Quotes about Relationship

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.

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 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).