Sacred Marriage

Excellent, excellent book! ( )

"What if god designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?"
Thomas is from a Catholic background. This is an interesting proposal. Each chapter is about a different aspect of holiness. It seems to be written with men in mind. Chapter titles:

1. Greatest challenge in the world: a call to holiness more than happiness
2. Finding God in marriage: marital analogies teach us truths about God.
3. Learning to love: marriage teaches us to love
4. Holy honor: marriage teaches us to respect others (particularly our spouse)
5. Soul's embrace: good marriage can foster good prayer
6. Cleansing of marriage: how marriage exposes our sin
7. Sacred history: building the spiritual discipline of perseverance
8. Sacred struggle: embracing difficulty in order to build character
9. Falling forward: marriage teaches us to forgive
10. Make me a servant: marriage can build in us a servant's heart
11. Sexual saints: marital sexuality can provide spiritual insights and character development
12. Sacred presence: how marriage can make us more aware of God's presence
13. Sacred mission: marriage can develop our spiritual calling, mission, and purpose

Quotes from the book:
Romantic love has no elasticity to it. It can never be stretched; it simply shatters. There is much in Christian history that has unofficially considered married believers to be second-class Christians who compromised their integrity. Any situation that calls me to confront my selfishness has enormous spiritual value. if the purpose of marriage was simply to enjoy an infatuation and make me happy, then I'd have to get a new marriage every two or three years. The ultimate purpose of this book is not to make you love your spouse more. It's to equip you to love your God more. He planted marriage among humans as yet another signpost pointing to his own eternal, spiritual existence. Marriage creates a climate where this love is put to the greatest test. The problem is that love must be acquired. It must be chased after, aspired to, and practiced. A man who says "I've never loved you" is a man who is saying essentially this: "I've never acted like a Christian." It's easy to love God because God doesn't smell, have bad breath, or reward kindness with evil like humans. Can it mean, then, that if my wife is unhappy, I'm failing God? Contempt is conceived with expectations. Respect is conceived with expressions of gratitude. 1 Peter 3:7 Peter tells us that we should improve our marriages so that we can improve our prayer lives. Dissension is a major prayer-killer. The institution of marriage is designed to force us to become reconcilers. That's the only way we'll survive spiritually. What marriage has done for me is hold up a mirror to my sin. Don't give in to the temptation to resent your partner as your own weaknesses are revealed. Biblically speaking you can't swap your spouse for someone else. The mature response, is not to leave but to change ourselves. We live in a nation of quitters. Today you can virtually define marriage with perseverance or the maintenance of a long-term relationship. When you divorce your spouse, you have no idea what the future hold for him or her. If you're reading this after you've gone through a divorce, you serve no one, least of all God, by becoming fixated on something you can't now undo. That's what forgiveness and grace are for, a fresh start, a new beginning. By remaining faithful in the midst of unfaithfulness (being divorced), her eyes were opened to God's presence in a new way. By remaining faithful to an unfaithful husband, she demonstrated the truth of a God who remains faithful to an unfaithful people (like us). This tendency to avoid difficulty is a grave spiritual failing that can and often does keep us in Christian infancy. Strength comes from facing the struggle head-on, not when we run from it. A good marriage is not something you find, it's something you work for. Marriage can never remove the trials. But even difficult marriages to difficult men can give women the strength to become the people God created them to be. The opposite of biblical love isn't hate, it's apathy. Many men don't realize the damage they do simply by remaining silent. These are not profiles in courage; they are monuments of male shame. Marriage presumes the gift of self. The absence of conflict demonstrates that either the relationship isn't important enough to fight over or that both individuals are too insecure to risk disagreement. Glossing over disagreements and sinful attitudes and behaviors isn't fellowship; it's polite pretending. I believe one of marriage's primary purposes is to teach us how to forgive. Forgiveness is so unnatural an act that it takes practice to perfect. In an arranged marriage, sex is something he expects to receive, not something he plans to give. Marriage creates a situation in which our desire to be served and coddled can be replaced with a more noble desire to serve others. The vast majority of people do not enter marriage with a view to becoming a servant. God is always worthy of being obeyed, and God calls me to serve my spouse. Most of us are introduced to sex in shameful ways. Sex cannot pay spiritual dividends if its currency is shrouded in unfounded and illegitimate guilt. Marriage provides a context that encourages spiritual growth by moving us to value character, virtue, and godliness over against an idealized physical form. A godly marriage shapes our view of beauty to focus on internal qualities. Continuing to give your body to your spouse even when you believe it constitutes damaged goods can be tremendously rewarding spiritually. Sex may be God's way of calling us to connect with each other. We can learn to use the sex drive to groom our character. Communication calls us our of ourselves. Becoming a more mature person is just as honoring to God as is doing the right things. ( )

There was quite a bit of good material in the book. However, the author's continued focus on mystical / contemplative Christianity was a somewhat large distraction for me. ( )

This is another great book by Gary Thomas. I recently finished Sacred Parenting and the Sacred Parenting bible study. I read this book in preperation for the bible study that goes with it. After finishing this book I am all the more eager to do the bible study at church! Gary Thomas does an excellent job of addressing the issue of marriage from a very practical and biblical point. It is easy to relate to the illustrations. This book is not a "how to" book on marriage but rather a book that points to the fact that marriage is designed by God and is essentially for God and the deepening of a relationship with God. As this personal relationship deepens so does the marriage and it also is fortified and strengthened by this personal relationship. God is a God of love and that is what marriage is all about. To better understand this one must seek out God on a personal level. This book is an excellent book to be read with your spouse, however, it is also worth reading even if your spouse does not wish to read it with you. Be challenged to apply God's word to your every day life.

Thank you Zondervan for providing this review copy. ( )

So why would the unmarried girl want to read a book about marriage? Well, my recently married friend Brittney was reading it in a couples Bible study. She said thought was helpful for married people, but she really wanted to give it to all her unmarried friends because she thought it would set up some more realistic expectations for marriage (what, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns?). And seeing as most of our single friends would tell her where she could kindly stick the book, she thought I would be more open to it since I’m in a relationship and not riding the Single Train right now.

And seeing as how I would, in fact, like to be married one day, I told her I’d give it a shot.

Anywhatzit, I think the premise of this book is applicable to so much more than a marriage, although it probably seen most sharply within matrimony. (My pastor always said if you want to look like Jesus, get married. No one will point out the ways you don’t look like Jesus more than your spouse!) If we take a look at the relationships in our lives, none of which are perfect and all of which cause us some sort of problems, we can use the experiences from those relationships to shape ourselves into looking more like Christ. When all we want to do is lash out/retreat/eat a cake, we can “what would Jesus do” the situation and try and act accordingly. I think it also sets up some realistic expectations for marriage. If we expect that the primary reason for marriage is happiness, we’ll cut bait and run when things get difficult. But God is a God of commitment and constancy and a deep abiding love, so we should strive for that as well in our marriages (and other relationships). Quite a bit of good stuff in here!

Read my full review here: http://letseatgrandpa.com/2011/02/25/book-review-14-sacred-marriage-by-gary-thom... ( )