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Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? Paperback – August 4, 2015
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What if God designed marriage to make you holy instead of happy? What if your relationship isn't as much about you and your spouse as it is about you and God?
In Sacred Marriage, bestselling author Gary Thomas uncovers the ways that your marriage can become a doorway to a closer walk with God and with each other. Join over one million others who have already uncovered Thomas's tips for fostering a sacred marriage.
Within the pages of Sacred Marriage, Thomas invites you to see how God can use your relationship with your spouse as a discipline and a motivation to love God more and reflect more of the character of his Son.
In addition to life-changing insights from Scripture, church history, and time-tested wisdom from Christian classics, you'll find practical advice and techniques to make your marriage happier by becoming holier husbands and wives.
In Sacred Marriage, Thomas will give you all of the tools you need to:
- Turn marital struggles into spiritual and personal appreciation
- Love your spouse with a stronger sense of purpose
- Confront your weaknesses and sin in order to grow your relationship with God and with your spouse
- Partner in the spiritual growth and character formation of your spouse
- Transform a tired marriage into a relationship filled with awe and respect
Thomas reveals that sacred marriages teach us to love God and others well by fostering a healthy sex life, a strong prayer life, and a rich spiritual life. God uses our marriages to help us grow in character, in prayer, in worship, and in service--we just have to recognize that the purpose of marriage is holiness, not happiness.
Each copy also includes thought-provoking discussion questions designed to spark conversation between couples and small groups, allowing you to dive deeper into the lessons that Thomas shares in Sacred Marriage.
Join the one million others who have already started on their journey to transforming their relationship with their spouses and with their Creator.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherZondervan
- Publication dateAugust 4, 2015
- Dimensions5.45 x 0.85 x 8.4 inches
- ISBN-100310337372
- ISBN-13978-0310337379
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Who is Gary Thomas?
Gary Thomas seeks to draw people closer to Christ and each other. He is the award-winning author of 20 books that together have sold more than 2 million copies and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He and his wife Lisa have been married for 38 years and they have 3 adult children and 2 grandchildren.
What are Gary's credentials?
Gary holds a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Western Washington University, a master's degree in systematic theology from Regent College, and an honorary doctor of divinity degree from Western Seminary.
From the Publisher
A Note from the Author
This isn’t a book that seeks to tell you how to have a happier marriage. This is a book that looks at how we can use the challenges, joys, struggles, and celebrations of marriage to draw closer to God and to grow in Christian character.
To spiritually benefit from marriage, we have to be honest. We have to look at our disappointments, own up to our ugly attitudes, and confront our selfishness. We also have to rid ourselves of the notion that the difficulties of marriage can be overcome if we simply pray harder or learn a few simple principles. Most of us have discovered that these “simple steps” work only on a superficial level.
Why is this? Because there’s a deeper question: What if God didn’t design marriage to be “easier”? What if God had an end in mind that went beyond our happiness, our comfort, and our desire to be infatuated and happy?
This is a book that looks and points beyond marriage. Spiritual growth is the main theme; marriage is simply the context.
