Sacred Marriage - Review

Sacred Marriage

By: Gary L Thomas

Publication: August 4th 2015 by Zondervan (first published February 1st 2000)

272 pages

Genre: Adult, Non-fiction, Christian, Self-Help, Marriage

Source: Personal Kindle Library

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Goodreads description--Happy is good. Holy is better.

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. What if God s primary intent for your marriage isn t to make you happy . . . but holy?

Sacred Marriage doesn't just offer techniques to make a marriage happier. It does contain practical tools, but what married Christians most need is help in becoming holier husbands and wives. Sacred Marriage offers that help with insights from Scripture, church history, time tested wisdom from Christian classics, and examples from today's marriages.

Sacred Marriage reveals how marriage trains us to love God and others well, how it exposes sin and makes us more aware of God's presence, how good marriages foster good prayer, how married sex feeds the spiritual life, and more.

The revised edition of Sacred Marriage takes into account the ways men's and women's roles have expanded since the book was first written. It has been streamlined to be a faster read without losing the depth that so many readers have valued.

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."

Husband and I *just finished reading Sacred Marriage together. We had a couple of complaints, but we both enjoyed the overall message.

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.