Marriage

One of the most important things you can do with your family is read the Bible together with them. Children are never to young nor too old for you to engage them in Bible reading, study, and devotions as a family together. Honestly, if your family is anything like my family, it can be difficult to...

A s we've seen, the Puritans had a rich understanding of Christian marriage ( part 1 , part 2 , part 3 ). In this final post, I'd like to show that they also believed marital love must be sexual . Both marital partners should give themselves fully to each other with joy and exuberance in a healthy...

Jennifer Marie, my dear wife, died on the fourteenth of September last year. [1] She was thirty-eight. We had barely made it to our eighteenth wedding celebration the month before. Our four young covenant children prepared and served us a special meal that she could eat. We dined together beneath...

C ontrary to characatures, the Puritans had a lot to say about love, and marital love in particular. In our continuing series ( post #1 , post #2 ) we take up their teaching that marital love must be superlative. A husband and wife are to love each other so dearly that both are persuaded that the...

C ontinuing with our series on the Puritans' views of marital love (see introduction ) we come to the theme of the spirituality of marital love, that is, that is must be in Christ and in accord with God’s commandments. Love must be rooted in the experience of being equally yoked together...

E dward Taylor (c. 1642–1729), a pastor, physician, and poet of Puritan New England, wrote, “A curious knot God made in Paradise…. It was the true-love knot, more sweet than spice” (“Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children,” in The Poems of Edward Taylor , ed. Donald E. Stanford, abridged ed. [New...

Exuberant over an experience, an oh-so-sweet manifestation of divine providence, you delightedly seek to give God praise in telling your story. “It was such a ‘God thing’,” you proclaim. As you see it, God wove together an otherwise inexplicable combination of events to deliver a wonderful—even...