I think the biggest investment that a wife or a husband can make in their spouse is the investment they make in their own souls. Here’s what I mean: If you do get married, all’s rosy and great. You love each other. And time goes by, and you read all kinds of books and you hear a question like that — “How are you investing in your wife?” Investing in my wife? What does that even mean?

I think it is very easy to abstract that from your own soul transformation, so that it becomes a project: “Marriage is a project. Got to read another book. Got to go to another seminar. Got to learn the right love language.” That can be good, but far more important is: Do I go to the Lord and invest in him and say, “God, make me a new person”…

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Every marriage needs a compost pile.

Do you have any idea what a compost pile is? It means you’ve got a really nice green backyard. It’s wonderful. It’s a great place to hang out. And the relationship has pukey, dirty, lousy, no-good stuff in it that neither of you considers to be sin. And you could be wrong on that. You build a compost pile way off in the corner, and you throw that habit of your spouse in the compost pile.

Now, you can camp out by a compost pile and smell the stinky stuff all night long. Or you can pull a curtain around it and have a picnic at the picnic table on the green grass with the woman you married. While all your junk and all her junk is in the compost pile, you both know they’re there, but the smell is bracketed — it’s just cut off. And you both are looking in each other’s eyes and you know very honestly there’s a compost pile back there. “We’re not going to talk about it right now. We’re going to enjoy these grandkids, and we’re going to do this barbecue.”

Behaviors are late things. Early things are soul things: attitudes, feelings, angers, joys. And that’s where the battle is fought — with Jesus, over your Bible — so that when you get up in the morning and go down to the breakfast table after a half an hour with Jesus, coming to terms with your own sin, confessing, you’re able to speak upbuilding things…

Excerpt from audio transcript of What Every Marriage Needs Most by John Piper, founder and teacher, desiringGod.org.