Cons

It was hard for me to find anything to critique, so these are not reasons to avoid this book, or even warnings to reject these parts, but more like personal preference or things I would add.

• I’m unsure whether I followed/got the connection to being a wife for the last of the six major sections. The last 5 chapters are about general Christian living. The first of the five did describe your marriage as a way to display the gospel, but the last four felt disconnected to anything wifely. They covered very important topics such as living sacrificially for Christ, doing all things for His glory, how to get your focus on Him instead of yourself, and a chapter on having oil in your lamp like the 5 faithful virgins. Excellent chapters! But they could have been found in any book on Christian living and weren’t strongly tied back to being a wife. Perhaps it’s my current pregnancy brain begging for someone to tell me what 2+2 is (haha) or maybe I’m grasping at straws here trying to do anything but praise this really great book!

• I think chapters 5 and 7 somewhat miss some points and/or nuance which I  would have added

Chapter 5

• Chapter 5 focused on your relationship with God, making sure you have a devotional life, Bible reading plan, how to get it done, things like that. Great topics and advice! Spending time with the Lord and reading the Word is extremely important. Yet, I feel sentiments like on page 53 lack nuance: “Most unhappy wives today do not really have a marriage problem. They have a God problem. Your marriage is not as much about what you do as a wife, but who you do it all for.” There are many happy wives, and have been for thousands of years all over the world, that do not know the One True God at all, but have very happy marriages by instinctively living with, instead of against, the nature of men and women (as designed by God, of course).  If you are a nagging wife, memorizing scripture may not actually help if you cannot identify what you do that is naggy.  Many a wife with a head full of scripture and very regular devotion time have not been trained in being a godly woman or wife and feel as though they are banging their head against a wall. I used to be one of these women. They wonder after each argument, “Why me God!? Why is my marriage so hard when I read my Bible daily and memorize scripture?? I am so spiritual! I deserve better.” They completely fail to see what another set of eyes with years of experience could tell them. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t read a Bible verse about why a husband leaves laundry next to the basket. Of course the Bible tells us not to be contentious women, but so many cannot put two and two together to see ultra-pragmatically how to approach the one hundredth sock on the floor.  In my own marriage experience, I will honestly say that our hardest years of marriage so far were times when I was much more consistent in Bible reading, prayer, worship, and church attendance/activity/fellowship, yet the marriage flows so much more easily now in a season where these things are admittedly not the strongest they have ever been. It was as if the pride and sanctimony of going through “good Christian” motions (and they ARE good motions!) blinded me from seeing the practical ways I was tearing down my own marriage. It took another woman telling me “just stop arguing” for all the Proverbs I had memorized to slap me in the face! This was not because the Word is not sufficient, but because the Lord designed Christians to walk together and help one another in teaching, instruction, admonishment, and encouragement to aid us in daily life.  So, while I don’t directly disagree with anything in this chapter I wanted to add my personal experience on this topic. 

Chapter 7

• Chapter 7 looked at spiritual warfare.  I believe the ideas about what spiritual warfare can look like, and where it can come from, are good but not spelled out quite enough. Spiritual warfare gets talked about a lot without enough application and can leave a lot of Christians with the impression that it’s just anything that just feels yucky. Raining on a good hair day? Spiritual warfare. An attractive woman at work starts complimenting your husband? Spiritual warfare. The kids interrupted your devotion time? Spiritual warfare. 
  
  First, examples like these, which can be 100% true, may not be so helpful if they aren’t. It can take any and all responsibility that rightly belongs to the believer out of the equation. Maybe you actually need to teach your kids to not interrupt your Bible time better, or you need to make it at a time when they are asleep or better entertained. Maybe the kids’ behavior is not the spiritual warfare, but your lack of time management or child training is. Believers are wise to approach each situation not just as a vague attack to quote Bible verses at, but also as an opportunity to examine what habits and behaviors they contributed to the situation as well, because you may never know exactly why something is happening. You can always approach from both fronts. I don’t think the latter was really developed.
  
  Second, many things that are satanically influenced are frequently left out of the list.  A beautiful woman talking to your husband at work, or him tempting you to nag him with his dirty socks lying around are fine examples but consider these that are often “too touchy” of subjects: feminism, humanism, the public school system, media (social, mainstream, or otherwise), the feminization of men, broken families, lack of proper discipleship of men and women, fragmented community/hyper-individualism. These are destroying marriages all over the world but it’s such a widespread and broad list that it’s much harder to tackle than “just smile and pick up the sock, sweetie. You’d miss it if you were a widow.” A lot of these topics can be so difficult to draw out of the scripture, let alone what to actually DO about them, that they are glossed over or forgotten completely (if they are not completely disregarded as falsehoods!). But they are in there. The world we currently live in necessitates that we diligently seek what the Word says about these pervasive and dangerous ideologies and make it our personal mission to guard our marriage against them. Laundry laying around may destroy a marriage if you choose to be really rotten about it, but Satan is a lot more clever than that as well. He loves to sneak things into the very fabric of society that are much harder to notice and attack.

To reiterate, I don’t think anything was told inaccurately in chapters 5 and 7, just that I would personally approach these two sections a bit differently. Still get this book! You will be blessed!