Book Review: Sacred Marriage

What if God Designed Marriage to Make us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? By Gary Thomas, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan ISBN 0=310-22796-8; 268 pages

Reviewed by Erin Peters

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. 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.

Any couple wanting to grow in their intimacy with God, and with each other should pick up this book, and read it together. Each chapter has quotes and one-liners in the margin that help focus on the main theme and thoughts of the chapter. For couples starting out, or starting over, this book can only make their marriage sweeter and grow deeper.

CH 1: The Greatest Challenge in the World – A Call to Holiness More Than Happiness

In this introductory chapter Gary walks us through some misconceptions about romantic love (“romanticism’s ruse”), as well as the longstanding tradition of celibacy in church history – the unofficial (sometimes blatant) belief and teaching that married believers were second class Christians who compromised their integrity or who were too weak to contain their sexual urges. Most of the Christian classics were written by monks and nuns for monks and nuns. The married could at best feebly try to simulate a single pursuit of God; and the thought of pursuing God through marriage wasn’t really given serious consideration – instead, the emphasis was largely on pursuing God in spite of marriage. The author challenges us to let go of the superficial romance depicted in popular culture, as well as the thought that marriage compromises our commitment to God. The ultimate purpose of this book is not to make you love your spouse more, but to equip you to love your God more.

“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.” (pg26)

CH 2: Finding God in Marriage – Marital Analogies Teach Us Truths About God

Undeniably there are numerous analogies in the Old and New Testaments that use images relating to husband and wife, bridegroom and bride, wedding banquet, wedding of the Lamb, to stress how God rejoices in his people. God wants us to relate to him with an obedience fueled by love and intimacy. The reason God became flesh was so that we might know him; and correspondingly, God did not create marriage just to give us a pleasant means of repopulating the world and providing a steady societal institution for the benefit of humanity. He planted marriage among humans as yet another signpost pointing to his own eternal, spiritual existence (pg29-30). Our challenge is to enter into our marriage relationship with the motivation hinted at by Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:9, “So we make it our goal to please him.” Near the end of the chapter we read the hard truth in the following lines:

“What most divorces mean is that at least one party, and possibly both have ceased to put the gospel first in their lives. They no longer live by Paul’s guiding principle, “I make it my goal to please him,” because the Bible is clear in its teaching. God says, “I hate divorce” (Malachi 2:16). If the goal of the couple was to please God, they wouldn’t seek a divorce... exceptions are to be assumed...but most cases of divorce among Christians involve two people who have distorted their priorities in life.” (pg35)

CH 3: Learning To Love – How Marriage Teaches Us To Love

Love is not a natural response that gushes out of us unbidden – infatuation sometimes does that. Christian love 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” (pg41). We must allow our marriage relationship to stretch our love and to enlarge our capacity for love, and we do this by realizing that serving and loving our spouse pleases God. Scripture says in effect,”Make your wife happy. Sacrifice yourself daily. You’ll find your life only when you first lose it” (pg43). Marriage is designed to call us out of ourselves and learn to love the “different”.

"Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are, while longing for them to become what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another’s glory or toward degrading each other.” (Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III, “Intimate Allies”, quoted on pg39)

CH 4: Holy Honor – Marriage Teaches Us To Respect Others

In the seventeenth century classic “An Introduction to a Devout Life”, Francis de Sales wrote something simple but powerful, “have contempt for contempt”. This chapter deals with the discipline of showing respect, particularly to your spouse. The sad truth is that comparatively few Christians think of giving respect as a command or a spiritual discipline. We are obsessed with being respected, but rarely consider our own obligation to respect others. Contempt is born when we fixate on our spouse’s weaknesses. Jesus provides a remedy that is stunning in its simplicity yet foreboding in its difficulty. He tells us to take the plank out of our own eye before we try to remove the speck from our neighbor’s eye (Matthew 7:3-5). Jesus urges us to adopt humble spirits. Contempt is conceived with expectations. Respect is conceived with expressions of gratitude. We can choose which one we will obsess over –expectations, or thanksgivings. That choice will result in a birth – and the child will be named either contempt, or respect (pg67).

