Book Review: The Meaning of Marriage

A month ago, my awesome husband Clint and I celebrated our 10 year anniversary.  I decided that would be a great time to read Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage.  I’ve heard a lot of great things about this book and was eager to learn more about how to make our marriage the very best it can be.  I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God brought Clint in my life to show me what the gospel is all about.  Clint is the epitome of sacrifice and does an awesome job of providing for and protecting our family while pointing us to Jesus at all times.

Here are several things that I highlighted while reading…

  • We are defining marriage as a lifelong, monogamous relationship between a man and a woman. According to the Bible, God devised marriage to reflect his saving love for us in Christ, to refine our character, to create stable human community for the birth and nurture of children, and to accomplish all this by bringing the complementary sexes into an enduring whole-life union.
  • Unless you’re able to look at marriage through the lens of Scripture instead of through your own fears or romanticism, through your particular experience, or through your culture’s narrow perspectives, you won’t be able to make intelligent decisions about your own marital future.
  • Nothing can mature character like marriage.
  • Older views of marriage are considered to be traditional and oppressive, while the newer view of the “Me-Marriage” seems so liberating. And yet it is the newer view that has led to a steep decline in marriage and to an oppressive sense of hopelessness with regard to it.
  • Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
  • If God had the gospel of Jesus’s salvation in mind when he established marriage, then marriage only “works” to the degree that approximates the pattern of God’s self-giving love in Christ.
  • This is the secret—that the gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another. That when God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind.
  • The Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfillment and sacrifice but rather mutual fulfillment through mutual sacrifice.
  • 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 gospel will help you experience deeper and deeper union with each other as the years go on.
  • The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.
  • Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Ephesians 5:21
  • Only if you have learned to serve others by the power of the Holy Spirit will you have the power to face the challenges of marriage.
  • If we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility.
  • Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.
  • A servant puts someone else’s needs ahead of his or her own. That is how all believers should live with each other. And if all believers are to serve each other in this way, how much more intentionally and intensely should husbands and wives have this attitude toward one another?
  • The ability to serve another person requires the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to drive this very gospel into our hearts until it changes us.
  • Self-centeredness by its very character makes you blind to your own while being hypersensitive, offended, and angered by that of others.4 The result is always a downward spiral into self-pity, anger, and despair, as the relationship gets eaten away to nothing.
  • And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. (2 Corinthians 5:15)
  • If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.
  • How would we live if we instinctively, almost unconsciously, knew Jesus’s mind and heart regarding things that confronted us?
  • “We love—because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
  • In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other.
  • Imagine a house with an A-frame structure. The two sides of the home meet at the top and hold one another up. But underneath, the foundation holds up both of the sides. So the covenant with and before God strengthens the partners to make a covenant with each other. Marriage is therefore the deepest of human covenants.
  • A covenant relationship is a stunning blend of law and love.
  • Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love.
  • To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
  • There are two features of real friendship—constancy and transparency. Real friends always let you in, and they never let you down.
  • The picture that the Bible draws of spiritual friendship is remarkable. Christian friendship is not simply about going to concerts together or enjoying the same sporting event. It is the deep oneness that develops as two people journey together toward the same destination, helping one another through the dangers and challenges along the way.
  • The goal is to see something absolutely ravishing that God is making of the beloved.
  • Your marriage must be more important to you than anything else. No other human being should get more of your love, energy, industry, and commitment than your spouse.
  • Marriage by its very nature has the “power of truth”—the power to show you the truth about who you are.
  • Give each other the right to hold one another accountable. “Exhort one another daily, lest you become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).
  • Marriage has unique power to show us the truth of who we really are. Marriage has unique power to redeem our past and heal our self-image through love. And marriage has unique power to show us the grace of what God did for us in Jesus Christ.
  • To the eye of God, as the years go by, you are making each other more and more beautiful, like a diamond being cut and polished and set.
  • Even at the atomic level, all the universe is held together by the attraction of positive and negative forces. The embrace of the Other, as it turns out, really is what makes the world go around.
  • Marriage was created to be a reflection on the human level of our ultimate love relationship and union with the Lord. It is a sign and foretaste of the future kingdom of God.
  • Romans 7:1ff tells us that the best marriages are pointers to the deep, infinitely fulfilling, and final union we will have with Christ in love.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *