Study Guides
Marriage & Relationships
Build stronger marriages and healthier relationships through honest group discussion. These guides tackle communication, boundaries, conflict, and what it looks like to love well.
Love Does
by Bob Goff
Bob Goff's Love Does is not a theology textbook or a self-help manual — it's a collection of wild, funny, and deeply moving stories from a life lived with reckless, action-oriented love. Bob's central thesis is deceptively simple: love is not merely a feeling or a set of beliefs; love is something you do. Through tales of sailing the Pacific on a crate of canned meat, sitting on a bench outside a law school dean's office for seven days, eating ice cream with world leaders, and fighting for justice in Uganda, Bob argues that faith becomes real the moment it gets off the couch and into the world. Each chapter is a story, and each story is an invitation to stop merely admiring Jesus from a safe distance and start following Him into adventure.
View Discussion GuideThe 5 Love Languages
by Gary Chapman
Gary Chapman's The 5 Love Languages: Singles Edition takes his landmark framework — the idea that each person gives and receives love through one of five primary "languages" (Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch) — and applies it directly to the world of single adults. Whether you are single by choice, by circumstance, or by season, Chapman argues that understanding your own love language and the love languages of the people around you will transform every significant relationship in your life: friendships, family ties, coworker connections, and romantic relationships. The book's central thesis is that emotional love tanks run on the fuel of a specific love language, and that most relational breakdown happens not from a lack of love but from a failure to speak the right language.
View Discussion GuideLove and Respect
by Emerson Eggerichs
Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs is built around one foundational insight drawn from Ephesians 5:33: wives need love and husbands need respect — and when couples fail to meet these core needs, they spin into what Eggerichs calls the "Crazy Cycle." The book's thesis is both simple and revolutionary: a wife's greatest need is to feel unconditionally loved, and a husband's greatest need is to feel unconditionally respected. Neither need is more important than the other, and each spouse holds the key to breaking the Crazy Cycle by choosing to meet their partner's need regardless of whether their own need is currently being met. Eggerichs unpacks this through three major sections — the Crazy Cycle, the Energizing Cycle, and the Rewarded Cycle — offering couples a practical and biblically grounded framework for transforming their marriages.
View Discussion GuideSacred Marriage
by Gary Thomas
Gary Thomas opens Sacred Marriage with a question that reframes everything: "What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?" That single question is the engine of the entire book. Thomas argues that marriage is not primarily a romantic arrangement for personal fulfillment — it is a spiritual discipline, as rigorous and transforming as fasting, prayer, or solitude. Every frustration, every moment of tenderness, every season of boredom or passion in a marriage is raw material in God's hands for shaping us into the image of his Son. Sacred Marriage does not promise a better marriage by the time you finish it; it promises a better you — and a richer, more honest relationship with God.
View Discussion GuideThe Meaning of Marriage
by Timothy Keller
Timothy Keller's The Meaning of Marriage (co-written with his wife Kathy Keller) is one of the most theologically rich and practically honest books about Christian marriage written in a generation. Drawing on decades of pastoral ministry in New York City, Keller argues that the Western cultural narrative about marriage — that it exists primarily to fulfill our individual emotional needs — is both deeply attractive and profoundly broken. Against that story, Keller sets the biblical vision: marriage is a covenant relationship that mirrors Christ's sacrificial, permanent love for the church, and it is precisely this "hard work" of covenant love that forges the deep friendship, intimacy, and joy that everyone wants from marriage. The book does not promise an easy path, but it promises a true and beautiful one.
View Discussion GuideBoundaries
by Henry Cloud
In Boundaries, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend tackle one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Christian life: the idea that loving others well sometimes requires saying no. Drawing on Scripture, psychology, and decades of counseling experience, the authors argue that a "boundary" is a personal property line — a marker that defines where you end and someone else begins. Far from being selfish, they show that healthy limits are essential to love, responsibility, and spiritual maturity. The book walks readers through why so many Christians struggle to set boundaries, what the Bible actually teaches about personal responsibility, and how to apply these principles across every major relationship in life: parents, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, and even oneself.
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