“We must never be naïve enough to think of marriage as a safe harbor from the Fall...The deepest struggles of life will occur in the most primary relationship affected by the Fall: marriage.” (Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III, quoted on pg53)

CH 5: The Soul’s Embrace – Good Marriage Fosters Good Prayer

Prayer is central to Christian spirituality, and few verses are more astounding than 1 Peter3:7, “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you for the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.” If prayer is the essence of spirituality, and if a wrong attitude in marriage destroys that activity, it behooves men in particular to pay careful attention here (pg75). Peter tells us that we should improve our marriages so that we can improve our prayer lives. This chapter talks about the many different ways marriage feeds into and builds our prayer lives. By learning to respect others, meeting each others’ sexual needs, overcoming dissension, and using the analogies of marriage to foster more creative prayer, we can build and maintain active, growing and meaningful prayer lives.

“A magnificent marriage begins not with knowing one another but with knowing God.” (Gary and Betsy Ricucci, “Love that Lasts”) (pg73)

CH 6: The Cleansing of Marriage – How Marriage Exposes Our Sin

What marriage has done for us is hold up a mirror to our sin. It forces us to face ourselves honestly and consider our character flaws, selfishness and anti-Christian attitudes, and this should encourage us to be sanctified and cleansed and grow in godliness. But what often happens is that “couples don’t fall out of love so much as they fall out of repentance” (pg96). This chapter challenges us to use the revelation or our sin as a means to grow in the foundational Christian virtue of humility, leading us to confession and renouncement. We are reminded not to give in to the temptation to resent our partner as our own weaknesses are revealed.

“If you’re a Christian, the reality is that, biblically speaking, you can’t swap your spouse for someone else. But you can change yourself. And that change can bring the fulfillment that you mistakenly believe is found by changing partners. In one sense, it’s comical: Yes, we need a changed partner, but the partner that needs to change is not our spouse, it’s us!” (pg101)

CH 7: Sacred History – Building The Spiritual Discipline of Perseverance

Marriage helps us to develop the character of God himself as we stick with our spouses through the good times and the bad. Every wedding gives birth to a new history, a new beginning. The spiritual meaning of marriage is found in maintaining that history together. It’s a journey that never really ends, but it takes at least the span of a decade for the sense of intimacy to really display itself in the marriage relationship (pg107). The priority of a sacred history is an eternal priority. One of the most poetic lines in Scripture is found in 2Thessalonians3:5, “May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and Christ’s perseverance.” The Bible’s best recipe for holiness and a “successful” live here on earth is to have our hearts filled with God’s love and Christ’s perseverance. Having said all this, the author begins on page 114 to look at divorce, and he takes us down the path of a “broken history” where God’s faithfulness and grace were lived out.

“The holiness that will be rewarded in heaven is a persistent holiness.” (pg110)

CH 8: Sacred Struggle – Embracing Difficulty in Order To Build Character

The account of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s marriage to Charles Lindbergh is a truly revealing and inspiring story (pg138-148). The author asks the question, “Would I rather live a life of ease and comfort and remain immature in Christ, or am I willing to be seasoned with suffering if by doing so I am conformed to the image of Christ?” This chapter reminds each of us that a good marriage is not something you find, it’s something you work for.

“God never promises to remove all our trials this side of heaven – quite the contrary!—but he does promise that there is meaning in each one. Our character is being perfected, our faith is being built, our “heavenly reward” is being increased.” (pg151)

CH 9: Falling Forward – Marriage Teaches Us To Forgive

The reality in this chapter is that the person we marry will eventually hurt us – sometimes even intentionally so, making forgiveness an essential spiritual discipline. And it is rarely the case that we are able to forgive “one time” and the matter is settled (pg169). In the practice of this discipline, marriage forces us to embrace that most difficult of Christian clichés: “Hate the sin and love the sinner.” Philip Yancey encourages us to move in the direction of loving the sinner by thinking what it must have been like for Jesus. No one loved sinners with the depth that Jesus did. What a reminder!!

