Grace Changes Everything: How The Gospel Reshapes Marriage

Being married is great. Really great. Think about it. Deep love. Other-centered affection. Walks in the park, holding hands at sunset. Gentle kisses. Thoughtful gifts-just because. Sticky notes left on the mirror saying, “I love you so much.” Candlelit prepared meals when you walk in the door. Surprise weekends at a bed and breakfast. Roses. Cards. Cuddling on the couch. Back-rubs and foot massages. Phone calls throughout the day. Winks from across the room that say, “I'm so glad to be married to you.” The marriage bed. One-flesh intimacy. Tender affection. Patient endurance. Christ-like warmth—all the time. Yes, being married is great!

Only sometimes, it's a little different than that. Okay, often, our day-in, day-out experience as husbands and wives is downright hard. Instead of perpetual reception of thoughtful gifts from the other, we walk in most days to receive ongoing complaints about the dirty socks left on the coffee table. Again! Instead of patient endurance, we blow up in anger at the smallest offense. We demand to be served and are slow to consider how we might be a servant. Even Jesus-loving husbands married to Jesus-loving wives fail. Often. Miserably! In the midst of everyday life, we fail to trust grace, fail to remember the cross, fail to live grace towards our spouse, fail to receive grace easily, and fail to display grace to others through our marriages.

Why? Why is marriage so hard? What happens in between the minutes spent daydreaming about how amazing your marriage could be and what happens when you're actually together with your spouse? If you are eager to learn how grace transforms marriage, then read on. If you're weary from running on the performance treadmill of striving harder and doing better in your marriage, then press forward. If you are desperate for help to know how grace changes everything in your marriage, then read further. If you are eager to see the transforming power of the gospel work more deeply in you and produce supernatural levels of love and affection towards your spouse, then keep reading. If you've already figured all this stuff out and your marriage needs no help whatsoever, then please stop reading and get out there and help the millions of us who are struggling through.

This book seeks to take the gospel (good news of Jesus life, death, burial, and resurrection) and apply it to marriage. This book is for those who want to grow more and more into displaying the amazing grace of Jesus through your marriage. This book is for Christ-loving, grace-trusting, servant-hearted, other-centered, blood-bought Christians who struggle to know how the good news of Jesus changes everything in your marriage.

As you read, meditate, and consider Jesus and the power of the gospel to radically change you and reorient you in your marriage, may the Spirit of the Living God who abides within every Christian take the Truths of God's Word and burn them deep into our hearts. May grace work so profoundly within us that our actions are so radically transformed that grace alone explains why we do all that we do in marriage. No matter the trouble, trials, sins, temptations, failures, and hardships that have befallen your marriage, no one has sinned so deep that Jesus-grace is not deeper still. May we grow to live like Him towards one another because Jesus has made us His own. May we believe grace, live grace, and display grace through marriage.