While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
Interpretation
Character flaws can lead to significant issues in a marriage, affecting the spouse deeply.
In this quote, Timothy Keller emphasizes that while personal character flaws may cause minor inconveniences in casual relationships, they can have profound and damaging effects on a marriage. The intimacy and closeness of a marital bond magnify these flaws, potentially leading to significant problems that can jeopardize the relationship.
In practice
During a couples' therapy session, the counselor shared this quote to highlight the importance of addressing personal flaws.
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting⦠We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.
Some 70% to 80% of all who join the military will return to the civilian workforce. They'll return to communities, and one of the things I've worried about is the increasing disconnect between the American people and our men and women in uniform. We come from fewer and fewer places. We're less than 1% of the population.
In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.
When thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else's story, they have the chance to write a new story together.
I think when one becomes very close to another person, it can mean loving and intimacy, but on the other hand, there's also the danger of one destructing another under the name of love. I think that is the scariest thing for me in various relationships.
In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.
Love, children, and work, are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.
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