Top Christian Marriage Advice For All Couples Young And Old

If you and your spouse are a Christian couple, no matter how young or old you are, there is something that is strategically different about your relationship than simply a marriage as understood by the world at large.

Christian Marriage Advice

Here is come Christian marriage advice to enhance and strengthen your relationship:

1. Realize that Christian marriage is part of your discipleship.

A Christian marriage is between two disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. The singularity of being a disciple of Jesus is a good way to see the foundation of a Christian marriage. Look at Jesus’ sharp definition of discipleship and you will see that it is all-encompassing, and becomes your prime directive in all things.

If you view your marriage in this way, it will make things line up and anything that happens in your marriage becomes understandable in relation to your prime directive as a disciple of Christ.

No man can serve two masters. You can’t see loving your spouse as compartmentalized, as if loving them and partnering with them is distinct from your following after Christ. In this light, whatever happens between you can be best understood as God working with/in/for you to grow you and challenge you to new vistas of faith.

“If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.'” – Luke 14:26-30

2. Make your spouse your number one priority.

Christian marriage is the greatest thing that God uses to drive you to growth (translate: struggle, quandary, death to self, and emerging into new levels of faith).

Consider this statement:

“If your marriage is the highest priority in your life then shouldn’t it be the place also where you bring your faith to bear most vibrantly? The place you do your most strident believing?”

Start doing some believing about your marriage. Lift your eyes to consider some possibilities that are lofty, things the eye has not seen (1 Corinthians 2:9). Many of the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11 saw something from afar – things that contradicted their current experience – but they believed in the benevolence, relevance, and ability of a Promiser.

Your marriage is full of promise that may be contrary to your experience. Faith insists that God has something extraordinarily good intended in your marriage, and the contradiction with your present experience is intended to drive you to new vistas of faith and belief.

Faith also considers that there are playing pieces that you are unaware of right now; things that show up when you believe.

3. Evaluate and Adjust Your Expectations

So many of the books and teachings on marriage are techniques – techniques for simply rearranging the existing known playing pieces and for two selfish people to adjust to each other’s selfishness. We accommodate one another’s selfishness by bartering, trading, compromising, and biting the bullet at points.  As a result, we turn the volume down on expectations of marriage, turn the volume down on hopes and lofty dreams, and settle for less.

I hear so many say, “Yeah, but it takes two,” or “It’s a two-way street,” or “I have needs, too.” But the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 and Luke 6 talks about one-way righteousness in many expressions: “…if you love those who love you what credit is that to you,” or “do not even the pagans do the same?” This is not being a door mat, or giving up desires. One-way righteousness is assertive but also seeks to find the treasures of the Kingdom of God that Jesus announced was now in gear.

Your expectations, hopes, and dreams can be sky-high because they are what you have from God, and not fearfully based on a spouse who is a weak human, and who can never be your unmoveable and utterly reliable Rock.

“He only is my Rock and my salvation…”– Psalm 62

Christian Marriage Advice and Counseling

Based on some of the above concepts, Christian marriage counseling will be entirely different from counseling that has a humanistic foundation and goals. If you are interested in realigning your marriage, reinterpreting what you are seeing in Kingdom of God principles, I would be happy to work with you.