Product Description

Starting with the discovery that the goal of marriage goes beyond personal happiness, writer and speaker Gary Thomas invites readers to see how God can use marriage as a discipline and a motivation to love him more and reflect more of the character of his Son.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11241 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780310242826
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From the Back Cover
Your marriage is more than a sacred covenant with another person. It is a spiritual discipline designed to help you know God better, trust him more fully, and love him more deeply.

Scores of books have been written that offer guidance for building the marriage of your dreams. But what if God’s primary intent for your marriage isn’t to make you happy . . . but holy? And what if your relationship isn’t as much about you and your spouse as it is about you and God?

Everything about your marriage--everything--is filled with prophetic potential, with the capacity for discovering and revealing Christ’s character. The respect you accord your partner; the forgiveness you humbly seek and graciously extend; the ecstasy, awe, and sheer fun of lovemaking; the history you and your spouse build with one another--in these and other facets of your marriage, Sacred Marriage uncovers the mystery of God’s overarching purpose.

This book may very well alter profoundly the contours of your marriage. It will most certainly change you. Because whether it is delightful or difficult, your marriage can become a doorway to a closer walk with God, and to a spiritual integrity that, like salt, seasons the world around you with the savor of Christ.

About the Author
Gary Thomas is a writer and speaker whose fresh approach to the spirituality of family life is changing the way Christians look at marriage and parenting. As an adjunct faculty member at Western Seminary (Portland, OR), his focus is on spiritual formation—specifically, how we can integrate Scripture, church history, and the wisdom of the Christian classics into modern experience. Gary has written over 100 published articles in most of the major Christian magazines, including Christianity Today, Decision, Moody, Marriage Partnership, New Man, Discipleship Journal, Charisma, and many others. His many books have been translated into several languages and include the Gold Medallion Award-winning Authentic Faith, Sacred Parenting, Sacred Marriage, and Sacred Pathways. He has appeared on numerous national radio and television programs, including Focus on the Family and Family Life Today. Gary’s speaking ministry has led him to speak in forty-eight of the fifty states, and in four different countries.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sacred Marriage Copyright © 2000 by Gary L. Thomas Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Gary, 1961- Sacred Marriage: what if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy / Gary Thomas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-10: 0-310-24282-7 (softcover) ISBN-13: 978-0-310-24282-6 1. Spouses—Religious life. 2. Marriage—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Spiritual life—Christianity. I. Title. BV4596.M3 T46 2000 248.4-dc 21 99-053471 All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Interior design by Korina Kelley Printed in the United States of America 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 • 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 ONE 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 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 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 the sixteenth century) 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 cut. 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 a great Christian writer, 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 very much wanted to get married while a friend was encouraging her to remain single, insisting that 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. . . . From this thyme plant, in spite of the bitter nature of its juice, you may be able to draw and make the honey of a holy life.”1 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”? Romanticism’s Ruse If this sounds like a radically different view of marriage, it’s important to remember that the very concept of “romantic love,” which is so celebrated in movies, songs, and cheap paperbacks, was virtually unknown to the ancients. There were exceptions—one need merely read the 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.2 C. S. Lewis—whose marriage to an ailing woman was seen as somewhat “odd” by many of his contemporaries—explained that such a monumental shift in cultural thought as the development of romantic love is “very rare—there are perhaps three or four on record—but I believe that they occur, and that this [romantic love] is one of them.”3 This is not to suggest that romance itself or the desire for more romance is necessarily bad; 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 eighteenthcentury 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. 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.

Customer Reviews

The best marriage book ever written...
Admittedly, I haven't read every marriage book ever written, so the title of this review is probably overstating the case. However, I have read a number of marriage books (including some more popular ones like "The Five Love Languages" and "Fit To Be Tied," which are also solid and worth reading), and this is the cream of the crop.

The overarching theme of the book is explicated clearly in its subtitle, that marriage is primarily a means of God drawing us to holiness rather than an instrument used to bring about our own happiness. This concept seems to cast a somewhat melancholy vision for marriage as a medium for unhappy relationships, and many of the other folks with whom we read the book were initially disheartened by that premise. However, after giving Thomas some time to flesh out this idea, they came around to appreciate the heart of his message.

What I love most about "Sacred Marriage" is the concept of marriage as a spiritual discipline. Just like Richard Foster in "Celebration of Discipline" is able to turn the most traditional spiritual disciplines like fasting and study into something desirable and appealing, Thomas casts a vision of marriage that just draws me to an almost feverish pitch of anticipation. From Thomas' perspective, God can and will (if I am open to His work) use my marriage as one of the primary means of drawing me to Himself. And that has nothing to do with the circumstances of my marriage at any given time or the particular ways that my wife treats me. When we open ourselves to this new perspective, our marriages have the opportunity to be totally transformational. What an exciting prospect!!!

Another part of this book that was most appealing to me was the author's interest in drawing wisdom from many centuries of church teaching about marriage and relationships. He balanced this admiration for the church fathers with the ability to critique the components of historical church teachings that warrant criticism (like the notion that the truly holy person must be single). It is a very rare author, indeed, who can make Augustine and Clement come alive in ways that really instruct and minister to us.

Ultimately, I would recommend this book to anyone who is married, has been married, or will eventually consider marriage. I first read it a few years ago when I was engaged, and it totally transformed my perspective of marriage as I entered that divine institution. Several years later, it speaks into my life again, and I truly do hope to live out God's calling toward a "sacred marriage."

Sacred Companions
God made marriage to make us holy, not to make us happy. In his compelling style, Gary Thomas consistently communicates that one marriage-altering message.

As a marriage counselor, seminary professor, and writer of books on the spiritual life, I find far too many Christian books on marriage shallow, surface, and simple. Their solution-focused answers to self-centered questions often do more harm than good as they create more self-sufficient, self-centered sinners.

"Sacred Marriage" does a 180, putting the sacredness back in marriage. God intended marital love to mirror the love relationship between Christ and the Church. Further, God intends our marriages to be a spiritual discipline of spiritual friendship encouraging one another toward communion with Christ and conformity to Christ.

In the able hands and from the artful pen of Thomas, couples learn the most fulfilling message about marriage--together you have the capacity for sacredness, for a God-honoring, other-empowering, self-sacrificing purpose that brings joy now and impact forever.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Soul Physicians," "Spiritual Friends," and "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction."

Life Changing!! Earth Shattering!! Incredibly Amazing Book!!
This book changed my life and literally saved my marriage. I had divorce papers on my desk filled out and ready to take to the courthouse, then this book fell in my lap. Gary is truly a God send. Honestly, I thought at first that his wife must have written the book and signed his name to it because I have NEVER read a book by a man that had such insight about women. There is not enough space in this little box to describe how this book has changed my life and the way I view marriage completely. It should be REQUIRED READING for any man who dares to utter the words "Will you marry me?" Incredible, Awesome, Fantastic book. For me it was sent straight from from the throne of God. I knew this when I opened to the 3rd page and cried my eyes out. It said "For Lisa" I can't rave enough about this book. Get it! Get copies for all of your family and friends. Hand it out on street corners. The divorce rate in this country will be cut in half!! It's AWESOME!! A "must read" for all married Christians. Thank you Gary and thank you God for making Gary.