10 Resources to Strengthen Your Marriage
We always hear how hard marriage is and how there is a great chance that you will experience divorce in your lifetime. Although marriage can be hard, it can also bring great joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment. To help you and your spouse experience this gift, we have put together 10 resources that will strengthen your marriage today!
Online Resources to Strengthen Your Marriage
Home Team Toolkit
At Chase Oaks, we have built our "Home Team" series around winning at our most important relationships. And one of the most important relationships to get right is marriage. Therefore, we put together our Home Team Toolkit, a game plan for building healthy relationships, which can help strengthen your marriage.
Our toolkit has songs, books, studies, and blogs that will encourage you and help you learn practical ways to build a healthy home. And a healthy home begins with a strong marriage rooted in faith, love, and hope.
RightNow Media
RightNow Media is a Netflix for churches and Christ-followers. It features videos from well-known speakers and authors, which are centered around specific studies, books, and topics that can be streamed from virtually anywhere. And the best part is Chase Oaks offers it as a free resource.
RightNow Media offers a whole section of resources to strengthen your marriage. One great resource is a seven-session study based on the book, You and Me Forever, by Bestselling Author Francis Chan and his wife, Lisa Chan. This study looks at marriage from a unique perspective and helps you discover how you and your spouse can enjoy a satisfying marriage through love, laughter, and intimacy and how you can still achieve great things as individuals.
Some other great resources to strengthen your marriage on RightNow Media include Andy Stanley’s Staying in Love and Gary Thomas’ A Lifelong Love. Both help to strengthen marriages by helping couples reconnect and create a plan to choose love even when life gets hard.
Vertical Devotional
Vertical is an online devotional written by Chase Oakers that feature a short Bible passage and reflection that only takes a few minutes to read. As part of our “Home Team” series, we will be exploring what the Bible has to say about winning at our most important relationships, including marriage.
This might be a great way to connect with your spouse on a daily basis. You could read Vertical together in the morning before work or at night before bed. Just find a time that fits your schedules and take a few minutes to read and reflect on a short Bible passage every day!
Focus on the Family
Focus on the Family has a marriage page dedicated to strengthening marriages through a variety of blogs and articles. There are articles written for couples before they say, “I do,” and for couples who have been married for a while but might be facing a crisis or experiencing a stagnant time in their relationship.
The blogs and articles touch on topics such as healthy communication, finances, work-life balance, and sex and intimacy. There is also a free assessment that will help you and your spouse identify the areas in which your marriage could use some improvement and that will give you tools that will help you work on the identified areas.
Books to Strengthen Your Marriage
- Chapman’s Love Languages
In his bestseller, The 5 Love Languages, Dr. Gary Chapman describes practical ways you and your spouse can experience a deeper connection and greater intimacy. And it all begins with discovering your love language and how you can speak your spouse’s love language. By taking small, simple steps, you can transform and strengthen your marriage today!
- Janssen’s Marriage Masterpiece
Your Marriage Masterpiece by Al Janssen guides couples to transform their relationship through God’s amazing design. Janssen weaves real-life stories and biblical narratives to paint a complete picture of all that marriage can be.
Dr. Tony Evans, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship and bestselling author, says, "Your Marriage Masterpiece provides vision and guidance for couples to maintain their bearings as they navigate the treacherous waters of life together.”
- Cloud and Townsend’s Healthy Boundaries
Boundaries in Marriage by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend can help make the most of your marriage by learning when to say yes and no to your spouse. This book is great in helping couples set healthy boundaries that can be a difference-maker for their marriage. It helps couples understand how to get beyond the serious hurts in marriage and how to put boundaries in place that protect each spouse as individuals.
- Trent’s Breaking the Cycle
John Trent and Larry Weeden wrote Breaking the Cycle of Divorce to empower adult children of divorce to make their marriages work even when it is hard. Coming from a home of divorce increases the likelihood of divorcing later in life. But as an adult child of divorce, John Trent gives you encouragement, insight, and tools you and your spouse need to beat the odds and find success where your parents failed. This book will help you not give up even when giving up seems like the easier choice.
- Dobson’s Tough Love
Dr. James Dobson's Love Must Be Tough is for married couples who are facing a crisis—a crisis that might even seem impossible. Dobson’s “tough love” principles are valuable and effective and offers guidance to help you rekindle the romance and renew your relationship.
- Omartian’s Power of Prayer
Bestselling Author Stormie Omartian wrote two incredible books on the power of prayer in marriage. She wrote The Power of a Praying Wife and The Power of a Praying Husband to help married couples know how to pray for their spouses, even when it’s hard to find something nice to say about your spouse.
These books will help you form a deeper connection to God and will make you see your spouse in a different light through the lens of God’s love for each of you. Strengthen your marriage by learning how to pray for one another and support one another no matter what you are facing.