submit to their husbands. There is a lot of emphasis on the differences between men and women. The problem is that an overemphasis could encourage selfishness, especially on the part of the husband. There”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before), you will, nine times out of ten, become original without having noticed it. The”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Unless you’re able to look at marriage through the lens of Scripture instead of through your own fears or romanticism, through your particular experience, or through your culture’s narrow perspectives, you won’t be able to make intelligent decisions about your own marital future.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God