MMA: What Does Your Marriage Need Right Now?

This Monday’s Marriage Advice (MMA) begins with a simple question: What does your marriage need the most right now?  Is it more time together?  More opportunity to worship God together?  More encouragement and less harsh words?  Forgiveness and the letting go of grudges and bitterness?  Whatever it is, you need to identify it, discuss it, and act on it.

 

Sometimes a little push or shove in the right direction is all that someone needs, and sometimes your greatest need in a marriage can be solved or acted upon in just a few moments.  Expressing love and gratitude to one another, without pretense or qualification, may be the thing that moves your stagnant marriage forward to being forever more kind and gracious.  And maybe

Two Reasons You Lack Joy… And How It Can Be Restored

When was the last time you took a good, hard look at your life and asked some penetrating, difficult questions?  “Am I or am I not seeking God?  How am I doing at loving God with all my being and loving others as I love myself?  Do I live with an obvious joy because of my relationship with Jesus Christ?”  These questions are really, really hard to ask ourselves.  Martyn Lloyd Jones writes about the depressed Christian in his book Spiritual Depression, and describes well the person assuming their salvation without looking hard at their lives:

They have assumed that they are right about the first things, but they never have been right about their justification, and it is just here that the devil causes confusion.  It suits him well that such people should be concerned about sanctification and holiness and various other things, but they can never be right until they are here, and that is why we must start with this.  It is no use going on to deal with the superstructure if they foundation is not right (p. 26).

 

Lloyd Jones was concerned that we had a sure foundation before

Speaking of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and The Inward Curve (Part 4 of 4)

Read part one, part two, part three

Personal Critique

I believe Incurvatus in se to be an excellent metaphor for sin today. It is visual, striking, historically rich in men such as Luther and Augustine, and helps break “sin” from being mere actions to being something we suffer from and cannot change on our own. I have struggled to describe the nature and origin of sin on more than one occasion, being unaware of such an image from these men until recently. While there are many excellent definitions of sin, the “inward curve” on the self and away from God is as good as anything I’ve heard. Additionally, incurvatus in se is inherently relational, and our sin against God does not happen in a vacuum isolated from relationship. God has created us relational beings; this is a fact we cannot deny nor avoid. That being true, we need to

You’re Already In The House

I’m not very good at praying. There, I said it. Actually, I think I’m a decent public prayer – meaning, I know plenty of words that sound good when praying, how to pray for someone in a public setting, and what to say to conclude a prayer. My grandmother once asked me to pray before our Christmas Eve dinner since, “After all, you’re on your way to becoming a professional prayer.” That still cracks me up.

 

What I’m talking about is the ongoing, relational prayer between me and my Father. The prayers no one hears, the stuff that can’t be measured. Prayers in the car before picking Noelle up from work, or on SE 60^th as I walk to school, or on a run. Prayers for the person I just met and said I’d pray for, prayers for loved ones I know are hurting. It’s not that I don’t pray, but I don’t pray with the perseverance and persistence of which Jesus speaks.

 

In Luke 11, Jesus gives the disciples a model prayer upon their request. Immediately after that he

Speaking of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and The Inward Curve (Part 3 of 4)

Read part one, part two

Comparing and Contrasting Augustine and Luther

It is no exaggeration to declare that Augustine and Luther’s writings have shaped many millions of lives. It seems to be the case that people associate them as very similar thinkers, given that Luther was an Augustinian monk and knew Augustine’s thought very well. Yet, as we will see, the differences within their thinking are deep, beginning with the very way in which they speak of the inward curve.

Let us begin to compare these men with each man’s definition of incurvatus in se. Nygren writes, “In Augustine, the sinful soul is ‘bent down’ to earth; in Luther it is ‘bent upon itself.’”[1] For Augustine, the problem is that we are no longer upright; we only look to what we can see. Still seeking salvation and justification, we primarily look for it in one another. For Luther, the problem is actually worse than imagined. We don’t simply look to other people, but we use people for our own sake, for our own good. It would be safe to say that

MMA: Will You Be Ready for The Empty Nest? A Guest Post From Lorraine Bridges

 

John and Lorrie in Hawaii, loving Empty Nest Life!

My delightful son in law Christopher recently opened up his blog to guest blog writers and I decided to be first in line to submit a thought or two for him. He’s really done a masterful job at hitting home runs with his weekly MMA.  As his in-laws or “out-laws” as we refer to ourselves, we pay close, close, CLOSE attention to what he shares. He is, after all, married to our beloved first born daughter and we need to keep an eye on him! Wink wink.

 

 We admit to learning and re-learning some of his marital advice this past year. Yes, I re-read the 5 Love Languages book and discovered some things I had forgotten by golly! Positive changes continue to impact our relationship as we chalk up more years of marriage blessing. My husband John and I are approaching 32 years of marriage this March and we continue to work at our marriage.  I thought I should write about something maybe Chris

Are You a Depressed Christian?

What would cause the greatest preacher of the 20^th century so much concern that he would think it necessary to spend over five months preaching about it?  Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones was known to spend a very long time preaching from one book – he spent 13 years in the book of Romans alone!  Astonishing as that is, there was one Christian characteristic, or lack thereof, which greatly concerned him.  Such is the subject matter of his book Spiritual Depression:  Its Causes and Cure.

 

The significant lack the Doctor saw was that of Christian joy.  Although this characteristic marked the early church and was instrumental in many people coming to faith when Christianity was new on the scene, Lloyd-Jones saw it largely missing from the people he ministered to at Westminster Chapel and abroad.  Lloyd-Jones

A Year with The Doctor

Have you ever heard about an author dozens of times, from dozens of different people, but for no good reason never got around to reading any of said author’s material?  Such is the case for me with Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, revered by many to be one of the greatest preachers of the 20^th century.  He was also a prolific writer – most notably his books Spiritual Depression, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, and Preaching and Preachers. 

 

This year, I’m going to concentrate most of my free-reading (sadly, I don’t have much of it!) on Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones.  I’m calling 2012 “A Year with the Doctor”.  It should be a good time, and I will spend time

Speaking of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and The Inward Curve (Part 2 of 4)

Read part one

 

Luther and the righteous sinner

Martin Luther was profoundly influenced by Saint Augustine, being himself an Augustinian monk before being one of the catalysts of the Reformation.  While the two men are closely linked for good reason, there are also significant differences in emphasis and flat out incongruity between them in several areas. In Augustine, we needed to first take a step back and see some of the key threads such as self-love and the two Cities that influenced his thoughts about our inward curve; in Luther we need to look at simul iustus et peccator.

 

One of the primary thrusts of Luther’s theology was that a Christian is

MMA: Do You Have a Dream?

What do you dream about as a married couple?  What do you hope God does with your relationship, your spheres of influence, your family, your job(s) in the next several years?  Considering that today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I thought it would be appropriate to encourage you and your spouse to spend some time (if you haven’t already) dreaming.  This is in no way to discredit or slight MLK, because he was awesome.  But this is MMA and it’s what I do!

 

Noelle and I have not always dreamed well together.  Early in our marriage, we were honestly just