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A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together? QUOTES

A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together? QUOTES

1 " We learn to love imperfect people by serving them out of reverence for a perfect God... "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

2 " A defeatist attitude kills almost as many marriages as do affairs. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

3 " A good marriage isn't something you find; it's something you make. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

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

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

5 " So what does this mean? I am dedicated to the preservation of my marriage’s unity. Not just for my happiness and my children’s security, but because of my calling in Christ. I will guard my marriage, feed it, work through issues, confront when necessary if something is threatening our unity, forgive with eagerness to preserve our unity, be gentle so that no bitterness attacks our unity, live with patience so that I don’t replay past episodes, and certainly remain vigilant to never let my heart be stolen by anyone else. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

6 " 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. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

7 " Done well, marital sexuality can be a supremely healing experience. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

8 " 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. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

9 " Our wives don’t have to “deserve” it. A Christian husband doesn’t love his wife only when she is lovable. He loves her whenever Christ deserves to be reverenced, which, of course, is always. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

10 " What if I ran all my actions through this grid: “If my son-in-law treated my daughter the way I’m treating my wife, how would I feel?” Men, that’s the way what you’re doing looks like to God. Women, just switch the genders. Imagine hearing your (perhaps future) daughter-in-law talking to her friends about your son with the same tone and words you use to describe your husband: How does that feel? "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

11 " 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. If we truly want to love God’s sons and daughters, we have to seek to understand God’s sons and daughters. Men and women, have you ever asked God why your spouses are the way they are? In the midst of your frustration, have you ever sought God’s perspective for what has “bent” them in their current direction? "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

12 " Your tests don’t have to define you. Your compatibility doesn’t have to be a ceiling over which your relationship can never rise. Your past hurts don’t have to constitute the first steps in a journey toward divorce court. We worship, serve, and are empowered by a supernatural God who can lift us above our scientific limitations and create something special out of something very ordinary. These tests don’t account for the power of a magnificent obsession. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

13 " Married life, offered in service to God, is such a good and rewarding life. Let’s give ourselves fully to it; let’s keep building our “marital house” until we die, pursuing each other, forgiving each other, loving each other, and growing together through the years. If we do this, we will, like Anne, be richly blessed with a lifelong love. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

14 " Don’t pass over this thought, because it’s crucial: Isaiah 40:29 assumes that God will call us to various tasks for which we lack enough power on our own. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?

15 " Keep in mind: if your marriage and family feel like a joke or as if they’re bordering on chaos, it’s not anything that God hasn’t seen or isn’t capable of redeeming. So much of Christian teaching today is about us developing “our” gifts, improving “our” talents, reaching “our” potential, yet so much of Jesus’s teaching and modeling is about surrendering to the work of the Holy Spirit. Let’s allow marriage to teach us to trust this Holy Spirit. He’s proven Himself. "

― Gary L. Thomas , A Lifelong Love: What If Marriage Is about More Than Just Staying Together?