No More Perfect Marriages...But There is a Perfect God!

Being willing to fight for your marriage and work on the tough stuff takes courage. In the third chapter of their book, No More Perfect Marriages, Mark and Jill Savage give us eight "God tools" to use for working on our marriages, and for battling what they have coined "the perfection infection." (I'd list them all out, but you really should get the book and discover them for yourself! :) )  The first tool they mention is courage. I love this quote, "Courage is not the absence of fear; it is determining something is more important than the fear. Your marriage is more important than your fear of conflict, your fear of taking off your mask, your fear of intimacy, your fear of disagreement, or your fear of honest conversation." (Check out this video Tim and I did discussing how we found the courage to work through some pretty tough times in our first few years of marriage.)

One of the things I love most about the Savages is that they have no illusions. They are not looking through their rose colored glasses or out of their "perfect Christian home" bubble. They come from a perspective that few have ever reached. To serve in ministry, to deal with infidelity, to walk, or perhaps I should say crawl through the process of restoration and then to dare to speak about it is rare and oh, so powerful. It was from the depths of the dark times that Jill says, "I learned it's easy to love someone who is loving you. It's a completely different ballgame to love someone who is not loving you back." What a true picture of God's redeeming love for us, His church, His children!

How many times have we confessed our love for Him, vowed to deny all else, and then in a moment of weakness given our hearts to another? And yet, through it all He doesn't give up on us. He pursues us all over again. Cleans us off. Takes us back, and restores us to full fellowship. Thank you, Jesus!

I love this quote from the forward of their book done by Dr. Gary Chapman (of The 5 Love Languages), "The reality is, there are no perfect husbands and no perfect wives, so why would we expect to have a perfect marriage?" Amen!

When it comes down to it, I have learned over the past nearly 12 years of marriage that there are many times you have to choose love whether you feel it or not. Don't get me wrong, I am crazy in love with my man, and I love him so much more now than the day we married. But there is such a different aspect of love that comes from dealing with tough stuff, walking through ups and downs, and coming face-to-face with your own "humanness." For your marriage to thrive it must be based on more than mere loving feelings. It must be grounded in the true essence of what love really is. Love is so much more than a feeling. It is a choice. It is choosing to look beyond yourself, beyond your spouse, and adopt an eternal perspective that says, "God first!" When talking about the God tool of wisdom the Savages say, "No matter what your spouse does, you have to be motivated by doing the right things for God. Not for a specific result, but simply because God asks you to do things His way. The beautiful thing about this is that you will gain wisdom. You will be changed. And if one person changes in a marriage, the marriage changes!"

Much like the process of sanctification that follows salvation (that process after having accepted Christ of continually being made more and more of who God would have you be), your marriage is not complete the moment you say, "I do." Marriage is a lifetime of growing, learning and becoming more and more of the spouse the Lord would have you be. Mark and Jill say, "We naturally pull apart unless we work to stay together." This makes me think of driving a car. If you let go of the wheel you will naturally run off the road. You must pay attention! But the beauty of it is if you are already in the ditch, it's going to take some muscle and maybe a good tune-up, but you can get that thing out of the ditch, back onto the road, and start again.


Perhaps Mark and Jill summed it up best with this line in the final paragraph of the book, "There are no perfect marriages, but there is a God who wants to "perfect" us through this thing called marriage."

If you'd like a chance to win a FREE copy of the book No More Perfect Marriages please comment below with your email address or private message me on my Facebook page to be entered in the July 1st drawing!

See all posts from my Book Review of No More Perfect Marriages...