Cruciform love--more about it in marriage

I have gotten back to Paul Tripp's book called What did you Expect??Redeeming the Realities of Marriage. He talks about cruciform love and its context in marriage. He wants to tell us how Christlike love thinks and acts in marriage. Since this is helpful to me, I want to place some of his descriptive points down here. These are QUOTES:

1. Love is being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of your husband or wife without impatience or anger.

2. Love is actively fighting the temptation to be critical and judgmental toward your spouse, while looking for ways to encourage and praise.

3. Love is the daily commitment to resist the needless moments of conflict that come from pointing out and responding to minor offenses.

4. Love is being lovingly honest and humbly approachable in times of misunderstanding, and being more committed to unity and love than you are to winning, accusing, or being right.

5. Love is a daily commitment to admit your sin, weakness, and failure and to resist the temptation to offer and excuse or shift the blame.

6. Love means being willing, when confronted by your spouse, to examine your heart rather than rising to your defense or shifting the focus.

7. Love is a daily commitment to grow in love so that the love you offer to your husband or wife is increasingly selfless, mature, and patient.

8. Love is being unwilling to do what is wrong when you have been wronged but to look for concrete and specific ways to overcome evil with good.

9. Love is being a good student of your spouse, looking for his physical, emotional, and spiritual needs so that in some way you can remove the burden, support him as he carries it, or encourage him along the way.

10. Love means being willing to invest the time necessary to discuss, examine, and understand the problems that you face as a couple, staying on task until the problem is removed or you have agreed upon a strategy of response.

11. Love is always being willing to ask for forgiveness and always being committed to grant forgiveness when it is requested.

12. Love is recognizing the high value of trust in a marriage and being faithful to your promises and true to your word.

13. Love is speaking kindly and gently, even in moments of disagreement, refusing to attack your spouse's character or assault his or her intelligence.

14. Love is being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt your spouse into giving you what you want or doing something your way.

15. Love is being unwilling to ask your spouse to be the source of your identity, meaning, and purpose, or inner sense of well-being, while refusing to be the source of his or hers.

16. Love is the willingness to have less free time, less sleep, and a busier schedule in order to be faithful to what God has called you to be and to do as a husband or a wife.

17. Love is a commitment to say no to selfish instincts and to do everything that is within your ability to promote real unity, functional understanding, and active love in your marriage.

18. Love is staying faithful to your commitment to treat your spouse with appreciation, respect, and grace, even in moments when he or she doesn't seem to deserve it or is unwilling to reciprocate.

19. Love is the willingness to make regular and costly sacrifices for the sake of your marriage without asking anything in return or using your sacrifices to place your spouse in your debt.

20. Love is being unwilling to make any personal decision or choice that would harm your marriage, hurt your husband or wife, or weaken the bond of trust between you.

21. Love is refusing to be self-focused or demanding but instead looking for specific ways to serve, support, and encourage, even when you are busy or tired.

22. Love is daily admitting to yourself, your spouse, and God that you are not able to love this way without God's protecting, providing, forgiving, rescuing, and delivering grace.....love is fundamentally deeper and more active than some warm, romantic, feeling.....No, love is a specific commitment of the heart to a specific person that causes you to give yourself to a specific lifestyle of care that requires you to be willing to make sacrifices that have that person's good in view.

"This comprehensive, lifelong relationship is a tool in the hands of God to expose our delusions of wisdom, righteousness, and strength and to mobilize us to seek help. And there is help, wonderful and sufficient help, for all who seek it."

His book fleshes all of these points out in more detail in just one of the chapters. This is helpful to me---it is a goal to look toward and a key help in examining my love.

A sobering quote from Ryle

In Ryle's book on Holiness he says,

"A single day in hell will be worse than a whole life spent in carrying the cross."

I need to meditate on this one.

Sweet Lamb of God

-Sweet Lamb of God



I also had a song my a very young child singing Amazing Grace but the link doesn't work any more so deleted it.

Orthodoxy and what it should mean to us

DugDownDeep_Shook.mov from Covenant Life Church on Vimeo. This is a quote from Dug Down Deep by Joshua Harris. The book sounds interesting and he allows us to read a chapter from his book if you go to his blog here: http://www.joshharris.com/2010/07/free_chapter_from_dug_down_dee.php