Life Library — Marriage
10 Commandments for Healthy Marital Communication
Couples should remember to continuously fine-tune their communication skills. Doing so will enhance a good marriage and stabilize a rocky one. Effective communication can mean the difference between a lasting, quality relationship and a lifeless marriage or even a divorce.
10 Ways to Say "I Love You"
Ten suggestions to help you be more adept at expressing your love to your spouse.
The APA Does it Again
Psychologists who say fathers are not necessary prove the limits of social science.
A Christ-Centered Marriage
The teaching on the marriage of God is the covenant of salvation. Therefore redemption is at the heart of our understanding of marriage.
Confronting Cohabitation
In a time when so many people make the mistake of cohabitation, the church has the opportunity to proclaim the hope and promise that are ours through faith in Jesus Christ. The power that raised Christ back to life is the power that brings new life, new possibilities.
Doing Without Marriage
In Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, it became socially acceptable decades ago for couples to live together without being married. Nevertheless, the fossilization of transcendent values leaves a heavy weight on children, families and human souls. Is this America's future?
Getting Closer as a Couple
For various reasons married couples may drift apart. The vitality and sparkle that used to characterize their relationship is gone. They didn't plan it. It just happened — subtly, slowly, silently. However, there is good news. Christian couples can break through emotional distance to revive their relationships.
How to Get Along with Your In-Laws
While getting along with in-laws may seem like a formidable task at times, it will help to remember that the better your relationship with your in-laws, the healthier your marriage and family life will be. The solid foundation for families is love, and that love should be inclusive, embracing in-laws.
Inside Look at Promise Keepers
Promise Keepers are zealous about equipping men to live for God. Men who go to Promise Keepers' events ask, "How can LCMS leaders be critical of this movement? For the first time in my life I am excited about God and want to live for Him. How can this be bad?”
Living Together Before Marriage
There is something in the issue of "living together" that is uniquely disturbing, especially on the part of Christians, simply because it mimics, but does not honor, marriage. Indeed, the arrangement violates the very meaning, substance and institution of marriage.
Make Yours a Stock Market Marriage
Like the stock market, marriages have their ups and downs. Knowing that and staying the course increases your chance of success in either.
Marriage Lite
Civil unions, a popular alternative to gay marriage, could make real marriage largely a thing of the past.
The Mystery of Marriage
This article is a summary of the theology of marriage that can serve as a foundation for evaluating the implications of reproductive technologies from a Christian perspective.
Platonic Proposal?
Turning social scientists loose on a problem and backing them with lots of money is unlikely to solve America's marriage problems.
Surrogate Motherhood — A Clerical Case
The whole point of marriage as a paradigm of God's relationship with his people is to illustrate the oneness of what we are given in marriage and in the gift of a child as its outcome. Careless sentimentality in reproductive ethics erases this message of God to us.
The Venture of Marriage
God fashions marriage so that a man and woman learn to be true to each other. Through marriage God brings us into relation with one who is different but who also reflects back something of the truth of our own nature. That image is the bold and daring vision we have to offer the world.
What About . . . Living Together Without Marriage
A reprint of a tract from the LCMS "What About …" series. Pastors and congregations will want to work patiently and lovingly with couples caught up in the sin of living together without marriage.
What is Marriage?
It is not our human prerogative to redefine marriage for the sake of political correctness, social justice, or to accommodate the changing times. As God does not change, but is ever faithful, so marriage does not change and ever proclaims the faithfulness of God to His people.
With this Ring
At the wedding ceremony the bride and groom exchange wedding rings. They are circles to symbolize the permanence of this relationship. There are three additional aspects that these rings portray.
Your Family Vocation
Every Christian has been called by God into a family. Our very existence is by our parents, who conceived and brought us into the world. Luther says, "God has given this walk of life, fatherhood and motherhood, a special position of honor, higher than that of any other walk of life under it.”