—Gary Thomas
MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD
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“One of the best marriage books we’ve ever read—it’s a classic. Every couple who prizes their faith and their relationship needs to read this incredible book.”—Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott, authors of Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts |
“Thoughtful, deep, and truly impactful. I recommend Sacred Marriage to engaged couples, those who have been married for decades, and everyone in-between.”—Kevin G. Harney, author of Empowered by His Presence and the Organic Outreach series |
“I have personally been blessed and helped by the words in this book that will breathe hope in any relationship.”—Gregory Jantz, PhD, founder of The Center: A Place of Hope |
Sacred Marriage Gift Edition | Devotions for a Sacred Marriage: A Year of Weekly Devotions for Couples | Sacred Marriage Participant's Guide with DVD | Sacred Marriage Bible Study Participant's Guide | Sacred Marriage Video Study DVD | |
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Customer Reviews |
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Price | $16.49$16.49 | $13.49$13.49 | $49.69$49.69 | $9.69$9.69 | $28.70$28.70 |
More Sacred Marriage Resources | The perfect gift for engaged, newlywed, or married couples! This two-in-one book and devotional from bestselling author Gary Thomas helps couples discover how marriage can become a doorway to a closer walk with God and each other. | This devotional based on the bestselling Sacred Marriage book provides 52 weekly devotions offering practical and biblical wisdom for nurturing your marriage as an expression of your love for God. | In this six-session small group Bible study, Sacred Marriage, writer and speaker Gary Thomas invites you to see how God can use marriage as a discipline and a motivation to reflect more of the character of Jesus. | In this six-session small group Bible study (DVD sold separately), Sacred Marriage, writer and speaker Gary Thomas invites you to see how God can use marriage as a discipline and a motivation to reflect more of the character of Jesus. | In this six-session small group study (participant’s guides sold separately), Sacred Marriage, writer and speaker Gary Thomas invites you to see how God can use marriage as a discipline and a motivation to reflect more of the character of Jesus. |
Making Your Marriage a Fortress | Cherish: The One Word That Changes Everything for Your Marriage | Married Sex: A Christian Couple's Guide to Reimagining Your Love Life | Preparing Your Heart for Marriage: Devotions for Engaged Couples | |
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Price | $14.62$14.62 | $15.29$15.29 | $19.58$19.58 | $12.94$12.94 |
Other Exceptional Marriage Books by Gary Thomas | The wisdom and insight every couple needs to keep your marriage together when the trials of life threaten to rip it apart and how you can fortify your marriage ahead of time. | There are a countless number of marriages consisting of two people just going through the motions, but there are real ways this pattern can be reversed: when husbands and wives learn to cherish one another in their everyday actions and words. | A unique, comprehensive guide to sexual intimacy for Christian couples in every season of marriage. | Gary Thomas coaches engaged couples on how to grow closer to the Lord in the days leading up to the wedding as a means of preparing them for all the days after the wedding. |
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Gary Thomas's writing and speaking draw people closer to Christ and closer to others. He is the author of twenty books that together have sold more than two million copies and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. These books include Sacred Marriage, Cherish, Married Sex, and the Gold Medallion-award winning Authentic Faith.
Gary holds a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Western Washington University, a master's degree in systematic theology from Regent College (Vancouver, BC), and an honorary doctor of divinity degree from Western Seminary (Portland, OR). He serves as a teaching pastor at Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sacred Marriage
What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More than to Make Us Happy
By Gary L. ThomasZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2015 Gary L. ThomasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-33737-9
Contents
1. THE GREATEST CHALLENGE IN THE WORLD A Call to Holiness More Than Happiness, 9,2. ROMANTICISM'S RUSE How Marriage Points Us to True Fulfillment, 14,
3. FINDING GOD IN MARRIAGE Marital Analogies Teach Us Truths about God, 28,
4. LEARNING TO LOVE How Marriage Teaches Us to Love, 39,
5. HOLY HONOR Marriage Teaches Us to Respect Others, 51,
6. THE SOUL'S EMBRACE Good Marriage Can Foster Good Prayer, 70,
7. THE CLEANSING OF MARRIAGE How Marriage Exposes Our Sin, 82,
8. SACRED HISTORY Building the Spiritual Discipline of Perseverance, 97,
9. SACRED STRUGGLE Embracing Difficulty in Order to Build Character, 123,
10. FALLING FORWARD Marriage Teaches Us to Forgive, 145,
11. MAKE ME A SERVANT Marriage Can Build in Us a Servant's Heart, 164,
12. SEXUAL SAINTS Marital Sexuality Can Provide Spiritual Insights and Character Development, 182,
13. SACRED PRESENCE How Marriage Can Make Us More Aware of God's Presence, 209,
14. SACRED MISSION Marriage Can Develop Our Spiritual Calling, Mission, and Purpose, 228,
EPILOGUE: THE HOLY COUPLE, 244,
Acknowledgments, 249,
Questions for Discussion and Reflection, 251,
Notes, 265,
CHAPTER 1
THE GREATEST CHALLENGE IN THE WORLD
A Call to Holiness More Than Happiness
By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. Socrates
I'm going to cut him open.
Historians aren't sure who the first physician was who followed through on this thought, but the practice revolutionized medicine. The willingness to cut into a corpse, peel back the skin, pull a scalp off a skull, cut through the bone, and actually remove, examine, and chart the organs that lay within was a crucial first step in finding out how the human body really works.
For thousands of years, physicians had speculated on what went on inside a human body, but there was a reluctance and even an abhorrence to actually dissect a cadaver. Some men refrained out of religious conviction; others just couldn't get over the eeriness of cutting away a human rib cage. While an occasional brave soul ventured inside a dead body, it wasn't until the Renaissance period (roughly the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) that European doctors routinely started to cut people open.
And when they did, former misconceptions collapsed. In the sixteenth century, Andreas Vesalius was granted a ready supply of criminals' corpses, allowing him to definitively contradict assumptions about the human anatomy that had been unquestioned for a thousand years or more. Vesalius's anatomical charts became invaluable, but he couldn't have drawn the charts unless he was first willing to make the cuts.
I want to do a similar thing in this book — with a spiritual twist. We're going to cut open numerous marriages, dissect them, find out what's really going on, and then explore how we can gain spiritual meaning, depth, and growth from the challenges that lie within. We're not after simple answers — three steps to more intimate communication, six steps to a more exciting love life — because this isn't a book that seeks to tell you how to have a happier marriage. This is a book that looks at how we can use the challenges, joys, struggles, and celebrations of marriage to draw closer to God and to grow in Christian character.
We're after what Francis de Sales wrote about in the seventeenth century. Because de Sales was a gifted spiritual director, people often corresponded with him about their spiritual concerns. One woman wrote in great distress, torn because she wanted to get married while a friend was encouraging her to remain single, insisting it would be "more holy" for her to care for her father and then devote herself as a celibate to God after her father died.
De Sales put the troubled young woman at ease, telling her that, far from being a compromise, in one sense, marriage might be the toughest ministry she could ever undertake. "The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other," he wrote. "It is a perpetual exercise of mortification ... In spite of the bitter nature of its juice, you may be able to draw and make the honey of a holy life."
Notice that de Sales talks about the occasionally "bitter nature" of marriage's "juice." To spiritually benefit from marriage, we have to be honest. We have to look at our disappointments, own up to our ugly attitudes, and confront our selfishness. We also have to rid ourselves of the notion that the difficulties of marriage can be overcome if we simply pray harder or learn a few simple principles. Most of us have discovered that these "simple steps" work only on a superficial level. Why is this? Because there's a deeper question that needs to be addressed beyond how we can "improve" our marriage: What if God didn't design marriage to be "easier"? What if God had an end in mind that went beyond our happiness, our comfort, and our desire to be infatuated and happy, as if the world were a perfect place?
What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy? What if, as de Sales hints, we are to accept the "bitter juice" because out of it we may learn to draw the resources we need with which to make "the honey of a holy life"?
This isn't to suggest that happiness and holiness are contradictory. On the contrary, I believe we'll live the happiest, most joy-filled lives when we walk in obedience. John Wesley once boldly proclaimed that it is not possible for a man to be happy who is not also holy, and the way he explains it makes much sense. Who can be truly "happy" while filled with anger, rage, and malice? Who can be happy while nursing resentment or envy? Who can be honestly happy while caught in the sticky compulsion of an insatiable lust or incessant materialism? The glutton may enjoy his food, but he does not enjoy his condition.
So we're not anti-happiness; that would be silly. The problem I'm trying to address is that a "happy marriage" (defined romantically and in terms of pleasant feelings) is too often the endgame of most marriage books (even Christian marriage books). This is a false promise. You won't find happiness at the end of a road named selfishness.
