Choose a stronger or calmer visual experience. The content stays the same.
A book by Henk Kruger · Marriage Rescue 911
How to Save
Your Marriage
When you have tried everything and nothing seems to work, your story may not be over.
Written from our own journey through a marriage that came frighteningly close to divorce, this book brings together real-life experience, biblical wisdom and practical relationship skills. It helps you understand what is happening beneath the conflict – and what you can begin doing differently.
For the marriage you are in
When marriage begins to feel impossible
Every marriage faces storms. But when the dark clouds linger longer than expected, questions begin creeping in that you never imagined asking when you walked down the aisle. Did I make the right choice? Is this ever going to change? Can this marriage still be saved?
Perhaps trust has been shattered by betrayal. Perhaps years of the same arguments have left both of you exhausted. You may still share a home and a life, yet feel miles apart, with little of the warmth or intimacy you once knew. Or you may be staying together because of faith, children or necessity while privately wondering whether joy will ever return.
How to Save Your Marriage was written for that place. It looks beneath the conflict to the wounds, patterns and missing skills that keep a marriage stuck, and explores what healing and change can require.
Don’t mistake how impossible it feels for proof that nothing can change.
Understanding. Healing. Practical change.
What this book
will help you do
Break destructive patterns
Recognise the habits and reactions that repeatedly undermine your marriage, and learn practical ways to respond differently when the same pressure returns.
Identify root causes
Look beneath the latest argument to understand the conflict, reactions and pain that keep resurfacing. Getting to the roots gives you somewhere more useful to begin.
Rebuild trust
Explore what rebuilding trust involves when betrayal or deep hurt has damaged it, and why the way you treat each other matters beyond the words you say.
Heal and reconnect
Address the wounds that make closeness difficult, and develop the relationship skills that help you move towards connection rather than merely learning to coexist.
Rediscover God’s purpose for your marriage
Bring biblical wisdom to the places where disappointment and pain have obscured your sense of purpose, and consider what it means to live that wisdom within your marriage.
Lived experience. Biblical wisdom. Practical skills.
A different kind of marriage book
There is a place couples reach where the familiar advice no longer seems enough. This book was written with that place in mind, bringing lived experience into conversation with biblical wisdom and the practical skills a relationship needs when it is under strain.
Its approach is fresh and sometimes unorthodox, willing to ask difficult questions about the roots of conflict, emotional wounds and the patterns we bring into marriage. Understanding those patterns is part of the work; learning how to act differently, especially when you are hurt or frustrated, is part of it too.
Why I wrote it
It began inside
our own marriage.
How to Save Your Marriage grew out of years of trying to understand what had gone wrong in our own marriage, what eventually changed, what we had to learn and what we wished we had understood much earlier.
We wanted to use what we had learned through failure, pain and restoration to help people who felt as stuck as we once did.
Read our storyOne idea from the book
What still occupies your territory?
One of the pictures used in How to Save Your Marriage comes from Israel’s journey towards the Promised Land. Reaching the land did not mean there were no battles left to fight. There were still territories to possess and giants to confront.
The book uses that picture to consider different areas of our lives. Your career may be thriving while unresolved hurt governs how you react at home. You may love your children deeply and still find that parenting exposes triggers you never knew were there. Different territories can have different giants.
Learning to rule and reign here means taking responsibility for your own life and its problems, with wisdom from God – never domination over your spouse or children. The abridged passage from Chapter 1 below explores this one framework from the book.
Read a sample
Chapter 1 – Embrace Your Destiny
Abridged extract from How to Save Your Marriage
Now, think again of your life as a piece of land where you are destined to rule and reign as a king. Envision each facet of your existence – be it your career, finances, hobbies, health, sexuality and sex life, your relationships and your marriage, your parental responsibilities and so on – as distinct territories within this domain. Post your salvation, the combination of these spheres constitutes the Promised Land which God wants you to inhabit and reign over.
Whether the focus is your finances, health, relationships with other people, your marriage, or intimacy in your marriage, and so on, there might be formidable challenges akin to giants on your land. These challenges may very well be orchestrated by adversaries that want to hinder you from living in total victory. Remember, Ephesians 6:12 (opens in a new tab) explains that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and rulers of darkness.
