Paul David Tripp is a pastor, a distinguished speaker and a best selling Christian author.
He has more than 30 books and videos focused on Christianity and it’s way of life and his main purpose is to consistently transform lives through the power of Jesus Christ every single day.
Pastor Paul’s Teaching On Romance In Marriage
“The first thing I would say to them is that romance is never the cause of a good marriage. Now, I am by nature a very romantic man. I like romance, but romance is actually the result of a good marriage.
And if you look to romance to form a good marriage for you, you are going to be a freaked-out, discouraged, disappointed, ultimately hopeless human being.
Why? What is a biblical view of marriage? It is a flawed person married to a flawed person in a fallen world — are you encouraged yet — but with a faithful God. So I am never going to have paradise in my marriage. Paradise is to come. I am never married to a perfect person.
That person will never be my Messiah. The person I am married to has no capacity whatsoever to change my heart. That person I am married to has no capacity whatsoever to bring satisfaction and contentment to my heart. They have no ability whatsoever to deliver me from my sin. They just have no ability to do any of that.
And so a good marriage is a good marriage because people in that marriage realize they are not the Messiah to one another. But they don’t panic, because they have been given an adequate and sufficient Messiah who invades marriage by his grace and gives us everything we need to be who we are supposed to be and to do what we are supposed to do in marriage.
Here is what this means, in sort of a bottom-line way: You never get your capacity to love from the person you were called to love. You never get your capacity to love from your spouse. You get your capacity to love at the foot of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. You have it. It is God’s gift of grace to you. And so you don’t need to look to the other person for what you have already been given in Christ.”
