Quotes about Growth

What I'm suggesting is that we connect our marriages with our faith in such a way that our experience in each feeds the other. By learning to respect others, meet each other's sexual needs, overcome dissension, and use the analogies of marriage to foster more creative prayer, we can build and maintain active, growing, and meaningful prayer lives while at the same time developing stronger marriages.

We must not enter marriage to be fulfilled, emotionally satisfied, or romantically charged, but rather to become more like Jesus Christ.

Trying to find contentment in this world without addressing the inner person is no more drastic a change than simply changing cubicles while continuing to work for the same company. Your location may change, but the overall environment is exactly the same.

The desire for ease, comfort, and stress-free living is an indirect desire to remain an "unseasoned," immature Christian. Struggle makes us stronger; it builds us up and deepens our faith.

If you want to be free to serve Jesus, there's no question—stay single. Marriage takes a lot of time. But if you want to become more like Jesus, I can't imagine any better thing to do than to get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you'd never have to face otherwise.

A good marriage isn't something you find; it's something you make.

A heavyweight boxing champion who dodges all serious contenders to consistently fight marshmallows is derided and ridiculed—and rightly so. Christians who dodge all serious struggle and consciously seek to put themselves in whatever situations and relationships are easiest are doing the same thing—they are coasting, and eventually that coasting will define them and—even worse—shape them.

Love is not an emotion; it's a policy and a commitment that we choose to keep in the harshest of circumstances. It's something that can be learned and that we can grow in. Biblical love is not based on the worthiness of the person being loved—none of us deserves Christ's sacrifice—but on the worthiness of the One who calls us to love: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

What if your husband's faults are God's tools to shape you? What if the very thing that most bugs you about your man constitutes God's plan to teach you something new? Are you willing to accept that your marriage makeover — the process of moving a man — might begin with you?

Christianity does not direct us to focus on finding the right person; it calls us to become the right person.

In case you've never thought about it, a woman's body changes much more rapidly than her character does.

The foundation of lasting self-confidence and self esteem is excellence, mastery of your work.