Marriage is meant to expose your self-focus and self-reliance. It is meant to convince you that you are needier than you thought you were and to encourage you that God's grace has more power to transform than you thought it did. Marriage is meant to teach you how to give, love, serve, forgive, support, encourage, and wait. Think

It is only when we really do believe that life is bigger than us, that there is something more important than our wants, needs, and feelings, and that we have been given life and breath for the purposes, plans, and praise of another, that we will be willing to forgive.

Theology that isn't zealous to promote forgiving and transforming grace, the kind of grace that changes your life, is simply bad theology.

You cannot ask for forgiveness without acknowledging that there is something in life that is more important than the progress of your own kingdom.

Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness. DAVID AUGSBURGER

When you forget mercy and think you're deserving, you find it all too easy not to extend mercy to others.

The reconciliation of a marriage must be a lifestyle, not just the response you have when things go bad. Consider

For the believer, harsh, critical, impatient, and irritated responses to others are always connected to forgetting or denying who we are and what we have been given in Jesus.

No one gives grace better than a parent who humbly admits that he desperately needs it himself.

There is no faith that he will give them all they need to respond to each other in godly ways. As a result, their relationship is reduced to human demands, human performance, human failure, human judgment, and human punishment

Forgiveness is a vertical commitment that is followed by a horizontal transaction.

We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.