Marriage Rebranded

Marriage Rebranded

I recently finished a book that our life group is currently going through together. It’s called Marriage Rebranded by Tyler Ward. My favorite part of the book is how he shifts the focus off of expecting marriage to make you happy, and instead focuses on the ability of your marriage helping you become the person God designed you to be. There are a lot of marriage books out there, but Tyler (and his wife) approach the topic from a young, fresh perspective. They acknowledge they are early marrieds and that they don’t have the decades of experience like other authors of similar books. It is this humility—in addition to a healthy dose of humor—which make this book an enjoyable read. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
Marriage isn’t, in fact, our gateway to happily ever after. It’s more like a chisel in Divine hands. And though there’s plenty of friction involved, it’s designed to chip away at all the dysfunction in our lives and free the beautiful statues inside. Happiness is not the primary goal of your marriage. Becoming more beautiful by becoming your best self—more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, faithful, gentle, self-controlled—is the goal. Marriage, even though it will introduce us to some of life’s most arduous moments, has brilliant intentions in mind. It’s unapologetically interested in chipping away at our dysfunctional thoughts, patterns, and postures in life and inviting us—and our spouses—to become the best version of ourselves. This vision of marriage takes the expectation off of our spouses to make us happy and re-creates the expectation that our marriage exists to help us grow. This Hebrew word for love—ahava—has little to do with what one feels or receives… To the contrary—ahava is actually a verb that means “I give.” “Marriage is not about finding ‘the One’ and falling in love. It’s about choosing one and, over time, becoming the ‘right couple’.” Because according to almost every possible measure, being a good spouse is one of the most meaningful and extraordinary and impacting and valuable things we can do in life. Love, then, is giving for the sake of our spouse’s becoming.
I love it when a book references other books and you feel like you are reading from a wealth of perspectives. As such, here are some other quotes mentioned in the book that I found insightful.
“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.”—Leo Tolstoy Shalom Arush, a Jewish rabbi and counselor, paints the picture of what I like to call the mirror phenomenon even more clearly. He says, “You didn’t get married to correct your spouse. You got married to be corrected, by using your spouse as a mirror.” Dan Allender and Tremper Longman, the authors of Intimate Allies, explain this paradox well: “Marriage is where depravity is best exposed … and because it, more than any other relationship, bears more potential to draw our hearts to heaven, it can more readily give us a taste of hell.” Love is not the twelve-part proposals or fairy-tale beginnings as much as it is the small, mundane but generous things we do for each other every day. Ann Voskamp, an author and refreshing voice on marriage, puts it perfectly when she says, “Real romance is really just sacrifice.” “Marriage is more than your love for each other,” says Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the twentieth century German theologian. “It has a higher dignity and power, through which God wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind.”

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Jeremy Jernigan

Speaker | Author | Founder of Communion Wine Co. https://linktr.ee/JeremyJernigan