This is a book that looks and points beyond marriage. Spiritual growth is the main theme; marriage is simply the context. Just as celibates use abstinence and religious hermits use isolation, so we can use marriage for the same purpose — to grow in our service, obedience, character, pursuit, and love of God.
For centuries, Christian spirituality was virtually synonymous with celibate spirituality; that is, even married people thought we had to become like monks and nuns to grow in the Lord. We'd have to do the same spiritual exercises, best performed by single people (long periods of prayer that don't allow for child rearing or marital discussion, seasons of fasting that make preparing meals difficult for a family, times of quiet meditation that seem impossible when kids of any age are in the house), rather than seeing how God could use our marriages to help us grow in character, in prayer, in worship, and in service. Rather than develop a spirituality in which marriage serves our pursuit of holiness, the church focused on how closely married people could mimic "single spirituality" without neglecting their family. The family thus became an obstacle to overcome rather than a platform to spiritual growth.
The reason the marriage relationship is often seen as a selfish one is because our motivations for marrying often are selfish. But my desire is to reclaim marriage as one of the most selfless states a Christian can enter. This book sees marriage the way medieval writers saw the monastery: as a setting full of opportunities to foster spiritual growth and service to God.
You've probably already realized there was a purpose for your marriage that went beyond happiness. You might not have chosen the word holiness to express it, but you understood there was a transcendent truth beyond the superficial romance depicted in popular culture. We're going to explore that purpose. We're going to cut open many marriages, find out where the commitment rubs, explore where the poisoned attitudes hide, search out where we are forced to confront our weakness and sin, and learn how to grow through the process.
We'll also look at what Scripture, church history, and the Christian classics can tell us. You'll find that the classics are amazingly relevant and that the past influences the present far more than many people think.
The ultimate purpose of this book is not to make you love your spouse more — although I think that will happen along the way; it's to equip you to love your God more and to help you reflect the character of his Son more precisely. At the very least, you'll have a new appreciation for the person with whom you have embarked on this journey.
I also pray it will help you to love your marriage more, appreciate your marriage more, and inspire you to become even more engaged in your relationship with your spouse. When you realize something is "sacred," far from making it boring, it gives birth to a new reverence, a take-your-breath-away realization that something you may have been taking for granted is far more profound, far more life-giving and life-transforming, than you may ever have realized.
I love marriage, and I love my marriage. I love the fun parts, the easy parts, and the pleasurable parts, but also the difficult parts — the parts that frustrate me but help me understand myself and my spouse on a deeper level; the parts that are painful but that crucify the aspects of me that I hate; the parts that force me to my knees and teach me that I need to learn to love with God's love instead of just trying harder. Marriage has led me to deeper levels of understanding, more pronounced worship, and a sense of fellowship that I never knew existed.
"Sacred" isn't my brand; it's my way of life. And applying it to my marriage has transformed every one of my days. I believe it can do the same for you.
CHAPTER 2ROMANTICISM'S RUSE
How Marriage Points Us to True Fulfillment
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
W. H. Auden
While holiness as a goal of marriage may sound like a radically different view of marriage, the very concept of "romantic love," which is celebrated in movies, songs, and novels, was virtually unknown to the ancients. There were exceptions — one need merely read Song of Songs, for instance — but taken as a whole, the concept that marriage should involve passion and fulfillment and excitement is a relatively recent development on the scale of human history, making its popular entry toward the end of the eleventh century.
This is not to suggest that romance itself or the desire for more romance is necessarily bad; after all, God created the romantic component of our brain chemistry, and good marriages work hard to preserve a sense of romance. But the idea that a marriage can survive on romance alone, or that romantic feelings are more important than any other consideration when choosing a spouse, has wrecked many a marital ship.
Romanticism received a major boost by means of the eighteenth-century Romantic poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake — followed by their successors in literature, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. These poets passionately argued that it was a crime against oneself to marry for any reason other than "love" (which was defined largely by feeling and emotion), and the lives of many of them were parodies of irresponsibility and tragedy.
