Your Grace-Filled Guide to Relationships

It’s hard, sometimes, to get over that thing your husband said weeks ago; or to resolve that tension with your colleague at work; or to fix a lifelong friendship that’s taken a bad turn. The biggest problem with relationships is they always seem to involve sinners–including ourselves. So how can we form strong, resilient bonds with people who, like us, are bound to mess up?

Thankfully, it’s not all on us. Through stories and biblical teaching, Jessica Thompson helps us move beyond trying to fix the people we interact with, and shows us a better way. Though our relationships may be marred by tension and frustration, because we are welcomed and known by Christ, they don’t have to stay that way.

Nothing changes the way we relate to others more than knowing how God relates to us. Knowing how God loves us and forgives us and is gracious and merciful toward us and forbears with us inevitably affects the way we think about other people. My good friend Jessica Thompson has written a book that articulates who God is for us and then shows how that changes the way we are toward others. Thank you, Jessica, for reminding me that God always meets my mess with his mercy and my failure with his forgiveness. Knowing this makes me want to love God and others. –Tullian Tchividjian, founder of Liberate and author of One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World

We need grace in all our relationships. So much loneliness, feeling betrayed, alienation, anger, vengeance, sadness, grief find their roots in relational conflict. Jessica humbly guides us to see that only by being a recipient of God’s grace can we be agents of grace in our relationships. She does this with humor, honesty, and confession from her own experience, not with advice as a relational guru. –Justin S. Holcomb, Episcopal priest, seminary professor, and author of On the Grace of God

Everyday Grace is for all who have struggled to accept their children and honor their parents and initiate with their neighbors and forgive their spouses and respect their bosses and celebrate their rivals. But it is not filled with practical tips that would trivialize the difficulty of these things. Nor is it a book of relational psychology that would strategize a resolution to these things. Instead, it is filled with the Scriptures that speak to these things–helping us to rest in Christ’s covering of all our relational failure and inviting us to change by the power of the Holy Spirit. –Nancy Guthrie, Bible teacher and author

Relational paradise was lost when our first parents fell into sin. Our desire for change in this area is anywhere between cautiously optimistic and downright cynical. What I enjoy about Everyday Grace is that Thompson simply cannot get over the one hope for true reconciliation: God, in Christ, has befriended us. –Gloria Furman, author of Glimpses of Grace and Treasuring Christ When Your Hands Are Full

Relationships are hard. We know this. Jessica Thompson knows this too and shares how she fights to take her gaze off herself and onto the only one who can help our broken relationships–Jesus. Her method doesn’t come from a list of ways to implement change; rather, she focuses on the gospel that transforms hearts and minds. Be encouraged by the good news as you read Everyday Grace, for it is the gospel that is our only Hope for our relationship problem. –Trillia Newbell, author of Fear and Faith: Finding the Peace Your Heart Craves and United: Captured by God’s Vision for Diversity