Even so, God is counting on you to slay and dispossess every giant that is preventing you from ruling in any part of your land, in Jesus’ name.
The important point to realise is that as long as you have not dispossessed the giants, you are not the ruler of your own land. To dispossess them you are not alone, of course, and God wants to help you every step of the way – just like He helped Joshua when they possessed their Promised Land.
It might be that you are already in control of some areas of your land, like your finances or your career. However, just like God told Joshua to dispossess every giant and to take control of the entire land, God wants you to have victory in all spheres and aspects of your life as well.
This includes your marriage.
Like the Israelites who had an assignment from God to slay the giants and to dispossess them from the land, as Christians we are also on an assignment from God to rule as kings in every sphere of our lives. If you are struggling in your marriage, it means there are giants that still need to be slain, and saving your marriage is your assignment from God.
If you wonder where the giants came from, consider that Proverbs 28:2 (opens in a new tab) says that “when a land does wrong, it has many princes, but when the ruler is a man of understanding and knowledge, its stability endures.”
The King James Version puts it this way:
“For the transgression of a land many are the princes thereof: but by a man of understanding and knowledge the state thereof shall be prolonged.”
As we can see, the Bible says that because of the transgression of the land, there are many other rulers on that land.
All have sinned. All have transgressed.
Our forefathers have sinned and transgressed.
Because of this, the “land” which is supposed to be yours may have princes or giants that still need to be dispossessed – wicked spiritual forces of darkness who want to control you, oppress you, and destroy you. See John 10:10 (opens in a new tab).
Notwithstanding any challenges you might have with regards to your own ability to handle conflict situations or your own level of maturity, from a spiritual perspective this is where the real battle lies.
Furthermore, the giants or princes on your land might not be that easily dispossessed. This is why the Bible places an emphasis on the importance of getting knowledge, wisdom and understanding for your life.
“Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.”
If you think of yourself as land with different territories over which you must rule, then understanding and wisdom is what you need to get victory in your marriage as well.
Knowledge and then understanding are often steps in the process of gaining deeper insight and making wise decisions that will ultimately lead to victory. Knowledge refers to the accumulation of facts and information, and it is the basic awareness or familiarity with a subject. Understanding takes it a step further, where you comprehend how those facts relate to each other.
Subsequently, wisdom is then the practical application of both knowledge and understanding in real-life situations. It involves using what you know and comprehend, or what you have learned through experience, to make sound judgments or decisions.
For instance, imagine a situation where you notice your spouse is visibly upset about something. You have the knowledge that they are being emotional and frustrated, and quickly recognise that what the situation requires is for them to calm down. In all sincerity you may hope to bring about this change by telling them they need to “calm down.” However, anyone with understanding should know that telling your spouse to calm down in the heat of the moment will likely escalate their emotions rather than soothe them. Wisdom is to understand that people tend to feel invalidated when they’re told to calm down, especially when they’re already overwhelmed.
Approaching the situation with wisdom means choosing a more thoughtful and empathetic response. Instead of directly addressing their emotional state, you might gently acknowledge their feelings, saying something like, “I can see you’re really upset, and I want to understand what’s going on.” This approach invites them to express their emotions without feeling dismissed.
If you understand why they are upset, you might acknowledge the situation by saying something like, “I understand there is a lot going on here, but let’s talk about it and see how we can get through this together.”
By creating a safe space for them to talk, and by acknowledging their feelings and emotions, you help them process their feelings which, in most cases, should cause them to calm down. Thus, you have wisely achieved the objective of getting them to calm down, where the wrong approach might have escalated the situation instead.
As Joshua was tasked with leading Israel into the Promised Land and dispossessing the giants who dwelled there, Deuteronomy 34:9 (opens in a new tab) shows us that Joshua was filled with the spirit of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him, equipping him for the daunting task ahead.
Similarly, to dispossess the giants and to get the breakthrough you need in your marriage, you need to trust God for understanding and wisdom in the areas where you are failing… especially when you have tried so much but nothing seems to have worked so far.
Continue reading
How to Save Your Marriage
The journey continues in the full book.
Buy on Amazon (opens in a new tab)