Have the Mind of Christ in Your Marriage

A quick Amazon search of "marriage books" reveals over 260,000 results. A search of "Christian marriage books" reveals almost 28,000 options. Within these thousands of book options, many of them tell us how to change our actions. They offer helpful to-do lists of tasks to do for your spouse. One of these nearly 28,000 Christian marriage books, 9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage, by Sheila Wray Gregoire, comes at it from a little different angle. While Gregoire does offer a number of practical application tasks and ideas, what sets her book apart is her focus on our mind ---how we think about our spouse, more than merely what we do for our spouse --which will in turn affect our actions.

Some of her advice on our thoughts include remembering that our spouse is our neighbor, and Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves, which should greatly affect how we treat them. She advises her readers to focus their thoughts and attention on their marriages so it doesn't drift out with the tide due to neglect or taking it for granted. She reminds us that we cannot expect our spouse to fulfill a role for us that only God can fill, and a reminder that we cannot change our spouse and mold them into what we want or expect. We must remember that the partners in a marriage are on the same team ---not in competition with each other. We also need to allow our spouse to be our spouse, and only allow God to be God.

I especially found her approach to submission very compelling (Chapter 5). She acknowledges that the usual definition of submission is that in the case of a disagreement, the husband wins --the wife is to blindly obey and defer to her husband's position, regardless of the outcome. I love that Gregoire quotes The Princess Bride, saying of the word submission, "I don't think it means what you think it means."

To illustrate her understanding, she walks through two Scriptural narratives: the story of Nabal and Abigail, in which she (correctly) did not blindly obey her husband (1 Samuel 25) and the story of Ananias and Sapphira, in which she (incorrectly) did blindly obey her husband, much to her own detriment (Acts 5:1-11). Gregoire advises to focus on unity of the marriage and asking the question 'What does God want me to do in this situation', not blind, dutiful "submission."

My capsule version of Gregoire's advice in this book is to "have the mind of Christ" (1 Cor 2:16 NIV), especially in regards to our spouse.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.