“To fail to love my wife and kids rightly in the name of loving other people rightly is a sham,”

What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?

Any situation that calls me to confront my selfishness has enormous spiritual value, and I slowly began to understand that the real purpose of marriage may not be happiness as much as it is holiness.

How can we discover in the challenges of marriage the opportunities to learn more about God, grow in our understanding of him, and learn to love him more?

Marriage can be that holy place, the site of a relationship that proclaims God’s love to this world. Notice what makes this story so moving: two individuals who have greater empathy for the difficulties in each other’s situation rather than in their own. Selfish marriage is the opposite: each partner feels their own pain more intensely and their

Knowing why we are married and should stay married is crucial. The key question is this: Will we approach marriage from a God-centered view or a self-centered view? In a self-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

“If you want to be free to serve Jesus, there’s no question — stay single. Marriage takes a lot of time. But if you want to become more like Jesus, I can’t imagine any better thing to do than to get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you’d never have to face otherwise.”

If what we desire most doesn’t satisfy us, we will never be satisfied, even when our “desires” have been met! That’s why finding our fulfillment in God is the cornerstone of a satisfied life. We can harm our marriages by asking too much of them.

We show our love for God in part by loving our spouses well. And we love our spouses by loving God.