Viewing entries tagged
marriage
Many couples begin their relationships giddy and excited about each other. Love comes easily and romance feels natural. Along the way, many people find that love hard to maintain. What started as a blaze feels more like a flicker. How do you rekindle your love, and what can you do to make sure the flame never dims?
I think we do want someone who will love us just the way that we are. But we also need someone who loves us enough to help us grow and mature as well. So instead of asking, “Will this person fit into my life and not change me?” maybe there are some better questions we need to ask.
What’s ironic is that you tell yourself you’re making these sacrifices for your child, but the tension in your relationship is actually adding stress to your parenting and anxiety to your children.
Some people feel stifled by a freedomless marriage and other married couples are like single people who happen to share the same address. The way that the members of the Trinity relate model for us a vision of marriage marked by profound unity without the loss of individuality.
Christian women see Proverbs 31 as another burden they have to wear, but rightly read, it’s actually intended to do the opposite. The entire poem contains only a single command, and it isn’t addressed to women. The command comes after multiple statements about the woman’s children calling her blessed and her husband praising her.
Today, couples are cutting ties over poor hygiene, meddling in-laws, and refusing to clean toilets. But obviously, there are far more serious issues at stake also. What are the deal breakers in marriage? How you answer that question depends mostly on how you understand marriage.
People don’t tend to talk a lot about the conflicts they have. That’s understandable, of course, but the result can be that we don’t have any sense of what’s normal. I often hear people say, “Every couple argues,” but what does that mean? Someone might wrongly conclude that every couple has shouting matches with threats and intimidation. That’s not the case! When does conflict cross the line? When should you be concerned? What kind of behaviour should be out of bounds?
This week, I had a strange experience with two books on marriage. I finished reading Darby Strickland’s book, “Is It Abuse?” and started reading Tim and Kathy Keller’s book, “The Meaning of Marriage.” Both of them are excellent. Both of them address the topic of marriage from the Scriptures. But it’s as if they’re addressed to people from two different worlds. The first helps people to identify whether domestic abuse is present in a relationship and gives strategies for addressing it. The second helps people discover how a marriage can become all it was intended to be. Reading one gave me new awareness in reading the second. I realized that in only approaching marriage from the ideal that the Bible presents, there are principles that can be misunderstood and even used by abusers to manipulate their spouses. Consider the following examples.
Last time we considered how the good news about Jesus can change our relationships. Today, I want to look, in particular, at how it can transform a marriage. The Bible’s teaching on marriage today is drowned out by so many other voices. A search for books on marriage at Amazon returns more than 50,000 titles. With all of these books on the subject, you’d think that marriages today must be better than ever. The reality is that the opposite is the case. The Bible holds out hope, but even as Christians turn to its teaching on marriage, they can forget the gospel as they read. They can stumble on God’s commands without leaning on any of His grace. One of the principles of gospel living that we looked at two weeks ago was starting with what God has done before moving on to what we do. Let’s see how that gets played out in the Bible’s teaching on marriage.
Marriage can be wonderful, but conflict is usually part of the equation. There are differences to work out, hurts to deal with, and misunderstandings to overcome. Some people will barge into conflict with little concern for how it hurts the other person. Other people will bottle their feelings in until they’re ready to explode. Either way, the consequences can be devastating. Learning how to deal effectively with conflict in a marriage can be helped by laying down some simple ground rules on how to fight fair. I was helped by Brian Orme’s article in this regard. He gives five do’s and five don’ts for more constructive conflicts. This week, we’ll look at the five things to avoid.
