Christ Centered Marriage Quotes

The greatest source of security our children have in this world is a God-honoring, Christ-centered marriage between their parents.

...a marriage with Christ at the center of it pulls you right out of yourself. It teaches each partner, the husband and the wife, to forget about self for a while in care and sacrifice for the other. We come to ourselves by losing ourselves.

If we want to have and enjoy such Christ-centered intimacy, we need to get married. And if we want to get married, we need to pursue clarity about whom to marry. We don’t pursue clarity by diving into intimacy. The right kind of clarity is a means to the right kind of intimacy, not the other way around. Careful, prayerful, thoughtful clarity will produce healthy, lasting, passionate intimacy. Any other road to intimacy will sabotage it, leaving it shallow, fragile, and unreliable.

Children raised in a couple-centered home more fully understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. God’s love manifested in marriage speaks more to kids than any Sunday school lesson or sermon. This truth is the essence of Ephesians 5:25. Marriage is used as a word picture for God’s love for the church. What is your marriage teaching your kids about Jesus?

The great prize in dating is Christ-centered clarity. Intimacy is safest in the context of marriage and marriage is safest in the context of clarity. The purpose of our dating is to determine whether the two of us should get married, so we should focus our effort there.

If you child is not given a biblical, high, Christ-centered view of marriage, he or she is likely live with distorted views and destructive practices. Therefore, you must be intentional to raise a child whose marriage honors God, impacts generations to come with the gospel, and is a witness to the world about the love of the Savior for his people.

the Bible’s solution to a bad marriage is a reorientation to the radical, spousal love of Christ communicated in the gospel. “You shall not commit adultery” (Exod 20:14) makes sense in the context of his spousal love, especially on the cross, where he was completely faithful to us. Only when we know this sacrificial, spousal love of Christ will we have real fortitude to combat lust. His love is fulfilling, so it keeps us from looking to sexual fulfillment to give us what only Jesus can.

And just as Christ is always drawing his people closer to himself, so in Christ-centered marriage each spouse is constantly endeavoring to provide an atmosphere in the home which helps the other to draw closer to Christ, to be always flourishing in the spiritual life. This certainly is another tremendously important reason for marriage. As the Monk Moses of Mt. Athos states, “Two people come to the communion of marriage to help one another in their salvation.” Fr. Alexander Elchaninov hints at this with these remarkable words: “In marriage the festive joy of the first day should last for the whole of life: every day should be a feast day; every day husband and wife should appear to each other as new, extraordinary beings. The only way of achieving this: let both deepen their spiritual life, and strive hard in the task of self-development.

While the great prize in marriage is Christ-centered intimacy, the great prize in dating is Christ-centered clarity.

When humanity, rather than the God-man Christ, becomes the deliverer, we clearly see the articulation of a new religion. For Christians, Christ is the center of all being. For those seeking new experiences, existence becomes a search for the fleeting satisfaction of desire and the pursuit of “inspiration,” which amounts to a movement away from the spiritual and toward the emotional. In such a state, the emotional can seem all-consuming and worth the sacrifice of surrendering self-control to this tide of emotion.

What does it mean to live in an intentionally Christ-centered way in your daily life—in your marriage, parenting, friendship, work, community, finances, etc.? Remember that only when you live for Christ can you recapture the transcendence for which you were created. Only in transcendent living can you recover your true humanity. And only in recovering your true humanity can your life really have meaning and purpose. All of this is true because your humanity is not tied to self-discovery and self-fulfillment (as the surrounding world proposes) but in investing your life for Christ’s glory and the success of his kingdom on earth.

If you want a happy Christ-centered marriage, you must be centered in Christ!

God could have made a single self-sufficient sex that felt perfectly complete and didn't long for anybody, but He didn't. Why not? Do you know what I think? I think God made us male and female because we need to long for each other. It's not good not to long for someone; it's not good to be absorbed in yourself. Somehow, each of us needs to get out of self. With the help of God's grace, the marriage of a man and woman can make that happen. Solitary sex can't do that, it sinks him into a looking-glass idol of the self. Casual sex can't do that, it merely uses the other for the purposes of the self. But a marriage with Christ at the center of it pulls you right out of yourself. It teaches each partner, the husband and the wife, to forget about self for a while in care and sacrifice for the other. We come to ourselves by losing ourselves.

