Family Ties

Are your expectations for marriage your own—or your parents'?

What do you want to bring into your marriage from your past, and what do you want to leave behind?

Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman III have together written this inductive Bible study guide to help couples build healthy and happy marriages. Through six study sessions for individuals, couples or groups, they lead you to examine how your early experiences of family and your current family relationships can influence your marriage relationship—for better or worse.

Intimate Marriage Bible studies bring spouses into deeper communion with God and with each other. In marriage a man and a woman are called to leave their families of origin, to weave their individual lives into a unity and to cleave to each other. How can fallen human beings even begin to contemplate this ideal—God's ideal?

These studies will help you take small but real steps toward honoring the image of God in each other and living out God's goal for marriage. As you explore and respond to Scripture together, you will discover strength and beauty in your marriage and become even more intimate companions.

Family Relationships are Complex. We bring the patterns of relating-positive and negative-to our marriages. Sorting out our own expectations from our family's desires can be a major undertaking. But it is a necessary part of leaving our family of origin so that we can become a new family unit. Here is an opportunity to sort out what you want to bring into your marriage from your past and what you want to leave behind. Doing so will build a stronger bond between the two of you and enhance your relationships with your extended family as well.

Dan B. Allender (M.Div., Westminster Theological Seminary; Ph.D., counseling psychology, Michigan State University) is professor of counseling at Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, Washington. He taught previously at Grace Theological Seminary and Colorado Christian University.

A speaker and writer, his books include The Healing Path, To Be Told, How Children Raise Parents, The Wounded Heart and Leading with a Limp. With Tremper Longman, he wrote Bold Love, Cry of the Soul, Intimate Allies and the Intimate Marriage Bible studies.

Tremper Longman III (Ph.D., Yale University) is Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He is also Visiting Professor of Old Testament at Mars Hill Graduate School, Visiting Professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary and adjunct of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. He lectures regularly at Mars Hill, Regent College in Vancouver and the Canadian Theological Seminary in Calgary.

Longman is the author or coauthor of over twenty books, including How to Read Genesis, How to Read the Psalms, How to Read Proverbs and Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation, and coeditor of A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible. He and Dan Allender have coauthored Bold Love, Cry of the Soul, Intimate Allies, The Intimate Mystery and the Intimate Marriage Bible studies.