Marriage Matters: Study Guide with Leader's Notes

Publisher's Description

He snapped at her during breakfast. She brought up a past mistake. He walked out angry. She left without saying good-bye. An ordinary day in an ordinary marriage. But what if things could be different? What if you could transform these ordinary moments of annoyance, conflict, pain, or cold indifference into something new?

Winston T. Smith, drawing on his extensive experience as a marriage counselor, offers a simple yet powerful prescription for changing your marriage. He shows how examining the everyday disappointments and irritations in your marriage will help you understand yourself, your spouse, and your need for God's love. Change begins with seeing day-to-day interactions from a different perspective, taking simple steps to love one another more effectively, and then learning how to take those steps over and over again. Interactions that used to devolve into pointless annoyances and fights can become an opportunity for God's activity and love to become increasingly evident and powerful. The principles in this book will take your marriage to extraordinary places and lead you into a deeper relationship with an extraordinary God. Don't settle for an ordinary marriage, learn to live out God's extraordinary love in your most intimate relationship.

Using discussion questions, small group exercises, vignettes, Bible study, and relationship-building activities, this interactive ten-week study gives couples the invaluable experience of applying and living the principles from the book Marriage Matters. The leader’s notes in the back provide extra content and direction for pastors, counselors, and mentors as they work with couples in small groups and in individual counseling sessions.

Winston T. Smith, MDiv, a counselor and faculty member at the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation (CCEF), has extensive experience as a marriage and family counselor and teaches seminary students how to counsel couples. He is the author of the book Marriage Matters and the minibooks Divorce Recovery, Help for Stepfamilies, Help! My Spouse Committed Adultery, The Problem with Masturbation, Who Does the Dishes?, and Burned Out.