A Word from Bob

I’ve taken the following “quotes of note” from my book Gospel-Centered Marriage Counseling: An Equipping Guide for Pastors and Counselors. I pray that these quotes will be a blessing to you and to the couples you counsel.

A Biblical Vision for Marriage 

1. The grand purpose of every marriage is to glorify God. Messed up, messy marriages have a great opportunity to bring God glory.
2. Marriage is a principal tool of sanctification. Marriage is a workroom for two people to become more like Christ. Marriage is soul school.
3. God calls husbands and wives to be each other’s best biblical counselor. We’re to be each other’s most vital one-another minister, most important encourager, most intimate spiritual friend.
4. The purpose of marriage is to reveal God’s glory as we represent the Trinity, reflect Christ and the church, and enhance the maturity of our spouse.
5. God designed marriage to be two people being continually filled individually and together by the Trinity. Out of the overflow of that filling they sacrificially give life to each other so that they grow together in Christlike service for others.
6. What does a gospel-centered marriage look like? We are to give each other grace-love that God uses to transform us increasingly into the character of Christ.
7. Paul Tripp talks about “people in need of change helping people in need of change.” Great phrase. As it applies to marriage, I like to say, “transformed spouses transforming spouses.”

A Biblical Vision for Marriage Counseling 

1. Gospel-Centered Marriage Counseling seeks to ask and answer one central question: “What would a model of biblical marriage counseling look like that was built solely upon Christ’s gospel of grace?”
2. All secular models of marriage counseling reduce marriage to a set of principles and procedures designed to help couples better manage life without God.
3. All truly Christian models of marriage counseling expand marriage to God’s eternal perspective to help couples realize they cannot live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
4. How do we take theology, the gospel, and Christ’s story and relate it to the troubled couple sitting in front of us?
5. What is a primary goal of marriage counseling? To help the husband and wife together to live a life of love—to walk in love, to have a pattern of other-centered care and concern.
6. The biblical marriage counselor needs to know how to get out of the way so the couple can couple.  The counselor is not the most important person in a couple’s marriage—Christ is and they are.
7. Marriage counseling is not individual counseling with an audience—with one spouse watching you counsel the other spouse. The art of marriage counseling involves equipping the couple to be each other’s biblical counselor.
8. Our mindset as a counselor should not be, “How can I rescue their marriage?” Instead, our mindset needs to be, “How can I encourage this couple to connect to each other, to Christ, and to the body of Christ so their marriage glorifies Christ?”
9. Biblical marriage counselors are soul physicians who serve under the Great Soul Physician.

Infusing Hope in the Midst of Hurt: Resurrection-Focused Marriage Counseling 

1. Our hope is not in the situation, not in the couple, not in our training, skillfulness, winsomeness, or experience. Our hope is in the God who resurrects dead things, including dead marriages.
2. Biblical marriage counselors must constantly remind themselves of the Bible’s redemptive narrative. Everything in Scripture is moving toward resurrection hope.
3. If we believe that God provides everything couples need for life and godliness, then we will see their marital problems as God’s opportunity to reveal more of his love, grace, and power.
4. Hope-based counselors keep their eyes wide open to suffering and sin while looking with spiritual eyes to the God who sustains and heals couples in their marital suffering and reconciles and guides couples to overcome their marital sinning.
5.  By the time your first few marriage counseling meetings have concluded, your prayer is simple: “Lord, may you have used me to help them glimpse a vision of a better life together in Christ.”

Comforting Each Other with Christ’s Comfort: Sustaining in Marriage Counseling 

1. How can I help this couple find their gospel comfort in Christ so they can comfort each other (2 Cor. 1:3-8)?
2. How does the gospel guide us to journey with couples so they move from self-centered anger and bitter disappointment toward other-centered love and grace-based compassion?
3. Through sustaining marital counseling, our prayer is that the couple begins to say, “Like Christ, we care about each other’s hurts.”
4. Our gospel-centered calling is to help couples move from being focused only or predominantly on their own hurt to focusing on each other’s hurt and their Father’s comfort.
5. Hurting spouses want their counselor to take their side. Biblical marriage counselors, while empathizing deeply with each spouse, take Christ’s side.
6. Our first calling is to help marriages glorify God. Our second calling is to be on the side of the marriage. We are not on the wife’s side. We are not on the husband’s side. We are on the marriage’s side.
7. Our biblical counsel will fall on deaf ears if our counselee has unbiblical beliefs about God. How we view God is the most important thing about us.
8. We are naïve to expect couples to turn to God for comfort unless they believe he is the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort. This is why biblical marriage counselors must help couples restore a biblical image of God that counters the distorted lies of Satan.
9. We not only want the couple to speak into each other’s lives, we want to help the couple see how Scripture speaks into their marital suffering with hope and help from above.

Interpreting Marital Life from a Faith Perspective: Healing in Marriage Counseling 

1. How can I help this couple find their gospel encouragement in Christ so they can encourage each other (2 Cor. 1:80-11; Phil. 2:1-5)?
2. Biblical marriage counselors help couples hope in the goodness of God who raises the dead—including dead marriages—by developing a faith perspective.
3. The power of the personal ministry of the Word is our ability to counter Satan’s condemning narrative by applying universal biblical truths specifically to the unique couple sitting in front of us.
4. We want to help the couple develop a resurrection-hope mindset that communicates: “God’s future vision is greater than our past baggage. God’s healing is greater than our deep hurt. Christ’s grace is greater than our suffering and sin.”
5. Healing is not about fixing me, but about fixing my eyes on Christ. Healing is not about my happiness, but about my holiness in Christ. Healing is not about my immediate good, but about God’s ultimate glory.
6. Christ’s redemptive prescription for marital healing shifts our gaze to Christ’s death for us and our death to self. It shifts our mindset to the reality that marital problems in our heart require Christ-dependence—resurrection power.

Dispensing Grace to One Another: Reconciling in Marriage Counseling 

1. How can I help this couple find their gospel restoration in Christ so they can forgive each other, reconcile with each other, and have their marriage restored in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17–21; Eph. 4:30–5:2)?
2. In addition to asking, “What ever happened to sin?” we should also be asking, “What ever happened to grace?” Some of us are good at exposing sin. Are we even better at magnifying grace? We should be, because where sin abounds, grace superabounds (Rom. 5:20).
3. We are all tempted toward a stubborn inclination to continue in self-sufficient attitudes that lead to self-centered relationships maintained by self-protective suppression of the truth (Rom. 1:18–32).
4. How people relate intimately to us mirrors how they relate intimately to others. This principle holds true only if our marriage counseling relationships are truly and purely intimate. If our biblical counseling relationships are shallow and merely academic, then we cannot expect to detect significant relational patterns.
5. There is tremendous power when a biblical counselor, speaking from God’s Word, affirms to a struggling husband or wife, “God has graciously forgiven you in Christ!”

Growing in Grace in Marriage: Guiding in Marriage Counseling 

1. How can I help this couple discover and apply gospel wisdom from Christ and his Word so they can discern together what is best and pure and glorifying to Christ (Phil. 1:9–11)?
2. Our task is to help couples apply gospel reality to their daily reality.
3. Biblical marriage counselors pray, “Father, help me have your eternal vision of this couple—your vision of them as victors in Christ.”
4. In marriage, Christ is not commanding us to do anything he has not already done. To make marriage work, we are to be imitators of God. What he did, we are to do. We are to live a life of love in marriage just as Christ loved us.
5. We coach spouses to live out the truth that it’s supernatural to love each other like Christ, through Christ, for Christ.