Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?

Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?

by Gary Thomas

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."

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Paperback, 272 pages

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

tags: theology, relationships, christian living, faith, christianity, religion, nonfiction, marriage, family, christian

Book Quotes

“That’s what’s so difficult about Jesus’ call to love others. On one level, it’s easy to love God, because God doesn’t smell. God doesn’t have bad breath. God doesn’t reward kindness with evil. God doesn’t make berating comments. Loving God is easy, in this sense. But Jesus really let us have it when he attached our love for God with our love for other people.”

― Gary Thomas

“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.”

― Gary Thomas

“The reality of the human condition is such that, according to Porter (and I agree), we must “salvage our fragments of happiness” out of life’s inevitable sufferings.”

― Gary Thomas

“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”

― Gary Thomas

“Otto Piper points out that “there is always an element of mistrust implied in the marriage contract.”2 The reason we promise to love each other “till death do us part” is precisely because our society knows that such a promise will be sorely tried—otherwise, the promise wouldn’t be necessary! We don’t make public promises that we will regularly nourish our bodies with food or buy ourselves adequate clothing. Everyone who enters the marriage relationship will come to a point where the marriage starts to “rub” somewhat adversely. It is for these times that the promise is made. Anticipating struggle, God has ordained a remedy, holding us to our word of commitment. In this struggle we become nobler people.”

― Gary Thomas

“One of these early thinkers, Augustine (A.D. 354–430), suggested that there are three benefits of marriage: offspring, faith (fidelity), and sacrament. Of the three benefits, he clearly points to the latter (sacrament) as the greatest. This is because it is possible to be married without either offspring or faith, but it is not possible to be (still) married without indissolubility, which is what a sacrament points toward. As long as a couple is married, they continue to display—however imperfectly—the ongoing commitment between Christ and his church. Thus, simply “sticking it out” becomes vitally important.”

― Gary Thomas

“In this fallen world, struggles, sin, and unfaithfulness are a given. The only question is whether our response to these struggles, sin, and unfaithfulness will draw us closer to God—or whether it will estrange us from ourselves, our Creator, and each other.”

― Gary Thomas

“Heloise learned to love Abelard solely for who he was. That forbidden love brought her nothing but pain, but she would rather have shame and pain with Abelard than peace and happiness without him.”

― Gary Thomas

topics: Marriage

“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.”

― Gary Thomas

“Gary and Betsy Ricucci point out, “Our Lord has sovereignly ordained that our refining process take place as we go through difficulties, not around them. The Bible is filled with examples of those who overcame as they passed through the desert, the Red Sea, the fiery furnace and ultimately the cross. God doesn’t protect Christians from their problems—he helps them walk victoriously through their problems.”1”

― Gary Thomas

“Contempt is conceived with expectations. Respect is conceived with expressions of gratitude. We can choose which one we will obsess over—expectations,”

― Gary Thomas

“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’ll grow – but you won’t! 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 (see Matthew 7:3–5). If you’re thinking “but my spouse is the one who has the plank,” allow me to let you in on a secret: You’re exactly the type of person Jesus is talking to. You’re the one He wanted to challenge with these words. Jesus isn’t helping us resolve legal matters here; He’s urging us to adopt humble spirits. He wants us to cast off the contempt – to have contempt for the contempt – and learn the spiritual secret of respect. Consider the type of people Jesus loved in the days He walked on earth – Judas (the betrayer); the woman at the well (a sexual libertine); Zacchaeus (the conniving financial cheat); and many others like them. In spite of the fact that Jesus was without sin and these people were very much steeped in sin, Jesus still honored them. He washed Judas’s feet; He spent time talking respectfully to the woman at the well; He went to Zacchaeus’s house for dinner. Jesus, the only perfect human being to live on this earth, moved toward sinful people; He asks us to do the same, beginning with the one closest to us – our spouse.”

― Gary Thomas

topics: Marriage

“I think most of us who have been married for any substantial length of time realize that the romantic roller coaster of courtship eventually evens out to the terrain of a Midwest interstate - long, flat stretches with an occasional overpass.”

― Gary Thomas

“Honor isn’t passive, it’s active. We honor our wives by demonstrating our esteem and respect: complimenting them in public; affirming their gifts, abilities, and accomplishments; and declaring our appreciation for all they do. Honor not expressed is not honor.”2”

― Gary Thomas

“Giving respect to others brings light and life into our lives. It leads us in the end to respect the God who created all of us and shapes us as he sees fit. It is an essential discipline, and marriage provides daily opportunities to grow in this area.”

― Gary Thomas

“The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.”3 I AM TOLD OVER AND OVER IN SCRIPTURE THAT MY DUTY AS A CHRISTIAN IS TO BECOME MORE AND MORE LIKE JESUS CHRIST.”

― Gary Thomas

“Prayer pushes eternity back into our lives, making God ever more relevant to the way we live our lives.”

― Gary Thomas

“It marks prayer as the heart of our devotion, the constant awareness of God’s presence, our consistent submission to his will, and our frequent expressions of adoration and praise.”

― Gary Thomas

“One can do many external deeds of love and still hold back the really precious gift, the inner self. This gift can be given only through communication.”3”

― Gary Thomas

“If a woman essentially abandons her family to ambitiously serve God, she will likely display the same lack of compassion and empathy for others as she does for her own family, who feel her absence keenly.”

― Gary Thomas

Gary Thomas

Gary Thomas is a bestselling author and international speaker whose ministry brings people closer to Christ and closer to others. He unites the study of Scripture, church history, and the Christian classics to foster spiritual growth and deeper relationships within the Christian community.

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