Let's Bust a Recap : This Momentary Marriage

Y'all. We have a lot of books by John Piper. But confession time: I had never finished a single one of them until this week. I read some of Don't Waste Your Life in high school, and I've started Desiring God at least twice (without making it past the first chapter), but for some reason, he's an author I've just kept putting off. 

After reading This Momentary Marriage, I may need to add Piper to the very small list of authors who automatically get a slot on my yearly book lists. FYI: the only three who currently have that honor are C.S. Lewis, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens; and the only two I've actually read yearly with any consistency are Lewis and Shakespeare.

This Momentary Marriage by John Piper was on my very first official book list way back in 2015, but, like I said, I kept putting it off and Piper hasn't made it onto any of my book lists since...until 2020. 

And this book came to me at just the time I needed it. Cody and I celebrated our eighth anniversary this past May, and while I would marry him all over again in a heartbeat, 2020 has been one big ball of crazy and I was extremely blessed and challenged by this reminder that marriage is the doing of God and the meaning of marriage is the display of the covenant-keeping love between Christ and His people. What a sobering thought. That's much bigger than me and Cody and how we feel on any given day.

John Piper has been putting books out almost yearly since the '80s and this particular one was published in 2009. It consists of fifteen chapters, comes in at just under 200 pages, and it is very straightforward. Piper's writing in This Momentary Marriage is clear and if you haven't gotten his point by the end of the book then you weren't paying attention. I was hooked from page one of the foreword by his wife Noël, and I read the book in one week because I deliberately limited myself to two chapters a day so I could absorb it. I easily could have read this book in a day.

Piper not only writes to married couples in this book; two chapters are dedicated to singles and he covers the topic of divorce as well. I truly would recommend this book to anyone. I think it would be helpful no matter what stage of life you're in or no matter how long you've been married. Piper says in his acknowledgements: "I waited forty years to write this book. There have been so many stresses in our marriage that I felt unfit to write about marriage at ten, twenty, or thirty years into it. Now at forty years, I realize we will never have it all together, so it seemed a good time to speak." None of us will ever have it all together this side of Heaven, but reading books like this sure do help along the way.

"As you gave the ring to one another 

and have now received it a second time from the hand of the pastor, 

so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. 

As high as God is above man, 

so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. 

It is not your love that sustains the marriage, 

but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer~