What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage
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Product Description
A longtime pastor, noted leader, and international talks speaker calls engaged and married couples to a grace-based lifestyle of daily reconciliation, marked by six practical commitments.
Marriage, according to Scripture, will permanently occupy two flawed people living with each additional in a fallen world. Yet, in pastor Paul Tripp’s professional experience, the majority of couples enter marriage with unrealistic expectations, leaving them unprepared for the day-to-day realities of married life.
This unique book introduces a biblical and practical approach to persons realities that is rooted in God’s faithfulness and Scripture’s teaching on sin and grace. “Spouses need to be reconciled to each additional and to God on a daily basis,” Tripp declares. “Since we’re permanently sinners married to sinners, reconciliation isn’t just the right response in moments of failure. It must be the lifestyle of any healthy marriage.”
What Did You Expect? presents six practical commitments that give shape and momentum to such a lifestyle. These commitments, which include honestly facing sin, weakness, and failure; willingness to change; and embodying Christ’s like, will equip couples to renovate a thriving, grace-based marriage in all circumstances and seasons of their relationship.
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This is an incredible, realistic and practical book. It goes far beyond the normal marriage counseling and is a real eye opener into what we must do to ensure a stong marriage. Best I have ever read. Would highly recommend it to all readers, goes far beyond marriage counseling, rich and deep reading for anyone who is seeking a closer walk with God.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
My spouse and I have read many marriages books over our 31 years of marriage and I consider this one exceptionally excellent! A wealth of fantastic information that will help any marriage and give you a better understanding of God as well.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Paul Tripp has provided the church with another brilliant tool for Christian living and biblical counseling with his latest title, What Did You Expect?? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage. With this title Tripp focuses on several key principles for the Christian life, and how they affect (and should affect) your marriage. If you are familiar with Tripp’s previous work then this book will not break a lot of new ground. But, it does help to apply some of the principles he has been so faithful in teaching (i.e. heart idolatry, the importance of worship, etc.) in the realm of marriage.
Tripp orients the teaching of this book around six commitments that He want to see married couples make:
1. We will give ourselves to a regular lifestyle of confession and forgiveness.
2. We will make growth and change our daily agenda.
3. We will work together to erect a sturdy bond of trust.
4. We will commit to building a relationship of like.
5. We will deal with our differences with appreciation and grace.
6. We will work to protect our marriage.
Each of these commitments was personally convicting, and all point back to the larger principles of effective at your marriage. As the title suggest Tripp points out that many couples get married with the incorrect kind of expectations. Tripp astutely observes that “life after the honeymoon is radically different from the honeymoon that preceded it. The person you loved to play with, you are now living and effective with.” (32) This means that to have ongoing growth in your marriage you need to be committed to effective at it.
Additionally, Tripp rightly argues that before you can deal with the problems horizontally (with your wife), you must first deal with your problems vertically (before God). As Tripp puts it,
It is only when I like God above all else that I will ever like my national as myself. At the foundational level, the difficulties in our marriage do not first come because we don’t like one another enough. They take place because we don’t like God enough; and because we don’t like God enough we don’t treat one another with the kind of like that makes marriages work. (36)
Thus, in order to improve (sanctify) our marriages we must be committed to the process and committed to God. The rest of the book deals with the specifics of how this happens.
Overall I loved this book. It challenged me personally, and it will be a useful resource in the context of counseling. The only criticism that I have of the book is I wish that it had been better organized around the 6 commitments I listed above. The commitments were showed before every chapter, but it might have been helpful if these commitments were more overtly tied to the content of the chapter. It seemed as if the chapters were written before the commitments. This is not automatically a terrible thing, but I reflect it could have tied the overall theme of the book together more effectively if these commitments had been incorporated more into each chapter.
That being said, I will read this again and I will have others read it as well.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This is the best book I have read on healing a marriage from a Christian perspective. It is a healthy dose of much needed reality based on the truth of the Bible. Goes beyond external behavior modifications to the heart issues that produce the words and behaviors that are destructive to marriage. Targets the reader to see that we are each reliable for our behaviors & our responses and therefore focuses primarily on how do I change, not, how do I change my spouse. Sets before the reader the truth of the gospel that life in Christ can empower us to change the way we live, walk in the power of the Holy Spirit, and redeem our marriages.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
In full disclosure, I’m still reading this book. Knowing well the wisdom that can be gleaned from anything Paul Tripp writes, I bought this book. So far the best books on marriage that I’ve read include “When Sinners Say I Do” and “Sacred Marriage.” Add Tripps’s book to that list. He acknowledges freely the messiness of marriage, the hurts, griefs, disappointments, but he speaks hope into the mess. He consistently cultivates the “huge picture” view of marriage as part of God’s plot to sanctify His people, reveal their sins, so He in mercy can deal with them within the vulnerable relationship of two sinners. But this view is not “pie in the sky by and by.” It’s reality, but infused with the hope of the gospel. We can like well, and we can change.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5