Building Blocks Workbook (Download)

[Husbands] the most powerful weapons you have are your ears. Just listen to your wife, and she is much more likely to feel understood.

We blame people for the bad things we do, but take credit for the good things we do.

Since it is easy to focus on the negative, focus on your mate’s good qualities and express thanks with positive words of Love or Respect.

The woman absolutely needs love, and the man absolutely needs respect. It’s as simple- and as difficult- as that.

You have to become proactive, rather than just trying to stop the reactive.

God’s commands are not burdensome, but are given to us to spare us from more pain. Why would God command you to do something that doesn’t work?

We get on the Crazy Cycle because without love a wife reacts without respect, and without respect a husband reacts without love.

Mutual understanding, not communication, is the key to a healthy marriage relationship.

Research and experience prove that men and women see and hear differently. Recognizing these differences and adjusting to them is absolutely necessary for reaching mutual understanding and better communication.

Unconditional respect is as powerful to him as unconditional love is to her.

Love and Respect is a faith venture, not a formula.

Don’t conclude that your spouse is wrong when he/she is seeking to do the right and righteous thing.

No matter how difficult your spouse may be at the moment, your spouse does not have control over your reaction; you do. You may be experiencing disappointment, frustration, or anger, but you always have a choice.

If you want your husband to express appreciation for your attempts to be respectful, you must speak thankfully when he tries to be loving.

If a husband is commanded to agape- love his wife, then she truly needs love.

A man has a natural, inborn desire to go out and “conquer” the challenges of his world – to work and achieve.

Troubles over sex and money do not cause a marriage to go under. The lack of love and respect during conflict cause the marriage to go under.

Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative with lots of love and respect in between.

As you pray together, you will truly learn to love and respect together.

Feeling unloved, a wife gets defensive and acts offensively without respect. Feeling disrespected, a husband gets defensive and acts offensively without love.

This is the Rewarded Cycle: His love blesses regardless of her respect and her respect blesses regardless of his love.

It is hard to be negative while being thankful.

Marital researchers agree that a huge percentage of communication problems between husband and wife are due not to what is said but to how it is said – the attitude and tone of voice.

Husbands, to energize your wife give her face-to-face time, allowing her to talk and share her feelings.

One thing to remember in this culture is if we say something complimentary towards one gender, we aren’t saying something against the other.

Marriage is a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and your reverence for Jesus Christ.

There is power and freedom that comes in understanding that no one can cause you to react in a certain way. It is your choice.

As a wife, if you can start to understand how important your husband’s work is to him, you will take a giant step toward communicating respect and honor, two things that he values even more than your love.

Your spouse has a need that you don’t have. Are you going to say there is something seriously wrong with them or will you say “Viva la Difference”?

When parents genuinely trust and follow the Lord and His ways, their faith spills over onto the children.

Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean the other person is offensive.

No one can really practice Love and Respect unless he or she does it as unto Jesus Christ.

Your wife feels you are open with her when you discuss financial concerns, possible job changes or ideas for your future.

He will feel appreciated when you disagree with him only in private and honor his authority in front of the kids.

It’s true that women have intuition and that men should listen to them. It’s also true that women have blind spots and need the insight of their husbands.

Words of love from a husband are like good medicine that brings life to the marriage.

It is so easy to draw wrong conclusions about a spouse’s character and motives due to an occasional flare-up or silly comment.

We all need to wrestle with the spiritual truth that God is good. If you don’t believe God is good, you won’t trust His word. If you don’t trust His word, you will find excuses to ignore His commands.

Husbands, even Jesus Himself was asked by a woman, “Do you not care?” (Luke 10:40) When your wife accuses you of not caring, decode her deeper meaning.

When a wife insists that her husband earn her respect, she puts him in a lose-lose situation.

Getting married reveals, usually sooner than later, an incontestable fact: your spouse cannot possibly meet all your needs and desires

You’re the only person in the world who can meet your spouse’s deepest need for love and respect. After all, you alone are married to your spouse.

Research shows that 70% of the couples who were extremely unhappy in their marriage, but hung in there and worked through the tough time, identified themselves as being very happy five years later.

Holding back your love or respect will just keep the Crazy Cycle spinning away, but being mature and making the first move could slow it down.

Let the Lord change you, but don’t try to change each other.

The key to motivating another person is meeting their deepest need, especially during conflict.

When your wife comes to talk to you, listen to her. Realize she is coming to you because you matter more to her than anyone else. She has certain emotional needs and only you can meet them. Sometimes she may say things that don’t make sense to you and she is apt to misspeak and exaggerate when she is upset, but don’t put her down. Instead, listen to her heart. Give her a chance to express her concerns and, as she does so, don’t try to fix her. Don’t give her your solutions unless she asks for them.

Your marriage is a test of your devotion to Christ.

If we subscribe to the belief that because we are equal we are the same, then we’re going to expect our spouse to respond the way we do.

When we speak before we think, we widen the chances the other person(s) will be notably hurt, frustrated, confused, angry, fearful, or offended by something we’ve communicated.

We send each other messages in “code” based on gender, even though we don’t intend to. What I say is not what you hear, and what you think you heard is not what I meant at all.

Our research shows that couples who pray together are more apt to reap all kinds of benefits, including better and more frequent communication, going on “dates” more frequently and having sex more frequently.

Always try to look at your spouse the way Jesus does.

God’s commands are there to help us, not to hinder us or hold us back as male and female.

When confronting your spouse, attack the behavior, not the person.

When a husband chooses to do or say something loving, and that includes saying, ‘I’m sorry for coming across in an unloving way,’ he energizes his wife. When a wife decides to express herself respectfully, and that includes apologizing for her disrespectful attitude, she energizes her husband.