For example, one of the writers who embraced this romantic notion with fervor was the sensuous novelist D. H. Lawrence, whose motto was "With should and ought I shall have nothing to do!" Lawrence fell in love with Frieda Weekley, a married woman, and sought to woo Frieda away from her husband, as his "love" demanded he do. As part of his less-than-noble designs, Lawrence sent Frieda a note, proclaiming that she was the most wonderful woman in all of England.
Being married with three children and having already suffered a couple of affairs, Mrs. Weekley saw through Lawrence's emotion and coolly replied that it was obvious to her he had not met many Englishwomen.
In her startling and insightful essay on marriage written in the 1940s (titled, interestingly enough, "The Necessary Enemy"), twentieth-century writer Katherine Anne Porter bemoaned how "Romantic Love crept into the marriage bed, very stealthily, by centuries, bringing its absurd notions about love as eternal springtime and marriage as a personal adventure meant to provide personal happiness." The reality of the human condition is such that, according to Porter (and I agree), we must "salvage our fragments of happiness" out of life's inevitable sufferings.
Porter carefully explores the heights and depths of marriage, making the following observations about a young bride:
This very contemporary young woman finds herself facing the oldest and ugliest dilemma of marriage. She is dismayed, horrified, full of guilt and forebodings because she is finding out little by little that she is capable of hating her husband, whom she loves faithfully. She can hate him at times as fiercely and mysteriously, indeed in terribly much the same way, as often she hated her parents, her brothers and sisters, whom she loves, when she was a child ... She thought she had outgrown all this, but here it was again, an element in her own nature she could not control, or feared she could not. She would have to hide from her husband, if she could, the same spot in her feelings she had hidden from her parents, and for the same no doubt disreputable, selfish reason: she wants to keep his love.
With only a romantic view of marriage to fall back on, Porter warns, a young woman may lose her "peace of mind. She is afraid her marriage is going to fail because ... at times she feels a painful hostility toward her husband, and cannot admit its reality because such an admission would damage in her own eyes her view of what love should be."
Romantic love has no elasticity to it. It can never be stretched; it simply shatters. Mature love, the kind demanded of a good marriage, must stretch, as the sinful human condition is such that all of us bear conflicting emotions. "Her hatred is real as her love is real," Porter explains of the young wife. This is the reality of the human heart, the inevitability of two sinful people pledging to live together, with all their faults, for the rest of their lives.
A wedding calls us to our highest and best — in fact, to almost impossible — ideals. It's the way we want to live. But marriage reminds us of the daily reality of living as sinful human beings in a radically broken world. We aspire after love but far too often descend into hate and apathy.
Any mature, spiritually sensitive view of marriage must be built on the foundation of mature love rather than romanticism. But this immediately casts us into a countercultural pursuit.
In his classic work The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis satirically ridicules our culture's obsession with romanticism. The demon Screwtape, a mentor to the demon Wormwood, gloats:
Humans who have not the gift of [sexual abstinence] can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love," and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.
I think most of us who have been married for any substantial length of time realize that the romantic roller coaster of courtship eventually evens out to the terrain of a Midwest interstate — long, flat stretches with an occasional overpass. When this happens, couples respond in different ways. Many will end their relationship and try to re-create the passionate romance with someone else. Other couples will descend into a sort of marital guerrilla warfare as each partner blames the other for personal dissatisfaction or lack of excitement. Some couples decide to simply "get along." Still others may opt to pursue a deeper meaning, a spiritual truth hidden in the enforced intimacy of the marital situation.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Sacred Marriage by Gary L. Thomas. Copyright © 2015 Gary L. Thomas. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Zondervan; Reprint edition (August 4, 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0310337372
- ISBN-13 : 978-0310337379
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.45 x 0.85 x 8.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10 in Christian Marriage (Books)
- #12 in Christian Family & Relationships
- #21 in Marriage
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Gary Thomas is a bestselling author and international speaker whose ministry brings people closer to Christ and closer to others. He unites the study of Scripture, church history, and the Christian classics to foster spiritual growth and deeper relationships. Gary's unique message will help you:
* Embrace the unique way that you interact with God.
