Quotes About Relationship

What defines us as Christians is not most profoundly that we have come to know him but that he took note of us and made us his own.

The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature

God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions, so that when he comes to us in this world there would be these powerful words and images to describe the promises and the pleasures of our covenant relationship with him through Christ.

God is not honored by groundless love. In fact, there is no such thing. If we do not know anything about God, there is nothing in our mind to awaken love. If love does not come from knowing God, there is no point in calling it love for God .

Knowledge about Him will not do. Work for Him will not do. We must have personal, vital fellowship with Him; otherwise, Christianity becomes a joyless burden.

The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek it in the pleasure of their spouses. The biblical mandate to husbands and wives is to seek your own joy in the joy of your spouse.

It is not surprising that prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comforts in the den.

Marriage is patterned after Christ's covenant relationship to his redeemed people, the church. And therefore, the highest meaning and the most ultimate purpose of marriage is to put the covenant relationship of Christ and his church on display. That is why marriage exists. If you are married, that is why you are married. If you hope to be, that should be your dream.

if you devote yourself with all your heart to the holy joy of your spouse, you will also be living for your joy and making a marriage after the image of Christ and His church.

Which means, therefore, that our Bible reading is never just for seeing, never just for learning and doctrine. It is not even just for savoring, if that savoring is thought of in a private way that leaves us unchanged in our relationship with others. No. We read the Bible—we always read the Bible—for the kind of seeing and savoring Christ that transforms us into his likeness.

Faith is not saving faith if it tries to trust Christ for the wrong things. So this makes clear that trust per se, without reference to what we trust him for, is not the essence of a saving relationship to Christ.

God is glorified in his people by the way we experience him, not merely by the way we think about him. Indeed

God gives you Christ as the foundation of your marriage. "Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God" (Rom. 15:7). . . . Don't insist on your rights, don't blame each other, don't judge or condemn each other, don't find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, Letters and Papers from Prison, 31–32

God designed human fatherhood to be a portrait of himself.

If our effort to know God more clearly is not an effort to love him more dearly, it will be fatal.

We will not find a frustrated, gloomy, irritable Father who wants to be left alone, but a Father whose heart is so full of joy that it spills over unto all those (Christian Hedonists) who are thirty.

Bob Kauflin Kauflin argues that Christians tend to fall into one of three categories when it comes to the relationship between music and words: (1) music supersedes the word; (2) music undermines the word; (3) music serves the word. Arguing for this third paradigm, Kauflin suggests three implications:

Salvation is not mainly the forgiveness of sins, but mainly the fellowship of Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:9).

One of the things pleasing in God's sight is that his people keep on drawing near to him forever and ever. And so he is working in us this very thing.

In other words, the covenant involved in leaving mother and father and holding fast to a spouse and becoming one flesh is a portrayal of the covenant between Christ and his church. Marriage exists ultimately to display the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his church.

Emotions for God that do not spring from seeing God cannot honor God.

no se consiguen ni la salud ni la santidad a base de escapar de la gente que está pereciendo. El camino del amor, por enlodado y peligroso que sea, es el camino a la salud mental y al cielo.

What is needed is a miracle. I mean that literally. A supernatural in-breaking of God through the gospel of Christ. It is not even possible to describe the hope-filled relational dynamics that may happen when the gospel explodes in two hearts that bring such radically different experiences of sin and suffering to the relationship.

Therefore, the reason God seeks our praise is not because He won't be complete until He gets it. He is seeking our praise because we won't be complete until we give it. This is not arrogance. It is love.