Remaking The Godly Marriage

In Remaking the Godly Marriage, John Bartkowski studies evangelical Protestants and their views on marriage and gender relations and how they are lived within individual families. The author compares elite evangelical prescriptions for godly family living with the day-to-day practices in conservative Protestant households. He asks: How serious are the debates over gender and the family that are manifested within contemporary evangelicalism? What are the values that underlie this debate? Have these internecine disputes been altered by the emergence of new evangelical movements such as biblical feminism and the Promise Keepers? And given the fact that leading evangelicals advance competing visions of godly family life, how do conservative religious spouses make sense of their own family relationships and gender identities?

God has blessed Joel and Mary Beeke with a wonderful marriage. God has also given them the opportunity to counsel many people in troubled marriages as well as to provide premarital counseling to scores of engaged couples. In this booklet, the Beekes share ten principles they emphasize in their counseling. Perhaps you and your spouse are due for a checkup in your relationship. If so, carefully consider the important marks of a God-glorifying marriage found in this booklet. Strive to put these things into practice, and your marriage will be better for it! Table of Contents: 1. Building on the Word of God 2. Cultivating Spiritual Fellowship 3. Praying Together 4. Practicing Family Worship 5. Loving Your Spouse 6. Developing Good Communication Skills 7. Complimenting Your Spouse 8. Cultivating Physical Intimacy 9. Developing Friendship and Common Interests 10. Developing Togetherness in Parenting Series Description D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said that what the church needs to do most all is “to begin herself to live the Christian life. If she did that, men and women would be crowding into our buildings. They would say, ‘What is the secret of this?’” As Christians, one of our greatest needs is for the Spirit of God to cultivate biblical godliness in us in order to put the beauty of Christ on display through us, all to the glory of the triune God. With this goal in mind, this series of booklets treats matters vital to Christian experience at a basic level. Each booklet addresses a specific question in order to inform the mind, warm the affections, and transform the whole person by the Spirit’s grace, so that the church may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things.

Through a probing investigation of conservative Christianity and its response to an issue that, according to the statistics of conservative Christian groups, affects only a small number of Americans, Ludger Viefhues-Bailey alights on a profound theological conundrum: in today's conservative Christian movement, both sexes are called upon to be at once assertive and submissive, masculine and feminine, not only within the home but also within the church, society, and the state. Therefore the arguments of conservative Christians against same-sex marriage involve more than literal readings of the Bible or nostalgia for simple gender roles. Focusing primarily on texts produced by Focus on the Family, a leading media and ministry organization informing conservative Christian culture, Viefhues-Bailey identifies two distinct ideas of male homosexuality: gender-disturbed and passive; and oversexed, strongly masculine, and aggressive. These homosexualities enable a complex ideal of Christian masculinity in which men are encouraged to be assertive toward the world while also being submissive toward God and family. This web of sexual contradiction influences the flow of power between the sexes and within the state. It joins notions of sexual equality to claims of "natural" difference, establishing a fraught basis for respectable romantic marriage. Heterosexual union is then treated as emblematic of, if not essential to, the success of American political life--yet far from creating gender stability, these tensions produce an endless striving for balance. Viefhues-Bailey's final, brilliant move is to connect the desire for stability to the conservative Christian movement's strategies of political power.

The Puritans believed that godly marriages were foundational for the future life of families, churches, and nations. Therefore, they wrote prolifically on the subject of marriage, seeking to bring biblical reformation to this subject in a comprehensive way. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other previous Reformers had begun this task, but the Puritans took it much further, writing a number of detailed treatises on how to live as godly spouses. Out of the wealth of material available to us from the seventeenth century, Joel R. Beeke and James A. La Belle have gathered together insights from the past and summarized them in a contemporary form in order to encourage modern day coupled to glorify God in marriage. Table of Contents: 1.The Institution and Honor of Marriage 2. The Purposes and Benefits of Marriage 3. Securing a Good Entrance into Marriage 4. Preserving the Honor of Marriage 5. The Mutual Duties of Love and Chastity 6. The Mutual Duties of Help and Peace 7. The Wife's Duties in Marriage 8. The Husband's Duty of Love 9. The Husband's Duty of Authority 10.Concluding Counsel Appendix: George Swinnock's Prayers for Husbands and Wives

Around fifty percent of marriages end in divorce and of those who stay married, a large number are unhappy. "Happily ever after" seems to be something only reserved for fairy tales. Even the disciples, when considering the difficulties of marriage, replied, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry" (Matt 19:10). Certainly, this is not what God had in mind when he created marriage (Gen 2:24). How are married couples supposed to experience the abundant life that God originally meant for them? In 1 Peter 3:1-7, Peter speaks to husbands and wives about the characteristics of a godly marriage and God's expectation for each in the union. Through this, we learn God's perfect plan for married couples. Let consider it together with the Bible Teacher's Guide: "Expositional, theological, and candidly practical! I highly recommend The Bible Teacher's Guide for anyone seeking to better understand or teach God's Word." -Dr. Young-Gil Kim, Founding President of Handong Global University "I can't imagine any student of Scripture not benefiting by this work." -Steven J. Cole, Pastor, Flagstaff Christian Fellowship, Author of the Riches from the Word series

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what--or who--must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We have inherited from early modern England a model of marriage, she contends, so flawed that its logical consequence is conflict.

When sports ministry first emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, its founders imagined male celebrity athletes as powerful salespeople who could deliver a message of Christian strength: “If athletes can endorse shaving cream, razor blades, and cigarettes, surely they can endorse the Lord, too,” reasoned Fellowship of Christian Athletes founder Don McClanen. But combining evangelicalism and sport did much more than serve as an advertisement for religion: it gave athletes the opportunity to think about the embodied experiences of sport as a way to experience intimate connection with the divine. As sports ministry developed, it focused on individual religious experiences and downplayed celebrity sales power, opening the door for female Christian athletes to join and eventually dominate sports ministry. Today, women are the majority of participants in sports ministry in the United States. In Playing for God, Annie Blazer offers an exploration of the history and religious lives of Christian athletes, showing that evangelical engagement with popular culture can carry unintended consequences. When sport became an avenue for embodied worship, it forced a reckoning with evangelical teachings about the body. Female Christian athletes increasingly turned to their own bodies to understand their religious identity, and in so doing, came to question evangelical mainstays on gender and sexuality. What was once a male-dominated masculinist project of sports engagement became a female-dominated movement that challenged evangelical ideas on femininity, marriage hierarchy, and the sinfulness of homosexuality. Though evangelicalism has not changed sporting culture, for those involved in sports ministry, sport has changed evangelicalism.

Why Does Marriage Today Seem To Be Such a Far Cry From Paradise?Let's face it. Our culture's version of marriage is not as God designed it to be. With a lot more emphasis on individualism and consumerism, today's married couples tend to lose sight of God's original purpose for marriage--a call for his people to take Jesus' message to the heart of everyday life. Marriage Made in Eden provides a radical alternative to today's view of marriage, giving a glimpse into the historical and cultural aspects that have shaped marriage in America. With this insightful analysis you'll learn how marriage has come to be in the state we now find it and about God's model and purpose for a sacred Christian union.