In Hebrews 12:2, 'the race set before us' is not a sprint but a marathon. We are promised popularity, ease, and fun if we will pursue the lifestyles presented to us by the world. We are promised easy credit, 250 channels, unlimited minutes, all you can eat, no-fault divorce, free wireless, confidential abortions, and safe sex. Those are the 'joys set before us' by the world, and most people trust these promises to deliver joy apart from God. But notice what is happening. The pursuit of the excellence of Jesus Christ is replaced by the pursuit of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is replaced with the ratings of what or who is most popular, and self-control is traded for self-indulgence. Consequently, there is no foundation for endurance. Even God's people quit jobs and marriages at the same rate as the world. More tragically, many of God's people quit trusting God. They have been stripped of Christian character.

First, while the church shouldn’t affirm homosexual activity (or adultery, idolatry, or greed, for that matter), it should welcome anyone—gays included—to discover who God is and to find his forgiveness.5 Lots of people wear WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelets and T-shirts, but they don’t treat homosexuals as Jesus would. He wouldn’t react in fear or avoid them; he would welcome them, sit with them, and tell them of God’s deep interest in them. Many churches treat homosexuals as modern-day lepers—as outcasts; but Jesus came to heal, help, and set all people free to live for God. Surely churches can welcome gays without condoning their lifestyle—just as they can receive adulterers and alcoholics. As my pastor, Bill Stepp, regularly says, “God accepts you the way you are, but he loves you too much to leave you as you are.” It’s strange that professing Christians single out homosexual activity as the most wicked of sins. Often those who claim to be saved by God’s grace are amazingly judgmental, hateful, and demeaning (calling homosexual persons “fairies” or “faggots”) rather than being compassionate and embracing. Professing Christians are often harder on homosexuals outside the church than they are with the immorality within the church (cf. 1 Cor. 5:9–13). New Testament scholar Bruce Winter writes with a prophetic voice, “The ease with which the present day church often passes judgment on the ethical or structural misconduct of the outside community is at times matched only by its reluctance to take action to remedy the ethical conduct of its own members.”6 Second, the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexual inclinations, but rather sexual activity outside of a marriage relationship between husband and wife. In fact, no writers of antiquity, including biblical ones, had any idea of “sexual orientation”; they talked about sexual behavior. When the Scriptures speak against immoral sexual relationships, the focus is not on inclinations or feelings (whether homosexual or heterosexual).7 Rather, the focus is on acting out those impulses (which ranges from inappropriately dwelling on sexual thoughts—lusting—to carrying them out sexually). Even though we are born with a sinful, self-centered inclination, God judges us based on what we do.8 Similarly, a person may, for whatever reasons, have same-sex inclinations, but God won’t judge him on the basis of those inclinations, but on what he does with them. A common argument made by advocates of a gay lifestyle is that the Bible doesn’t condemn loving, committed same-sex relationships (“covenant homosexuality”)—just homosexual rape or going against one’s natural sexual inclination, whether hetero- or homosexual. Now, “the Bible doesn’t say anything about ——” or “Jesus never said anything about ——” arguments can be tricky and even misleading. The Bible doesn’t speak about abortion, euthanasia, political involvement, Christians fighting in the military, and the like. Jesus, as far as we know, never said anything about rape or child abuse. Nevertheless, we can get guidance from Scripture’s more basic affirmations about our roles as God’s image-bearers, about God’s creation design, and about our identity and redemption in Christ, as we’ll see below.

Marriage is patterned after Christ’s covenant relationship to his redeemed people, the church. And therefore, the highest meaning and the most ultimate purpose of marriage is to put the covenant relationship of Christ and his church on display. That is why marriage exists. . . . That is why we are married. That is why all married people are married, even when they don’t know and embrace this gospel.1

Knowing that our marriages have such a high purpose—to display the gospel to the world—is both encouraging and sobering. Yet right there within the truth of the gospel is our hope. We more accurately display the truth of the gospel as we better understand it. See, not only does

The world does not fully understand marriage, because it does not understand the gospel. It does not understand submission and sacrificial love, because it does not know the one great story of Christ’s sacrifice for His bride, the church. However, more often than not, couples who claim to be Christians display marriages no different from those seen in the world. There is little understanding of the beautiful picture marriage is meant to be.

