Tying the Knot: A Premarital Guide to a Strong and Lasting Marriage Paperback – February 1, 2016

It’s undoubtedly a wonderful tool that describes biblical truths and a guide for a good, Christ-centered married life!Ilse Fajardo

We have recommend this book to 3 engaged couples in our faith community and all have found it helpful. Allows for them to share a common language when talking about their relationship and future marriage. At he end of each chapter, there is "homework" and "couples work". If read and applied, it is a very unifying tool.

Great book blessed to cover it with a pastor who loves God’s people.

My husband and I read this book together as part of our pre-marital counseling process. It allowed us to start off our marriage on the right foot by sparking those hard conversations and giving us the opportunity to work through difficult topics together. We are so grateful that we went through this together BEFORE marriage, because we were able to get to know each other better in a way that we would not have, had we not read this. We asked each other a lot of hard questions before marriage and even before dating but there are topics in this book that even we did not think of discussing before tying the knot. I would recommend this to any couple seriously considering marriage/those who are engaged! You will not regret it!

As a Pastor, Biblical Counselor and former Professor of Biblical Counseling, I am always looking for great resources, especially on marriage and family. I absolutely love this book for several reasons. I will just mention a few.1) The focus is where it should be which is on Jesus. This is the kind of solid biblically based resource that I have come to expect from New Growth Press. Every issue in this book is looked at with Jesus at the center of marriage and the Bible as the authoritative guide.2) Excellent homework. Right from the start the homework starts and the first exercise is one of my favorites. He has each member of the couple write their personal conversion testimony. They each write why they won't to marry the other. Then he gets the parents involved by having all four parents write whether they support the marriage and why--that one is brilliant. And finally he has them write a physical conduct agreement. All that before you even start meeting with them. The great homework continues from them.3) This book is very accessible. It has just the right amount of content. It's not too long as some I have that have the couple look up every verse on the subject but it's not too short either where there is no biblical support. The chapters are short enough and the homework engaging enough to make each counseling session memorable and meaningful.I highly recommend this premarital guide for any pastor, counselor or person involved in premarital counseling.My only criticism, and it's minor, but it's the price. $16.19 for both the paperback and the e-book is a bit expensive (especially for the ebook). However, it won't stop me from using this resource.Keep them coming New Growth Press.

With a couple preparing for marriage I’ve decided to rethink my premarital counseling. As a result, I purchased two books. One of them was Tying the Knot by Rob Green. This is an attempt to have Christ-centered pre-marital counseling. “Jesus” and “Center” are part of each chapter title. He covers your life, love, problem solving, roles and expectations, communication, finances, community and intimacy. His desire is to see all of these things in light of the object of your faith: Jesus. Each chapter has homework to process the information and apply it in your relationship. It is intended for use with a pastor or mentor in preparation.A pastor or mentor is important precisely because we need to be pushed. There are things we would rather not talk about. This is the way we are. We want to duck the hard questions. People “in love” don’t want the boat rocked. They think they have arrived, they have found their soul mate. The search is over, but hard questions can question that conclusion. A good mentor will be able to tell a couple there are serious concerns. Struggles are okay- they deepen love or reveal we’re really into self-interest not actual love. So don’t deny struggles, or make too much of them. What matters is what you do with them.He does start with each person’s relationship with Christ. Too often people cling to a cultural form of Christianity. We treat Jesus as an optional add-on to life as opposed to the most important person in our lives. Jesus is a king, and Christians are part of His kingdom and are to keep that kingdom central. When we don’t, we become more like neighboring nations that continually fight for control. Our kingdoms begin to matter too much and the person who threatens our kingdom must be conquered or eliminated.Green then distinguishes between a worldly understanding of love and a biblical one. Real love isn’t about epic dates and woozy feelings. It is about sticking together in the midst of adversity, short-term and long-term. God doesn’t bail on us. He enables us to not bail on each other whether it is the flu, job loss, cancer etc. He expounds 1 Corinthians 13, and reveals how we have been loved by Christ.Problem solving is a problem for many of us because we are “hurt hoarders”: we keep a record of wrongs which creates long-term problems in a relationship. He focused on recording their wrongs and the growth of bitterness. We can also record our wrongs and withdraw out of a sense of guilt, shame and failure. Both make solving problems increasingly difficult. He covers some of the lies we can believe about problems that create more problems. He then lays out some basic principles to keep in mind. He brings the freedom we should experience due to the doctrine of justification to confess our sin, and to forgive theirs.With roles and expectations Green briefly delves into the reality of roles as God-given, and the differing expectations we have. I think he does a good job of distinguishing between roles and expectations. Too often they are confused. Expectations are person-relative. Roles are God-established. An overly progressive or liberal view makes roles person-relative because men and women are interchangeable. Some conservatives try to cram expectations into roles. There are no divine dictates about who cooks, does dishes or takes out the trash. Each couple works through those things in light of the gifts, interests, competing time demands and responsibilities etc. Each person comes from a different family culture and the couple needs to form a new family culture that is faithful in that to which God speaks and loving & wise in that to which He doesn’t.In communication he focuses on words as the overflow of the heart. We all need renewed hearts. Only Jesus can renew our hearts. Too often we speak in ways that diminish, wound and degrade our spouses. When your kingdom is on the line you will not care about collateral damage. And this is the problem.In discussing finances, Green wants us to see ourselves as stewards. This means that how we spend our money is tied to our relationship with Christ. His kingdom, not our own, should determine where our money goes. Too many people give little thought to Jesus when they think about cars, homes, vacations, snack food etc. We’ve been trained to think about the environment, or “fair trade”. But most haven’t been trained to think about stewardship. That’s important too! More important actually.He includes a rarity in pre-marital counseling material- a chapter on church. He talks about community and one of those communities is the faith community. It is one of the ways we keep Jesus in the center, and a manifestation of Jesus being in the center. He loves the Church! It is His Bride. How can we love Jesus and not love His Bride. Oh, unlike Him she is far from perfect. She’s like us, and therefore hard to love at times. Loving the Church is part of how we learn to love like Jesus.He wraps up with intimacy, or sex. We tend to keep Jesus out of our sex lives. We fail to see Jesus as the Creator of our bodies and therefore of sex. He has authority over our sex lives and does regulate them. Sex is intended to strengthen the one flesh union as an expression of love, not self-interest. That shapes how we talk and do sex in marriage.Tying the Knot covers almost all of the essential topics. It is a very readable book and is not verbose. He gets to the point, sometimes a little too quickly.He could have spent a little more time developing Christ as the Creator and Lord of marriage and His supremacy and sufficiency in all things related to life and marriage. But better a book this size than the size of mine. He was able to stay focused and that is helpful for young couples on the road to marriage.I’m surprise that child bearing and rearing is not really covered. I say this since “be fruitful and multiply” is part of the creation mandate (and Noahic covenant and Abrahamic promise), and forms one of the purposes of marriage. We live in a culture where marriage and children are increasingly separated as evidenced by more children being born outside of marriage, and more couples choosing to be childless (a national magazine had this as its cover story a few years ago). It is one of the topics I encourage friends to discuss before they are engaged. If you can’t get on the same page regarding children and how they will be raised there will be many conflicts surrounding those topics. I found this to be a glaring omission.But all together, I thought this was a very good book. I plan to use this book and not the other with the young couple coming for pre-marital counseling this summer. It doesn’t say everything, but what it says it does say well.