"Marriage is God’s idea."

"What God institutes he also regulates. If God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to his purposes for it."

"It is hard to get a good perspective on marriage. We all see it through the inevitably distorted lenses of our own experience."

"...the gospel helps us to understand marriage and marriage helps us to understand the gospel."

"...the main enemy of marriage: sinful self-centeredness."

"...you won’t be able to make intelligent decisions about your own marital future."

"Marriage is glorious but hard."

"...there’s no relationship between human beings that is greater or more important than marriage."

"Nothing can mature character like marriage."

"...no two people are compatible."

"'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.' - Stanley Hauerwas"

"Marriage brings you into more intense proximity to another human being than any other relationship can."

"...a good marriage is more painfully hard to achieve than athletic or artistic prowess."

"Modern people make the painfulness of marriage even greater than it has to be, because they crush it under the weight of their almost cosmically impossible expectations."

"If our views of marriage are too romantic and idealistic, we underestimate the influence of sin on human life."

"Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow."

"So, what do you need to make marriage work? You need to know the secret, the gospel, and how it gives you both the power and pattern for your marriage."

"...the experience of marriage will unveil the beauty and depths of the gospel to you."

"The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once."

"Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws."

"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."

"We are often running on fumes, spiritually, but we must know where the fuel station is and, even more important, that it exists."

"If we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility."

"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."

"While Paul writes that the husband is “head” of his wife, whatever it means cannot negate the fact that he is also his wife’s Christian brother and bond-servant..."

"Self-centeredness is a havoc-wreaking problem in many marriages, and it is the ever-present enemy of every marriage."

"Self-centeredness by its very character makes you blind to your own while being hypersensitive, offended, and angered by that of others."

"It is impossible for us to make major headway against self-centeredness and move into a stance of service without some kind of supernatural help."

"Some will ask, 'If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs—then what do I get out of it?' The answer is—happiness."

"To be part of a whole, to become part of a greater unity, you have to surrender your independence."

"...this ability to deny your own rights, to serve and put the good of the whole over your own, is not instinctive; indeed, it’s unnatural, but it is the very foundation of marriage."

"...you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making."

"If two spouses each say, 'I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,' you have the prospect of a truly great marriage."

"The Christian principle that needs to be at work is Spirit generated selflessness—not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself but thinking of yourself less."

"...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."

"The best sex makes you want to weep tears of joy, not bask in the glow of a good performance."

"To break faith with your spouse is to break faith with God at the same time."

"Marriage is therefore the deepest of human covenants."

"'...any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.'-W. H. Auden"

"When you first fall in love, you think you love the person, but you don’t really. You can’t know who the person is right away. That takes years."

"To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear."

"Passion may lead you to make a wedding promise, but then that promise over the years makes the passion richer and deeper."

"...only if you maintain your love for someone when it is not thrilling can you be said to be actually loving a person."

"Our emotions are not under our control, but our actions are."

"It is a mistake to think that you must feel love to give it."

"...if your definition of 'love' stresses affectionate feelings more than unselfish actions, you will cripple your ability to maintain and grow strong love relationships."

"...I can guarantee that, whoever you marry, you will fall 'out of like' with them. Powerful feelings of affection and delight will not and cannot be sustained."

"...family and relationships are a greater blessing and provide greater satisfaction than anything money can buy."

"Husband and wife are to be both lovers and friends to one another as Jesus is to us."

"Physical attractiveness will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure."

"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."

"...most people, when they are looking for a spouse, are looking for a finished statue when they should be looking for a wonderful block of marble."

"The search for an ideal mate is a hopeless quest."

"If you don’t see your mate’s deep flaws and weaknesses and dependencies, you’re not even in the game."

"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."

"Your spouse has got to be your best friend, or be on the way to becoming your best friend..."

"When you marry your spouse, that must supersede all other relationships, even the parental relationship."

"No other human being should get more of your love, energy, industry, and commitment than your spouse."

"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."

"...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."

"But children are children. They shouldn’t be expected to give you the friendship and love that a spouse can."

"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."

"As a divine institution, marriage has several inherent powers that we must accept and use—the power of truth, the power of love, and the power of grace."

"Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your weaknesses (though you may blame your spouse for your blow-ups)—it reveals them."

"If you are in denial about some feature of your character, that feature will control you."

"Statements of affirmation make a far lighter and less lasting impression upon the human heart than criticisms and condemnations."

"... there is no greater way for Christian spouses to serve one another than to help each other grow spiritually..."

"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."

"Our sins hurt Jesus infinitely more than your spouse’s sins hurt you."

"I don’t know of anything more necessary in marriage than the ability to forgive fully, freely, unpunishingly, from the heart."

"...authority and leadership mean that you become the servant, you die to self in order to love and serve the Other."

"Both women and men get to “play the Jesus role” in marriage—Jesus in his sacrificial authority, Jesus in his sacrificial submission."

"Gilligan argued that while men seek maturity by detaching themselves, women see themselves maturing as they attach."

"Men see women’s need for “interdependence” as sheer dependence, and women see men’s need for independence as pure ego."

"The family model in which the man went out to work and the woman stayed home with the children is really a rather recent development."

"You can change no one’s behavior but your own."

"...single people cannot live their lives well as singles without a balanced, informed view of marriage."

"We should be neither overly elated by getting married nor overly disappointed by not being so..."

"Single adults cannot be seen as somehow less fully formed or realized human beings than married persons because Jesus Christ, a single man, was the perfect man."

"Marriage was created to be a reflection on the human level of our ultimate love relationship and union with the Lord."

"Marriage does and should somewhat limit the extent of friendships you have with others of the opposite sex."

"So here is some advice. First, act your age."

"...you should not deliberately marry someone who does not share your Christian faith."

"The kind of love that lasts a lifetime is not only a matter of the emotions."

"Put friendship development before romantic development."

"Marriage should not be a strictly individual, unilateral decision. It is too important, and our personal perspective is too easily skewed."

"Sex affects our heart, our inward being, not just our body."

"The Christian sex ethic can be summarized like this: Sex is for use within marriage between a man and woman."

"If anyone says that sex is bad or dirty in itself, we have the entire Bible to contradict him."

"God not only allows sex within marriage but strongly commands it."

"The Christian teaching is that sex is primarily a way to know God and build community..."

"Ironically, then, sex outside of marriage eventually works backwards, making you less able to commit and trust another person."

"...we can’t stop sexual thoughts from occurring to us—they are natural and unavoidable. However, we are responsible for what we do with those thoughts."

'"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation..."-Jane Eyre'

"If you only obey God’s word when it seems reasonable or profitable to you—well, that isn’t really obedience at all."

"Each partner in marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it."

"Unless your marital relationship is in a good condition, sex doesn’t work."

"A lack of “sexual compatibility” might not really be a lack of lovemaking skill at all. It may be a sign of deeper problems in the relationship."

"A wife is not to give her husband unconditional obedience. No human being should give any other human being unconditional obedience."

"...in a marriage, where there are only two “votes,” how can a stalemate be broken without someone having to give way?"