* Partner in the spiritual growth and character formation of your spouse.
* Build a closer, grace-based family.
* Enjoy God with a new sense of freedom and delight.
Find out more at: www.garythomas.com
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Our first complaint was the word choices. Because we were reading out loud, we frequently stumbled over the verbose language—many, many times. I don't know how much of an issue this would have been reading silently because maybe we would have just assumed we'd gotten the message where we said the wrong word out loud. I'm not sure. Maybe others didn't have this issue. It could be a matter of speech and the written word being so different.
Our second complaint was that there was no discussion or thought questions to go with the chapter content. Well, that is until we got to the end of the book. Which we didn't know was even there since we were reading on our Kindles. Had we known there actually was a section dedicated to discussion questions at the back of the book, we probably would have made an effort to flip back and forth, but that also would have been annoying. I think it makes more sense to include these at the end of each chapter or section and if the reader wants to skip them then it's still easier to do so.
Overall, we both appreciated the message of Sacred Marriage. The important takeaways for us both were that everything in our marriage can be used to draw us closer to God. We can use our spouse's failings to view them in comparison to God--He will never fail us. We can use those same failings to grow in our love--not a selfish love that always seeks to be fulfilled, but in a self-sacrificial love that always seeks to fulfill others. We can use our own failings to remind ourselves that just as we are human and imperfect, our spouse is the same. Just as we fail and fall short, our spouse does too. And just as much as we want forgiveness and a pardon for our mistakes, our spouse does too. We can use marriage as a refiner's fire to become more like God, to love more like God, and to forgive more like God.
The author uses an example (and I'm totally paraphrasing the story) of a time when his wife wasn't doing something that he wanted her to do. I can't remember what the task was so let's say it's to make the bed. And she repeatedly doesn't do this task. He gets so annoyed. One day she tells him that she's going to love him forever, and he frustratedly responds that he doesn't need her to love him forever, he needs her to love him for twenty-seven seconds. Twenty-seven seconds is all the time it takes to do the task she daily neglects to do. And she basically tells him that maybe he needs to love her for the twenty-seven seconds it takes him to do the task himself. I loved this example. So often we latch onto these little things that our spouse isn't doing, and we think to ourselves "If he/she loved me they would do this" or "he/she isn't thinking about me at all at this moment that they choose not to do/to do this task". When in reality, we're also stuck in the moment of thinking about ourselves and not just doing whatever the task is ourselves. Many times, the task only takes us twenty-seven seconds, or thereabout. We can't keep score in our marriage. Doing so helps no one and hurts everyone.
Here are too many of my favorite quotes:
-...in one sense, marriage might be the toughest ministry she could ever undertake. "The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other," he wrote. "It is a perpetual exercise of mortification..."
-To spiritually benefit from marriage, we have to be honest. We have to look at our disappointments, own up to our ugly attitudes, and confront our selfishness.
-Who can be truly "happy" while filled with anger, rage, and malice? Who can be happy while nursing resentment or envy? Who can be honestly happy while caught in a sticky compulsion of an insatiable lust or incessant materialism? The glutton may enjoy his food, but he does not enjoy his condition.
-You won't find happiness at the end of a road named selfishness.
-I also pray it will help you to love your marriage more, appreciate your marriage more, and inspire you to become even more engaged in your relationship with your spouse. When you realize something is "sacred," far from making it boring, it gives birth to a new reverence, a take-your-breath-away realization that something you may have been taking for granted is far more profound, far more life-giving and life-transforming, than you may have ever realized. I love marriage, and I love my marriage. I love the fun parts, the easy parts, and the pleasurable parts, but also the difficult parts--the parts that frustrate me but help me understand myself and my spouse on a deeper level; the parts that are painful but that crucify the aspects of me that I hate; the parts that force me to my knees and teach me that I need to learn to love with God's love instead of just trying harder. Marriage has led me to deeper levels of understanding, more pronounced worship, and a sense of fellowship that I never knew existed.