“Any life situation that exercises our ability to extend forgiveness is a life situation that can mold us further into the character of Jesus Christ. I know of few life situations that call us to such a regular practice of forgiveness as the relationship of marriage.”

CH 10: Make Me A Servant – Marriage Can Build in Us A Servant’s Heart

Marriage creates a situation in which our desire to be served and coddled can be replaced with a more noble desire to serve others. Philippians Chapter 2 is the essence of this chapter and the author walks us through applying the spirit of service in practical ways. We’re not just after the imitation of Christ’s actions in our home. We also want to model Christ’s spirit and attitude. There are times to serve – and times to receive service (pg191). How do a husband and wife use money and time to serve instead of to dominate or manipulate? And the marital bed is yet another area where our service skills are put to the test.

“Significance is found in giving your life away, not in selfishly trying to find personal happiness.” (pg193)

CH 11 Sexual Saints – Marital Sexuality Can Provide Spiritual Insights and Character Development

To use our sexuality as a spiritual discipline –to integrate our faith and flesh, so to speak – it is imperative that we become theologically grounded enough to incorporate into our thinking a Jewish view of sexuality. God made flesh, and when God made flesh, he created some amazing sensations (pg206). The author challenges us to view our spouse as more than a lover, but as brother and sister in Christ. We need to reconcile the power of sex, seek spiritual development through sexual expression and gain God’s view of marital beauty. The sex drive literally calls us out of ourselves and into another. - provided that the “other” is our spouse. It reinforces the “falling forward” concept. As we are called out of ourselves, we nurture interdependence and fellowship, two very valuable Christian practices.

“Our God, who is spirit (John 4:24), can be found behind the very physical panting, sweating, and pleasurable entangling of limbs and body parts. He doesn’t turn away. He wants us to run into sex, but to do so with his presence, priorities, and virtues marking our pursuit. If we experience sex in this way, we will be transformed in the marriage bed every bit as much as we are transformed on our knees in prayer.” (pg226)

CH 12: Sacred Presence – How Marriage Can Make Us More Aware of God’s Presence

In marriage, it is our duty to communicate. In our relationship with our spouse, communication is a discipline of love. “We are called to cultivate Christ in our spouses by the power of the spoken word” (Allender and Longman, pg232). The author challenges us to consider that every word spoken to a family member is either an invitation to the experience of the holy or to the experience of chaos. God has given us the privilege and opportunity to place ourselves and our families on a “glorious pursuit”: becoming partakers of the divine nature, reflecting the very image of Jesus Christ. When we aggressively (and gracefully) lead our families in this pathway of progressive sanctification, we begin to reflect God’s glory.

“Let your relationship with your spouse point you to what you really need most of all: God’s love and active presence in your life.” (pg237)

CH 13: Sacred Mission – Marriage Can Develop Our Spiritual Calling, Mission, And Purpose

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.

“A mature marriage looks beyond itself, forfeiting not just the tyranny of individual desires, but also the tyranny of the couple’s comfort. It has been described by one couple as the transition from 'we are' to 'we care.'” (pg 256)

Epilogue: The Holy Couple

Marriage is a long walk. We can start out a little slowly, even occasionally lose our way, and still salvage a most meaningful journey. Rather than seeing marriage as a cosmic competitor with heaven, we can embrace it as a school of faith. In this final chapter, Gary challenges us to make it our goal to become a “couple-saint”. No longer defining our relationship to God in solitary terms, but working together to present ourselves as a holy unit, a pair of cherubim in the middle of whom God’s presence is radically enlivened.

“Our marriages are the testing ground for God to win us to himself. Our marriages are basic training for the one Marriage that will not disappoint.” (Allender and Longman III) (pg265)