Because marriage is God’s design, His doing, and meant for His glory, Christian marriages should be different. A sacrificial and submissive marriage is shocking to the world. In such a marriage, a husband and wife do not seek their own glory but look to one another’s good first, to the glory of God. This kind of marriage is beautiful—it’s what marriage was meant to be.

Sexuality. The moralist tends to see sex as dirty, or at least as a dangerous impulse that leads constantly to sin. The relativist/pragmatist sees sex as merely a biological and physical appetite. The gospel shows us that sexuality is supposed to reflect the self-giving of Christ. He gave himself completely, without conditions. Consequently, we are not to seek intimacy while holding back the rest of our lives. If we give ourselves sexually, we are also to give ourselves legally, socially, and personally. Sex is to be shared only in a totally committed, permanent relationship of marriage.

We need revival, a reformation of our hearts and minds. We don't need more self-help books, we don't need more welfare programs or feel-good efforts: we need more of Jesus Christ. Our battleground is not marriage, sexuality, sanctity of life, justice, or hunger. Our battleground is the gospel. Jesus is enough. I

The gospel shows us that sexuality is supposed to reflect the self-giving of Christ. He gave himself completely, without conditions. Consequently, we are not to seek intimacy while holding back the rest of our lives. If we give ourselves sexually, we are also to give ourselves legally, socially, and personally. Sex is to be shared only in a totally committed, permanent relationship of marriage.

This is the beginning of how husbands and wives forbear and forgive. They are blown away by being chosen, set apart, and loved by God. Husbands, devote yourselves to seeing and savoring this. Wives, do the same. Get your life from this. Get your joy from this. Get your hope from this—that you are chosen, set apart, and loved by God. Plead with the Lord that this would be the heartbeat of your life and your marriage. On this basis now—on the basis of this profound, new, God-centered identity as chosen, holy, and loved—we are told what to “put on.” That is, we are told what kind of attitude and behavior fits with, and flows from, being chosen, set apart, and loved by God through Christ.

The next pair is “humility, meekness.” Verse 12: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness . . .” Literally, “lowliness, meekness.” Again “lowliness” is the inward condition, and “meekness” is the outward demeanor. People whose hearts are lowly, instead of proud, will act more meekly toward others. The meek count others above themselves and serve them. That happens when the heart is lowly, or humble. So, husbands, sink your roots by faith into Christ through the gospel until you become more lowly and humble. Wives, sink your roots by faith into Christ through the gospel until you become more lowly and humble. The gospel of Christ’s painful death on our behalf has a way of breaking our pride and our sense of rightful demands and our frustration at not getting our way. It works lowliness into our souls. Then we treat each other with meekness flowing out of that lowliness. The battle is with our own proud, self-centered inner person. Fight that battle by faith, through the gospel, in prayer. Be stunned and broken and built up and made glad and humble because you are chosen, holy, loved.

Marriages that are Christ-centered are beautiful to behold and wonderful to enjoy. Romance as God intended it can last a lifetime.

As a matter of fact, Neptune in early Christianity was occasionally used as a sort of symbol, meaning the devil. I have a vase, presumably dating from the first century, on which are represented the three forms of the union of man and woman. In the first a man and woman are standing opposite one another, and the man holds a mandrake (the German Alraun) which is a love charm, and behind his back is a shadow, to indicate that a demon has of course insinuated that magic: that is the union through a magic charm. Then on the other side is the representation of a pagan marriage, which was regarded as being sinful, and there the man holds a fork with three points, a trident, the Neptune symbol. And in the center is represented the Christian union of man and woman; there a vertical fish is between them and they touch hands through the fish, that is the matrimonium in Christi, the marriage in Christ. You know, the Christian marriage is not a union of man and woman exclusively, but is a union with Christ between. Of course our modern marriage is no longer a union in Christ, and that is a mistake. The immediate union of man and woman is too dangerous: there must be a mediation, whatever it is. Therefore the Catholic church maintains very wisely the power of interference; the priest is always between, representing the church, the body of Christ in between a married couple. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1084). Princeton University Press.