Long-term marital intimacy requires accepting this truth: to stop giving yourself to your spouse is to spiritually divorce them.

When God does not supply our motivation, we tend to major in the minors and minor in the majors.

Christian life is a journey toward love, growing in love, expanding in our ability to love, surrendering our hearts to love, increasingly becoming a person who is motivated by love.

Being “married for a mission” can revitalize a lot of marriages in which the partners think they suffer from a lack of compatibility; my suspicion is that many of these couples actually suffer from a lack of purpose.

This is the journey marriage calls us to, to seek to understand and empathize, for each of us to strive to become a redemptive partner rather than a legal opponent.

No husband comes in a perfect package. No husband can do it all. Your job as a wife is to fight to stay sensitive to your husband’s strengths. Resist the temptation to compare his weaknesses to another husband’s strengths, while forgetting your husband’s strengths and that other husband’s weaknesses.

Our battle is today. Because of God’s grace, yesterday doesn’t count. Because of God’s hope, worry about tomorrow is inappropriate.

When our happiness is dependent on what happens to us and when our self-focus determines our daily mood, our joy will necessarily be limited to whatever good thing happens to us. But when we learn to truly delight in the welfare of others and rejoice in what God is doing in their lives, the potential for increased joy skyrockets.

The key question is this: Will we approach marriage from a God-centered view or a man-centered view? In a man-centered view, we will maintain our marriage as long as our earthly comforts, desires, and expectations are met. In a God-centered view, we preserve our marriage because it brings glory to God and points a sinful world to a reconciling Creator.

In this fallen world, struggles, sin, and unfaithfulness are a given. The only question is whether our response to these struggles, sin, and unfaithfulness will draw us closer to God – or whether it will estrange us from ourselves, our Creator, and each other.