Decide today that you're in your marriage for the long haul.

When we see marriage as a covenant, not a contract, it’s confirmation that we are meant to stay together until death parts us. In A Model for Marriage, Jack and Judy Balswick point out that “the core characteristic of a covenant marriage is commitment, a factor that is profoundly important to marital stability, according to research findings.”

The very nature of wedding vows implies a covenant, but for most brides and grooms, the common attitude is to see marriage as a contract that can be broken. Typically, a couple—despite vowing to endure better or worse until death—live by the principle that they’ll stay together only as long as their spouse fulfills their end of the bargain. That’s an attitude that feeds into the “short haul” approach.

The first 10 years of our marriage were terrible—what we call the “Great Tribulation.” Yes, we had some good times; but, overall, we didn’t have a good marriage. Yet we never considered divorce as an option. Though we were both young when we married, one thing was clear: We were determined to make it work. We didn’t think of our marriage as a covenant in those days, but we lived as if we had made a covenant. We understood our vows. We were there for the long haul—for better or for worse.

How different our lives would have been if we had given up because we were miserable. Eventually, we grew past our misery and started to build something special together.

A number of marriage studies have been based on interviews with couples on the verge of divorce who, of course, reported that they were miserable. Many of these studies are designed so the researchers can go back and reinterview the same couples years later. Invariably, the couples who divorced report that they still are unhappy; but most of the couples who stayed together report that they are now happy.

 

Click here to read two other principles to help fix your marriage before it’s too late.

 

I’ve worked with couples who were miserable but came to counseling because divorce just wasn’t an option for them. One of these couples came back recently to deal with some extended-family issues. I hadn’t seen them in years. My last memory of them was their telling me they believed they’d turned the corner in their marriage and had the tools to keep their relationship on-track. It turns out they did, and they thanked me for helping them turn things around. What had been misery to them—and the cause of divorce with many other couples—was long past. They were in the process of becoming everything they had hoped to be as a couple.

Marriages go through seasons. When a couple can genuinely make an unconditional commitment to stay the course during the cold, dark season of a marriage, then spring and even summer seasons follow.

There is a saying that goes something like: “Don’t doubt in the darkness what you know to be true in the light.” You can apply this warning to the seasons of a marriage. When you hit the dark , cold winter season together, don’t question the vows and commitments you made to each other in the light of the summer season. Stay the course. Love unconditionally and know that spring will come.

Click here to read two other principles to help fix your marriage before it’s too late.

The night I met my husband, Danny Lotz, I was 17 years old and had just graduated from high school.  Danny had been raised in a strong Christian home by a father who was a pastor of a small church in New York City.

Danny had received Jesus Christ as a young boy at his dad’s church and had taken a strong, uncompromising stand for his faith since then. He was a young girl’s dream, and 15 months later we were married in the same mountain chapel where my parents had married 23 years earlier.

An offer to help, a smile and a kind word will reduce the heat of everyday responsibilities.

 

The first command God gave mankind was to be fruitful and multiply (see Gen. 1:28). But fruitfulness involves more than merely growing physical fruit.

As a Christian, the Spirit of God has already been planted within you, now it's your job to cultivate the seed of His nature. And it is not going to be an easy thing to do all the time.

When envy invades a marriage relationship, the results are particularly tragic. Husband and wife, once a union of love and partnership, now compete for recognition and spiritual “one-upmanship.”

Typically, jealousy among spouses masks itself in legalism—creating discord and suspicion. It effectively destroys the potential for teamwork by fostering individual kingdom building rather than cooperation. Jealousy is commonly rooted in insecurity and is defined as that “peculiar uneasiness” we experience when we see others receive the attention we desire for ourselves.