The Mingling of Souls Quotes

“But there is a beauty even in loving without response because that kind of love is truly selfless. When we love with no expectation or promise of reciprocity, we know what it means to sacrifice and deny ourselves in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Grace does not make sin safe. Grace does make sinners safe.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Men, let me plead with you: The greatest fight of your life is not lust. You may think it is, but it isn’t. The greatest fight of your life will be rejecting the passivity that has infected your heart since the fall. Your natural default, especially as it pertains to sacrificial leadership of your wife, will be to mutely witness.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Most people are pleasant when the world is going the way they want. But a person’s character can be seen most clearly when the brokenness of the world has invaded his or her peace, when the way he or she thinks things ought to be is interrupted, disrupted, and dismantled.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“What made me love Christ wasn’t that all of a sudden I figured out how to do life. What made me love Christ is that when I was at my worst, when I was at my lowest point, when I absolutely could not clean myself up and there was nothing anybody could do with me, right at that moment, Christ said, “I’ll take that one. That’s the one I want.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“The longing in a single person’s heart for a wife or a husband finds its root in God’s glory.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“When we commit to a spouse for life, we are agreeing to enter a sacred union between two sinners and Jesus, and when you’ve got two sinners walking together over the years, you will see just how sinful he or she—and you—can be.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved.” The”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“God has seen our unloveliness—the deep brokenness and rebellion in our hearts—and instead of withdrawing, he pursues us to the beautiful end. He made an eternal commitment to sinners because of his great love for us. And because grace is true, you can face the world with all of its dangers and troubles, knowing you have been established forever as blameless by the holy groom, Jesus Christ.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“In too many marital conflicts, we work too hard at winning the argument and too little at winning the heart. You can express your feelings and thoughts, even share criticisms and complaints, but the end goal of marital conflict should be care for your spouse’s soul, not trying to rack up the most points. Seeking to win is not love.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“So quit looking for 'the one'. You have a better chance of finding an Oompa Loompa riding a unicorn, fighting Bigfoot.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Really, all frustration is birthed out of unmet expectations, and so is nearly every conflict.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Sex is a gift from God. It is meant to nurture intimacy in a marriage and forge a bonding of souls.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“You don’t really need to make a vow to stick with someone in the best of times. The inclination to run doesn’t exist then. It’s the low times the covenant is made for.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“When we learn to respond to each other rather than react, we will move much more quickly in our conflict toward resolution and reconciliation. Reactions only stoke the fires of conflict; responses, particularly godly ones, help us snuff out the conflict.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Relationships, sex, and intimacy are God’s ideas, and even though our selfish rebellion fractured God’s good design, God reconciled everything back to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. This includes sex and relationships! Our gracious God has not left us in the dark.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Because marriage is meant to reflect the great sacrificial and sanctifying love Christ has for his church, it makes sense to connect your married life to a local Christian congregation.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“nobody told me the second I gave my life to him, he would start tilling up the very deep places of my heart, revealing the darkest, nastiest things. Nor was I told about the stuff that would come to the surface so that I could deal with it and find my way to joy, through the cross. No one really preached that message.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“I think that church membership is a huge consideration, precisely because there is no such thing as a perfect church, and in our day and age in the West, we have so many options to choose from. Churches are full of sinners, so there will always be some messiness in a church. Churches are like families that way. So when a person stays in a church for a long period of time, there is evidence that she has been able to see that everything’s not perfect, but she nevertheless said, “I’m going to stay. I’m going to try to make this work. My commitment is more important than my desire to run away.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Proverbs 31:30: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Romance in marriage, for it to be truly a mingling of souls, cannot simply be a mingling of body parts. No, we must acknowledge both the blessing and the danger of beauty.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“The reason we struggle in relationships, marriage, and sex is because we are sinners. Therefore, the antidote for our sin must be the antidote for our struggles.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“The reason Christians get married “before the church” is not to give a religious appearance to the ceremony but because Christians hold the marriage covenant in the context of the community of the body of Christ. Seeking the support and counsel of family is an extension of this.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“And what we learn in the Song of Songs is that a marriage shaped according to this gospel of grace, forged over years of hard-earned trust and forgiveness, can be an unsafe place for sin but a very safe place for sinners. In a gospel-centered marriage, when two souls are mingled together with the Holy Spirit’s leading, we find confirmation after confirmation that grace is true, that grace is real—that we can be really, truly, deeply known and at the same time really, truly, deeply loved.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“we know that what we find physically attractive has been for the most part culturally informed, it is wise to acknowledge that God has hardwired us for the commitment of companionship over and above sexual attraction or physical pleasure. Companionship brings deeper joy and greater pleasure than the mere physical could ever bring by itself. If you have physical attraction and no companionship in your relationship, you’ll eventually be miserable; but if you have deep companionship with each other, physical attraction isn’t as important and becomes less and less so as time passes. In the movie Cast Away, we”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“When the person you’re attracted to goes through something difficult, it is evidence of her humanity if she is sad, stressed, or wounded. But what she does with that sadness, stress, and woundedness makes all the difference between someone who treasures Christ as supreme and satisfying and one who is her own god, who lives with a sense of entitlement and worships comfort. If you are seeking a romantic relationship, be wise and keep things with a prospective partner in the “friend zone” until you have seen how he handles the stress of a broken and fallen world.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“When the person you’re attracted to goes through something difficult, it is evidence of her humanity if she is sad, stressed, or wounded. But what she does with that sadness, stress, and woundedness makes all the difference between someone who treasures Christ as supreme and satisfying and one who is her own god, who lives with a sense of entitlement and worships comfort.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“As you pursue a relationship into the world of dating, don’t simply look for someone who reciprocates your attraction but one who reciprocates your desire to honor Jesus in your relationship above all else.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“Last but certainly not least, without the patience, grace, and godliness of my wife, Lauren, this book surely wouldn’t be in your hands. Her steadfastness through the first seven years of our marriage—which were extremely difficult—has, by God’s grace, given birth to the depth, beauty, and passion of the last eight years.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption

“God’s relationship to the church is not contractual; it’s covenantal. And what’s mind-blowing about God’s covenantal love toward the church is that God fulfills the obligations of both parties! God has put on my life the command that I am to love my wife, Lauren, as Christ loved the church. That is God’s command on my life—regardless of whether or not she reciprocates that love. I don’t love her as Christ loved the church in order to get something from her; I love her that way because that is what God has commanded me to do, and that’s the way he has loved me.”
― Matt Chandler, The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption