Choose to marry a mature person with whom you share a value system, and the two of you should not have “conflict” with one another. The idea of marriage is not to learn to fight well; the idea is to choose someone with whom a fight will be unnecessary.

Jesus Christ has paid our penalty, so we don’t have to continue to find someone to blame for our circumstances and we don’t have to continue to justify that which we do by making it someone else’s fault.

The admonition to love one another is placed directly after the admonition to not compete, because it is difficult for love and competition to coexist. One of the most destructive things to a marriage that a married couple can do is to compete with one another. God does not tell a man and woman married to one another to become a team, or to work together, but to become one.

The gentle husband endeavors to respond to his wife in a way that will transmit, not only the intellectual concept that he is trying to get across, but also his affection and concern for his wife. God tells husbands that it is more effective for a man to be gentle, loving and right, rather than to just be right.

Following our own plan, as the idolaters did, will lead us into sin and death, but following the plan of God will lead us into eternal life, eternal maturity and eternal leadership.

Our only claim to Christianity and to eternal life is that we are covered, not by our righteousness or our good works, but by the Blood of Jesus Christ, shed on the Cross of Calvary that our sins might be forgiven.

The Scripture indicates that a child should honor both of his or her parents. The designation of both mother and father in the commandment along with the Scripture references about marriage leads me to the conclusion that the designation of honor is, in part, determined by marital status. Fathers and mothers are meant to be honored in the context of the family unit.

A woman appealing to a man is the design of male/female relationships. Didn’t you have to appeal to your husband to get him interested in you in the first place? Then, when you became girlfriend and boyfriend, didn’t you have to be appealing to him to convince him to give you that ring?