Paul Tripp’s new book on marriage, What Did You Expect? looks very promising. In this review of the book, Oren Martin sums up Tripp’s main point:
Tripp identifies a central theme in marital problems: unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations lead to disappointments and a variety of sinful responses. But there is hope. God has given his people Scripture to help in their marriages, not only in the “standard” marriage passages, but in the storyline of Scripture. In other words, marriage is situated within the story of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation, and the already-not yet, so that when testing comes the God who is present is faithful, powerful, and willing to help us in need.
This God-centered and God-directed hope allows us to worship him (vertical) and build marriages of love, unity, and understanding (horizontal) so that we, as sinners married to sinners, can live for his kingdom and not our own in the foundation-building everyday moments of life. In order to take this “little-moment” approach to marriage, we must live in our marriages with a harvest, investment, and grace mentality. With this in mind, Tripp offers six daily commitments that become daily habits for the kind of marriage that God’s design intended, and his grace can make possible.
First, we will give ourselves to a regular lifestyle of confession and forgiveness (chapters 5-6). Marriages will not be changed without confession, and rather than viewing confession as a burdensome act, Tripp helpfully offers a biblical perspective on the grace of confession. It is a grace to know right from wrong, to see and understand ourselves with accuracy and our indwelling sin, to humbly receive criticism and rebuke, and, most of all, to know that we can face our wrongs because Christ has carried our guilt and shame. Therefore, we must build confession and forgiveness into our marriages through honesty, humility, compassion, acceptance, encouragement, patience, and perseverance, knowing that our faith is in Christ and his perfectly obedient life, sacrificial, sin-bearing, wrath-satisfying death, and hope-giving resurrection. It is only by remembering that we have been graciously forgiven by God that this kind of confessing and forgiving marriage will come.
Read a summary of the other five daily commitments here.