The main problem with most marriages, says Paul Tripp, is lack of submission— to God!

A Review of: What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage by Paul David Tripp, Crossway Books, April 2010, 288 pp., $3.19

Twelve years ago, my husband and I dutifully pursued premarital counseling, which meant having dinner with a well-meaning professor and his wife.

They walked us through their marriage’s highlights and lowlights, covering faithfulness, forgiveness, and the roles of husband and wife. But what I remember most about the talk was thinking my fiancé and I already had figured marriage out. We were seminary students who loved God and communicated well. These qualities, along with our mutual love, surely meant we could avoid the sinkholes that doomed other relationships.

We are, by God’s grace, still happily married, but I am often confronted with the extent of our foolishness in those early days. Like every married couple, we have faced unfulfilled expectations, disappointments, and unmet needs.

At minimum, we could have better anticipated these with Paul Tripp’s What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage.

Tripp adeptly burrows beneath discussions of gender roles, communication mishaps, and felt needs—the driving forces of most Christian marriage manuals—to get at the root of all marital problems: who or what we worship…

What Did You Expect? is fundamentally about the transforming power of grace, offered to anyone who has reached the end of themselves.

Read More: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/august/16.53.html

Lynn Roush is a counselor (MA, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) at The Crossing, an Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Columbia, Missouri.