Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash

1. Our family mirrors to the outside world the kind of person we want others to see us to be. If something is away with our family, we are afraid that people will conclude that something is badly wrong with us (9).
2. Being a part of a family – whatever the part, and whatever the family – is essential to our flourishing as people (19).
3. Our family stories demonstrate, from the very beginning of our existences that we are part of a plotline, but that plotline can often seem confused and mysterious and unseen to us. We know this, though. We know that God is just and will call every evil to account (41).
4. The church is not a collection of families. The church is a family. We are not “family friendly”; we are family (60).
5. A husband’s leadership is about a special accountability for sabotaging his own wants and appetites with a forward-looking plan for the best interest of his wife and children (89).
6. Concerning the “one-flesh union between a husband and a wife Moore writes, “the more a husband and wife are sanctified together in the Word, the more they, like the nervous system and limbs and organs of a human body, will move and operate smoothly, effortlessly, holistically. In so doing, the marriage will point away from itself, toward the blueprint after which it was modeled, the gospel union of Christ and the church” (95).
7. Everyone comes into a marriage with certain points of strength and vulnerability. Part of what it means to actively love each other is to know what these things are and to work to shore them up (117).
8. A Christian vision of life is one of genuine living sacrifice, not a series of self-absorbed transactions. In order to gain one’s life, one must really lay it down. This is the word of the cross, and the cross is to shape our sex lives as much as anything else (133).
9. A Christian vision of sexuality can actually make sex more satisfying, not less, by dethroning sexuality from its place of ultimacy (154).
10. Those who know their marriage is in trouble are the ones who can fight to save it (179).
11. Every human being is unique, with unique gifts, weak points, callings, besetting sins, personality types, and so on. One of the reasons parents are sometimes frustrated with their children is that the children are not mere copies of their parents, with the same tendencies, hopes, aspirations, and interests (205).
12. A Christian vision of parenting calls us away both from passivity and from domineering (233).
13. Often the divisiveness that happens within extended families is about conflicting spiritual worldviews, but occasionally the divisiveness is not about an unbelieving family member persecuting a Christian, but rather because a Christian decides to go ahead and, at the family table, sort the wheat from the weeds right now, rather than, as Jesus told us, waiting for Judgment Day (Matt. 13:29-30) (244).
14. Family is not the gospel. If you think that family is the source of ultimate meaning in your life, then you will expect your family to make you happy, to live up to your expectations (295).
15. When you do not need to be your family’s Messiah, or they yours, then you can pour yourself out for those God has placed around you (295).

To purchase Russell Moore’s book go here.