Setting Your Marriage Free , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - T. Anderson Neil

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127 pages

English

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It's Time to Make Your Marriage the Best Marriage PossibleIs your marriage the best it can be? The same powerful principles from Neil Anderson's Steps to Freedom in Christ that helped set more than one million people free from spiritual bondage can now revolutionize your relationship with your spouse! Neil Anderson and coauthor Charles Mylander offer you the practical tools you need to safeguard your marriage against the things that threaten to destroy it.Use this book as a couple or share with other couples in a small group. Each chapter includes discussion questions and a devotional guide for couples."This book gives biblical insight and practical helps for any marriage--whether it is healthy, in trouble, or disastrous. It is great to use personally or to share. Use it to protect the most important and cherished institution of society--the home."--Vonette Bright, cofounder, Campus Crusade for Christ International; founder/director, Women Today International"This book is absolutely life-transforming and marriage-enriching. I love the fact that it is solidly biblical and incredibly practical. There is a gem on every page."--Jim Burns, PhD, president of HomeWord and executive director of the HomeWord Center for Youth and Family at Azusa Pacific University

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	23 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441265777
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0461€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2006 by Neil T. Anderson and Charles Mylander
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Bethany House edition published 2014 ISBN 978-1-4412-6577-7
Ebook edition created 2014
Originally published by Regal Books as The Christ-Centered Marriage in 1996. Revised and updated and published as Experiencing Christ Together in 2006.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations identified T HE M ESSAGE are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified NASB are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
Contents
Cover 1
Title Page 3
Copyright Page 4
Introduction 7
1. God’s Perfect Design 17
2. Nurture and Nature 33
3. Created Male, Created Female 49
4. Putting Christ First 63
5. Conforming to His Image 77
6. Love Language 91
7. The Root of All Evil 109
8. Sexual Freedom 127
9. The Snakebite of Adultery 145
10. For Freedom’s Sake 167
11. When Only One Will Try 181
12. Steps to Setting Your Marriage Free 199
Appendix: Materials and Training for You and Your Church 231
Back Cover 238
Introduction
A Cultural Revolution
B oys, get up,” Mom called from downstairs.
My brother and I (Neil) didn’t want to leave our warm bed. It was cold in the upstairs bedroom loft we shared in that old farmhouse in Minnesota. The floor was like ice, and you could scrape frost off the inside walls in the winter, because the second floor had no heat. We would wait until the last minute (before Dad said something), and then grab our clothes and race downstairs. We dressed in front of the register that poured heat into the first floor from a wood-burning furnace in the basement. Mom always got up at five in the morning to start the fire. Chores had to be done before we ate breakfast. Then we walked our quarter-mile lane to catch the school bus that took us to school in our little country town.
I have great memories of my childhood. Our social life was centered around church, 4-H, school and family gatherings. We didn’t have a perfect family—nobody does—but we stayed together. The decade of the ’50s was a good time to be raised. Our parents were survivors of the Great Depression and World War II. Patriotism was at an all-time high. The Fourth of July, Memorial Day and Veterans Day were community celebrations. When the National Guard shot off their rifles, a bunch of us boys would race to get the spent cartridges. Families that prayed together stayed together. Only one in a thousand church-going families experienced a divorce.
Then came the ’60s. Our country was pulled into a war that many viewed as being simply wrong, and racial segregation could no longer be ignored. Some of our boys went to Canada to avoid the draft. Neighbors moved to the suburbs to avoid busing their children. Our country was being torn apart. Neighbors turned against neighbors, and fathers against sons. Street drugs spread among our college and high school campuses, and the era of “free sex” was ushered in. The Beatles claimed they were more popular than Jesus.
The family was torn apart by this cultural revolution. The debates about war, racism, teenage rebellion, sex, drugs and music polarized the older and younger generations and set parents at odds with their children. Most churches and Christian schools were not preparing leaders for these kinds of conflicts. They offered family-oriented ministries that focused on the “married only once” family in which the father worked and the mother stayed home to raise their children. Today, that model comprises only about 5 percent of the population in an average church.
Family Pressures Changed
It wasn’t as difficult to raise good children in the ’50s because society basically supported traditional family values. Father Knows Best , Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver were popular television programs. Foul language and explicit sex were forbidden on television and in movie theaters. Children were taught to obey authorities.
Pastoral counseling was taught in seminaries by godly pastors who knew how to pray and apply the Word of God. Few, if any, classes were taught about marriage, because the need for premarital counseling was seldom emphasized. The practical application of ministry focused on preaching, teaching, evangelizing and discipling. Yet seminaries and Bible schools soon began to realize they had to do something to save our families, which were being ripped apart by social changes.
The Catholic church started “Marriage Encounter” to encourage healthy marriages, and the process spread to Protestant denominations. Evangelical seminaries and Bible schools offered classes on family, marriage and premarital counseling, parenting, and divorce recovery. People debated whether divorce-recovery counseling and single-parenting classes should be offered. Some argued, “Isn’t that giving permission to those who are considering divorce by putting a stamp of approval on it?” Others said, “It is our Christian duty to forgive and help these people in need. What’s done is done.”
Soon, marriage-and-family-related programs, retreats, courses, books and tapes could be found throughout the country. Godly pastors were replaced in pastoral counseling classes by clinical psychologists, all of whom received their doctoral degrees from secular schools, because no Christian schools offered doctoral degrees in psychology in those days. Many of those counselors were (and are) godly people concerned about the family and committed to helping individuals become healthy and functional again. On the other hand, many concerned Christians were troubled by the influence of secular psychology on the Church as well as the demise of evangelism and discipleship.
Today, the most popular radio ministry is Focus on the Family. Gary Smalley’s series on marital communication, which was made popular through his infomercials, is one of the best-selling video series of all time—secular or sacred. Books and tapes about marriage and family are consistently the best-sellers, because saving marriages and families is the greatest felt need of our time.
Never in the history of the Church has such a concerted effort been made to save the family. We’re thankful for all those who seek to help troubled marriages and families, and we want to acknowledge the incredible contribution these Christian authors and speakers have made. Radio hosts and family advocates are providing important information to the Body of Christ.
However, we need to ask a hard question: How are we doing? Has the family as a whole become stronger in the United States? Have marriages become better? Certainly we can point to the cultural war as a contributing factor, but have we missed something?
The Christian community has searched the Word of God to find the answers for how a husband should love his wife, how a wife should be submissive to her husband, how a mother should mother, how a father should father, and how together they should raise their children. There are many excellent biblical resources available for the following family disciplines that relate to God, society, marriage and parenting:

Each discipline is like a spoke in the all-important Christian family wheel. Those in the Christian community learned these disciplines by consulting concordances that directed them to some Old Testament passages and to the second half of Paul’s epistles. There, they found biblical instructions for the husband, wife, parents and children. Pastors and teachers preached, taught messages and conducted seminars, workshops and conferences on every one of these spokes in the diagram.
When you read or listen to what committed Christian leaders have to say about these issues, you need to ask yourself, Are they telling the truth? Are they biblically correct? In most cases they are. Most Christian leaders try their best to make sure that what they are saying is biblically accurate.
However, something can be right but not complete. We could biblically and accurately communicate what God has to say about parenting, marriage and all the related disciplines, and yet our best efforts to respond may fall short of what God intended. The real question may not be, What’s wrong? but, What’s missing?
Just trying to obey biblical instruction often results in a subtle form of Christian behaviorism that sounds like this: “You shouldn’t do that. You should do this.” Or “Here is a better way to do it.” The result will likely be failure as we huff and puff our way into burnout. We may not be legalists in a pharisaic sense, but in too many cases, all we have done is gone from negative legalism (don’t do this and don’t do that) to positive legalism (do this and do this and do this, ad nauseam). Actually, there is nothing positive about legalism—regardless of its emphasis. When applied to marriage counseling, it sounds like this:
Mr. Jones, you should love your wife as Christ loved the Church