Marriage is designed by God, it’s His idea, and it is for good.
Have you ever seen those marriages that seem to just have everything together? It’s clear that God is in the center of it, and that He put those people together. Well, this book is NOT full of those. God may have formed the unions, as only He can, but these are stories of REAL marriages, problems, and God-given solutions. One day, you’ll have that marriage every envies, but you’ll also have a story of God’s faithfulness to use that marriage for good.
We need all the help we can get, so I asked my author and married friends for their stories, seeking out the BEST advice they had for cultivating strong, enduring marriages centered on Christ. Some of these devos are from “equally yoked” marriages. Some are from believers married to non-believers, and some are from married couples who found God together along the way.
Made up of real stories from real people about a real God, these devotionals are based in Biblical truth and will encourage, edify, and inspire marriages of all ages and stages.
Join 12 Devo Authors (+15 more writers) and discover how each story of God helping them in their marriage can impact your own.
This is a collaboration of 27 different contributors, husbands as well as wives sharing some of their valuable takeaways from their own married life - from a few years into their marriage all the way to almost 55 years of marital experience.
All the personal stories and examples shared across all the various chapters revealing many "Ah ha" moments.
What is forgiveness? It’s giving up the right to hurt you for hurting me. When we forgive, we emulate the very character of God because that is one of his greatest attributes. The power to forgive is one of the most amazing gifts that God gives us. This couldn't be more applicable than in marriage. Forgiveness can transform our marriages and is a choice we have—to love, rather than to demand justice. Although we can't help but experience that indwelling desire to get even, we can respond with a more powerful desire for reconciliation. Marriage teaches us how to forgive because it provides so many opportunities to practice forgiveness which is a process—a journey, not an event.
When we got married, my husband and I wrote our own vows based on scripture. When we shared them on our wedding day, our pastor said, You have made some wonderful promises to each other, but I must warn you that you will not be able to keep them all. One thing you must do is to learn and be willing to ask for and grant forgiveness freely and often.” What wonderful advice that we have taken to heart which has served us well all these years. Love keeps no record of wrongs. While it may seem humanly impossible to love this way, we can choose to give up our rights to hang on to the past and to rise above that with an attitude to persevere and keep moving forward—keeping our eyes on Jesus, our perfect example of forgiveness. Once an issue has been dealt with and forgiveness exchanged, it is important to move on and not dwell on past wrongs.
Let it go and don’t go dredging it up again later. Learning how to say we're sorry and to freely extend forgiveness to one another is central for marital peace.
You may not feel like forgiving at first. That’s okay. It is a decision – an act of the will. It means letting go of the past. Your feelings will follow. It is said that “It’s easier to act your way into feelings than to feel your way into acting.” Forgiving is more powerful when it is least deserved or expected.
It does not mean that you have to pretend that nothing happened. You probably will not be able to forget about what happened, but when forgiveness has taken place, the emotions that come when you do think about it will be much different than before. You will be able to recall the event as something that happened in your past, yet the hurt is no longer there. On the other hand, hurts that are not dealt with and forgiven are stored in our subconscious memory as a negative emotion. That is why they must be dealt with. Acid tends to eat away at the
container that stores it.
I have found so much truth in the saying that the one who benefits the most from forgiveness is not the one who receives it, but the one who grants it. Forgiveness cannot change your past, but it can change your future.