-God didn't design marriage to compete with himself but to point us to himself.
-Honor not expressed is not honor.
-Contempt is born when we fixate on our spouse's weaknesses. Every spouse has these sore points. If you want to find them, without a doubt you will. If you want to obsess about them, they will grow--but you won't.
-Couples don't fall out of love so much as they fall out of repentance.
-God doesn't protect Christians from their problems--he helps them walk victoriously through their problems.
-When we're most tired, most worn-out, and feeling more sorry for ourselves than we ever have before, we have the opportunity to confront feelings of self-pity by getting up and serving our mate.
-"Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power" (John 13:3), but instead of acting like a spiteful tyrant, Jesus got up from the meal and washed his disciples' feet. Instead of using his power to pout, chastise, or gloat, Jesus uses it to serve.
-But when we have power over another--particularly power in an area where someone feels so vulnerable and needy and where they can go nowhere else to be served--and then use that power irresponsibly, inappropriately, and maliciously, we become more like Satan, who loves to manipulate us in our weakness rather than like God, who serves us in our weakness.
-And yet, as we travel into marriage, there usually comes a moment when we wonder, "Is this really as good as it gets? Is this really all there is?" Instead of being turned away from our spouse when this disillusionment sets in, we can be turned toward God. It can remind us that even our best choice of a human partner isn't enough to satisfy us. It won't help us to change our emotional focus, recognizing we can never receive all the love we need and desire from fellow humans. Instead of realizing that our true needs can be ultimately met only in and by God, some people keep trying to find their fulfillment in new relationships, thinking that what they really need is just to find "the right person," which, when translated, usually means a new person. Christianity does not direct us to focus on finding the right person; it calls us to become the right person. Our happiness is not determined by what is around us, but rather by how we deal with what is around us.
-We allow marriage to point beyond itself when we accept two central missions: becoming the people God created us to be, and doing the work God has given us to do. If we embrace--not just accept, but actively embrace--these two missions, we will have a full life, a rich life, a meaningful life, and a successful life. The irony is, we will probably also have a happy marriage, but that will come as a blessed by-product of putting everything else in order.
Gary Thomas tells you the hard truths that you need to hear but you might not accept if they were coming from someone you knew. The distance of someone not intimately involved in your marriage helps you to see that this person is impartial with their advice and knowledge. Gary Thomas isn't attacking you, your flaws, your spouse, their flaws, or your relationship with God. He is simply presenting the information you most need to hear. And I highly suggest reading this with your partner as reading it first and then trying to share the information with them might come off as preachy. Yet, I know that not all spouses are interested in reading this kind of content or even in improving themselves or their marriage. If that's the case, then read this alone and put into practice all that you can on your side.
Sacred Marriage's message was enough to give this book 5 Stars. The mirror it placed in front of me to confront my own selfishness and self-centeredness that isn't Christ-like and won't serve my marriage is enough to deserve the rating. I do think the vocabulary used and sentence structure was a bit much. It tripped both my husband and myself up many times. And I hope if they revise this book that the discussion questions will be included at the end of each chapter versus the end of the book. Have you read Sacred Marriage? What did you think? Let me know!
*Finished this book and wrote this review back in February 2023, but review is just now going up due to scheduling.
Top reviews from other countries
It has opened my mind and heart to important topics and on how marriage reveals what really is in our hearts, which staying single would not. In marriage we live a reality that is harder than any other and if we follow God instrucions, in His Word, not only will we find peace and happiness even during struggles but we will become holier every day more. God will be able to work in our hearts to make us better persons, will work on our selfishness, then we will want to only give and we will find that it is better to give than to receive.
So difficult to express what a blessing this book has been to me and still is as I go back to it.