While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
Interpretation
Character flaws can lead to significant issues in a marriage, affecting the spouse deeply.
In this quote, Timothy Keller emphasizes that while personal character flaws may cause minor inconveniences in casual relationships, they can have profound and damaging effects on a marriage. The intimacy and closeness of a marital bond magnify these flaws, potentially leading to significant problems that can jeopardize the relationship.
In practice
During a couples' therapy session, the counselor shared this quote to highlight the importance of addressing personal flaws.
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
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.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting⦠We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.
To allow same-sex couples to adopt children and then to label their families as second-class because the adoptive parents are of the same sex is cruel as well as unconstitutional. Classifying some families, and especially their children, as of lesser value should be repugnant to all those in this nation who profess to believe in "family values."
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Be a good listener...It makes the person who's speaking to you feel loved,cared for and worthy of being heard.
If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.
With women composing nearly half the American workforce and increasingly serving as the primary breadwinner for families, we can't afford to treat pregnant women differently than their counterparts, especially when slight job modifications could help them stay in the workforce at no risk to their health.
When I ask OGs why there's so much division in the streets, nobody never really knows. But you know one thing that everybody always mention? A woman.
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