This week on Friday Reads, we’re looking at spiritual books that every bride and groom to be should read. That said, whether you are single and preparing yourself for marriage, engaged, a newlywed, or are years into your marriage, all of these books can be a great benefit to you and your relationship with your other half. Also, readers, be sure to add MunaLuchi Bride on Goodreads!
1. The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman
Are you and your spouse speaking the same language? While love is a many splendored thing, it is sometimes a very confusing thing, too. And as people come in all varieties, shapes, and sizes, so do their choices of personal expressions of love. But more often than not, the giver and the receiver express love in two different ways. This can lead to misunderstanding, quarrels, and even divorce.
Quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch are the five basic love languages. Dr. Gary Chapman identifies these and guides couples towards a better understanding of their unique languages of love. Learn to speak and understand your mate’s love language, and in no time you will be able to effectively love and truly feel loved in return.
2. The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller
In The Meaning of Marriage, Timothy Keller, along with Kathy, his wife of thirty-six years, draws a profound portrait of marriage from the pages of Scripture that neither idealizes nor rejects the institution but points us back to the relationship between God and man. The result is a vision for marriage that is refreshingly frank and unsentimental, yet hopeful and beautiful. This book is for anyone from singles, to couples considering marriage, to those who have been married recently or for a long time.
3. What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage by Paul David Tripp
The Bible teaches that we all bring something destructive into our relationships – sin. But as Paul David Tripp explains, we buy into the delusion that our biggest problem is outside of us. We blame our spouse. We blame our circumstances. We rarely take seriously the nature of our own sin.
Unlike other marriage books that only diagnose horizontal problems, What Did You Expect? fights a much deeper war over the worship of our heart. It’s only when we worship God as Creator, Sovereign and Savior that we will ever love as we should.
What Did You Expect? challenges you to look into the mirror of God’s Word and see yourself with clarity. Maybe it’s you. Maybe you love yourself more than your spouse. Maybe you love your little kingdom more than God’s big Kingdom. When you reach that level of honesty, you’re at the edge of real good things for your marriage.
4. Soul Cravings by Erwin McManus
Soul Cravings is a powerful, down-to-earth exposition that interprets our need for intimacy, meaning, and destiny as common sense apologetics pointing to the existence of and our need for God. The book will deeply stir the reader to consider and chase after the spiritual implications of their soul’s deepest longings.
5. Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God by Francis Chan with Danae Yankoski, Foreword by Chris Tomlin (Workbook Also Available)
Does something deep inside your heart long to break free from the status quo? Are you hungry for an authentic faith that addresses the problems of our world with tangible, even radical, solutions? God is calling you to a passionate love relationship with Himself. Because the answer to religious complacency isn’t working harder at a list of do’s and don’ts — it’s falling in love with God. And once you encounter His love, as Francis describes it, you will never be the same.
What are your favorite books that you’ve read before exchanging vows?
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