Arvin Engelson, a fellow student with Kathy and me at seminary years ago, likened marriage to a gem tumbler. You put gems into the tumbler and they are brought into constructive, creative contact with each other. They knock the rough edges off of each other until each gem is smooth and beautiful. But if you don’t put a special compound into the

Kathy’s and my bed and wept, wondering if she was doing the right thing. She now says, “Our marriage began at the gates of doubt and hell but is now at the gates of Heaven.”

The introductory statement for Paul’s famous paragraph on marriage in Ephesians is verse 21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” ... Modern Western readers immediately focus on (and often bristle at) the word “submit,” because for us it touches the controversial issue of gender roles. ... Only if you have learned to serve others by

yourself to someone.

therefore it is inevitable that we will need to seek another person who can reawaken the joy of love in us?

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. On the one hand, the experience of marriage will unveil the beauty and depths of the gospel to you. It will drive you further into reliance on it. On the other hand, a greater understanding of the

Many people believe that if you have sex with your spouse just to please him or her though you are not interested in sex yourself, it would be inauthentic or even oppressive. This is the thoroughly subjective understanding of love-as-passionate-feeling. And often this quickly leads into a vicious cycle. If you won’t make love unless you are in a

But the Bible sees God as the supreme good—not the individual or the family—and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feeling and duty, passion and promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.

The search for a satisfying sexual partner is a problem all by itself. Another report by the National Marriage Project states: A pornographic media culture may [also] contribute to unrealistic expectations of what their future soul mate should look like. Influenced by the sexy images of young women on MTV, the Internet, and on the runway in