Table Of Content

SACRED MARRIAGE GIFT EDITION GARY THOMAS This gift edition is dedicated to the memory of Bill Ehli, father of my wife, Lisa. He has given me a gift I can never repay. Contents Cover Title Page Introduction SACRED MARRIAGE 1: The 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: How Marriage Teaches Us to Love 4: Holy Honor: Marriage Teaches Us to Respect Others 5: The Soul’s Embrace: Good Marriage Can Foster Good Prayer 6: The 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 Epilogue: The Holy couple Notes Questions for Discussion and Reflection Acknowledgments DEVOTIONS: FOR A SACRED MARRIAGE 1: The God-Centered Spouse 2: A Prayer to Remember 3: Keeping the Focus Where It Belongs 4: Growing Old Together 5: God’s Son, God’s Daughter 6: The Gift of Fear 7: Don’t Look Back 8: Fame Is Trumped by Intimacy 9: A Soul Filled with God 10: The Foundation of Fellowship 11: The Heart To 12: The Preyer 13: Love Mercy 14: One Bad Habit 15: Soul Mate or Sole Mate? 16: Enjoying Each Other 17: Thoughtlessly Cruel 18: You Deserve a Break Today 19: Shaped by Sharing 20: I Hold You Responsible 21: The Big Picture 22: If It’s Not Sin … 23: Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts 24: You’re Prime! 25: Marital Ruts 26: To Make Her Holy 27: Marriage Is Movement 28: Earthly Education for Heavenly Heights 29: One 30: The Happiness That Follows Holiness 31: Running from Yourself 32: Good in Bed 33: Divine Detachment 34: Make Someone Happy 35: I Love Him Anyway 36: A Spiritually Tight Marriage 37: The Great Escape 38: Sanctuary 39: Real People 40: A Difficult Road 41: The Ministry of Noticing 42: One Day at a Time 43: You Don’t Understand: Role Reversals 44: Worth the Pain 45: What Do You Do 46: Open Marriage 47: The True Image of Love 48: A Call to Listen 49: The Estate of Marriage 50: Passive Persecution 51: Kindness Matters 52: Oases of Sanity Notes Acknowledgments About the Author Books by Gary Thomas Copyright About the Publisher Share Your Thoughts Introduction DEAR READERS, My wife and I experience great joy whenever we read and hear the testimonies of those who have read the book you now hold in your hands. The perspective that perhaps God created marriage to make us holy even more than to make us happy has apparently been used by God to restore many homes, reenergize flagging commitments, and open up couples’ eyes to the marvelous work God is doing in their souls. Marriage is filled with remarkable joys, even occasional ecstasies, but it can often lead us through times of tremendous pain. Lisa and I count it an honor that, by means of this book, we can walk through part of this journey with you. We are delighted that Zondervan has decided to make available this beautiful gift edition, which contains not only Sacred Marriage but Devotions for a Sacred Marriage as well. Thank you for joining us on this journey of exploring how God uses our marriages to glorify his name and transform us into the image of his Son. May God bless you as you seek to serve him by becoming the man or woman he created you to be; and may God continue to make your marriage a truly sacred, soul-shaping union that reflects Christ’s love for the church. The peace of Christ, Gary Thomas SACRED MARRIAGE 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 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