So I encourage every husband and wife to commit to the Jesus Way of Talking. Instead of allowing the stress of the situation to control you, you can say to yourself, “Because I love the Lord and I know that He rewards every good word, I am going to be truthful even if my spouse is not. I will also be uplifting, forgiving, thankful and scriptural in my speech because my ultimate goal is to please the Lord. Whatever my spouse’s weaknesses or bad habits might be, I will not let them cause me to sin with my lips.”

God rewards your obedience to love and respect, even if your spouse does not respond!

The heart of my communication means the other person cannot get my heart to be unkind, unloving, or disrespectful. Instead, I have made a decision about who I will be independent of the other person. I won’t blame my unkindness on someone else.

When others do not respond to our communication, we need to look first at our communication style. Is the other person incapable of hearing what we have to say? Or are we abrupt, brusque, and curt?

God is not trying to trick you or mess with you. Trust that He wants to reveal Himself to you just as much as He wants to reveal Himself to the world.

I often stress that one of the greatest rewards any persevering spouse can have is being a good example and influence on the children in the family.

When we feel crippling discouragement by the sinful choices and outcomes of our kids, we must not let this permanently deter us from parenting God’s way.

A major step toward a happy marriage is accepting differences and working them out with love and respect.

Unconditional respect, like unconditional love, is all about how one sounds (tone of voice and word choice) and appears (facial expressions and physical actions).

I have concluded that those of us in the church who believe we have the Truth are not using the whole truth. A crucial part of God’s Word has been completely ignored, or perhaps simply gone unnoticed, when it has been there right under our noses the whole time! Many Christian spouses know Ephesians 5:33 and can at least paraphrase it. The Apostle Paul tells husbands to love their wives as much as they love themselves, and wives are to respect their husbands. But is anyone really listening? Perhaps the first step to better communication between husband and wife is to hear what God’s Word clearly says. --Emerson

The difference between successful couples and unsuccessful couples is that successful ones keep getting up and dealing with the issues.

Refuse to let evil turn you into a contemptuous and hateful person.

[Women], as you enter quiet dignity, not preaching at your husband or scolding him as though you were his mother, something happens in his soul as a male.

Be a part of the solution, not part of the problem.

In your marriage be the first to “seek peace and pursue it” (1 Peter 3:11)

Negative actions rarely produce positive results.

Stay the course regardless of the child’s respect and obedience. This is the Family Rewarded Cycle: a parents love unto Christ regardless of the child.

Your hunger for God can create an appetite in your children.

Self-interest should never come ahead of your spouse’s interests.

Don’t label each other as bad because you differ on how you solve your troubles.

“With eyes of faith, envision Jesus standing just beyond the shoulder of your spouse and listening to every word you speak in every conversation, pleasant or tense. When you speak lovingly or respectfully to your spouse, you are speaking to Christ. Your spouse just happens to be there too.” This truth has sanctified the lips of many. Instead of giving their spouse a verbal whipping or choking on the idea of saying anything positive, now some spouses are motivated to speak words of unconditional love or respect.

The parent-child relationship is as easy, and as difficult, as love and respect.

Truth will carry its own weight if delivered respectfully and lovingly.

Husbands primarily want to hear ‘respect” talk during conflict. Wives primarily want to hear “love” talk during conflict.

“Living happily ever after” means knowing how to deal with the imperfect parts of life.

You must “ask God from the wealth of his glory to give you power through his Spirit to be strong in your inner selves.”

Your spouse deserves the truth from you. Do your best to tell it with love and respect.

Assuming goodwill can be revolutionary in relationships.

We are worth Jesus to the Father.

Life is too short to fuss and fret over trivial irritations.

The more we are upset at something, the wiser it is to let twenty-four hours pass before responding.

When you relinquish an offense, you need to send that offense somewhere. So follow Jesus’ example and release it to your heavenly Father.

[Husbands] do you realize the power of just holding your wife’s hand?

We have different vulnerabilities. We can pass judgment on one another all day long or we can say God made us different and that’s ok.

It’s so easy to dismiss our spouse as childish because we don’t have the same vulnerabilities they do.

Trusting and obeying God’s Word because we love and reverence God never, ever makes us a hypocrite! When the alarm goes off in the morning, we get up, even when we don’t feel like it getting up. Because we do what we don’t feel like doing, does that make us hypocrites? No, it’s a sign we are responsible people. Showing respectful behavior when we don’t “feel respectful” is evidence of maturity.

In the ultimate sense you marriage has nothing to do with your spouse. It has everything to do with your relationship with Jesus Christ.

When you play the blame game your marriage never wins.

Pink and Blue perceptions not only affect seeing, they affect hearing as well. Women hear with pink hearing aids and men hear with blue hearing aids. Even more important to understand as you and your spouse seek to gain better communication, you can hear the very same words, but each of you will hear different messages.

Assume goodwill about the person you are in conflict with.

Your husband knows you value his friendship when you tell him you like him and you show it (he knows you love him, but he often wonders if you really like him).

Positive changes flood a relationship immediately when both husband and wife cancel the blame game!

A wife has one driving need: to feel loved. When that need is met, she is happy. A husband has one driving need: to feel respected. When that need is met, he is happy. When either of these needs isn’t met, things get crazy with conflict.

Through Jesus and Peter, God set forth His standard for living in the unconditional dimension: choose to be loving even when the other person is not; do what is right regardless of the treatment you receive. I believe this standard applies directly to marriage. A husband who speaks lovingly to his disrespectful wife will be rewarded; and a wife who speaks respectfully to her unloving, not-worthy-of-respect husband will be rewarded. Whether you are husband or wife, the reward is what can keep you going in the midst of the craziness: knowing that God commends you, knowing that you have found his favor for your words and actions.