Marriage does not begin with you and your spouse. It begins with you and your God. Get right with God first. Then getting right with your spouse will follow, perhaps with a lot less struggle and more joy than just applying techniques.

God gets a ringside seat to all the nauseating, maggot-infested muck in our hearts… but wants to be with us, anyway. There was never an instant when He ceased to care for us. Yet He does not pander to our caprices. He is not above withholding the sugar pill that we hanker as good but He knows is bad for us.

Neither is He remiss in urging us to swallow the bitter pill that we recoil from as evil, but in His eyes is exactly what we need. In fact, whatever grieves us – a difficult job, problematic health, wobbly finances and yes, that impossible spouse – are not signs of His displeasure, but are rather invitations to participate in His grace.

I know for some people what I am about to say will be very hard to believe. But here goes: God loves you very, very much.

Here is how Larry Crabb paints a Romantic God. His verbal brushstrokes are so eloquent, I beg you to savor the next two paragraphs:

“The most powerful thing we can do to help someone change is to offer them a rich taste of God’s incredible goodness in the New Covenant. He looks at us with eyes of delight, with eyes that see a goodness beneath the mess, with a heart that beats wildly with excitement over who we are and who we will become. And sometimes he exposes what we are convinced would make him turn away in disgust in order to amaze us with his grace. That’s connecting. When we connect like that, it can change people’s lives.

“God doesn’t fix us or pressure us. He does whatever it takes to reveal himself to us. That may include probing deeply into our messy hearts or insisting that we do something we really don’t want to do. But the core purpose is always the same, not to repair or exhort us, but to draw us into a fuller appreciation of his beauty, to dazzle us with the sunrises of his nature, to awe us with the Grand Canyons of his character, to entice us with the endless fields of fragrant flowers blooming in his heart.”

Wow!

Therefore, how can we transform our selfish hearts and thus transform our marriages? To borrow the language of Psalm 34:8, by tasting and seeing the All-good God in all His indescribable splendor.

If you want to revitalize or even rescue your marriage, perhaps you need to lay aside all those techniques and theory. Start with God. Ask for His forgiveness. Enjoy His sheer goodness to you. He wants to have a romance with you. Then, with a cleansed and awakened heart, be the romantic person your spouse needs.