Sacred Marriage

Updates:

There's little to say I suppose. More closed doors on the churches. Closed doors for a better secular job. Nothing is lining up. I often feel hopeless. It's hard to press on, but I know I will. The Lord is with me. I've been trying to be more disciplined in my schedule and go to bed around 10, get up at 6am, hit the gym, and then go to Panera to job and church hunt until I go to work at 11 if I close. I've been maintaining that for the most part. My nights are spent with dinner and a book lately.

Sacred Marriage:

When Matthew was here visiting me he told me of how he has wanted to buy me a gift. He tried looking for things in Chicago to bring down. he even asked his brother to pick up something for me once while he was at the store, but his brother didn't have the money for it. When Matthew got here he noticed that I'd owned all the things he was planning to buy me. As we talked he mentioned to me a book I'd heard about before but never knew the premise. He later asked if I wanted that book and he bought it for me. The book was Sacred Marriage By Gary Thomas. Apparently he has a number of books on a similar theme and perspective. I found out that Matthew was recommended the book by a mutual friend who is engaged. As I've read this book my heart has been so touched and encouraged. I told my pastor I was reading it and he said he'd been using it for years in marital counseling. I spoke with his wife and she said she'd used the woman's version of the book "Sacred Influence" by the same author. I'm only in Chapter 5, but I've found myself underlining on nearly every page. I wanted to share some of the author's insights and maybe how they've touched my heart lately at just the right time in my life...


Gary asks the fundamental questions of his perspective on pg. 13 in the beginning of the book, "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?"

He quotes from Katherine Ann Porter in an essay written in the 1940's titled "The Necessary Enemy" as she makes the following observations about a young wife, "This very contemporary young woman finds herself facing the oldest and ugliest of dilemma of marriage. She is dismayed, horrified, full of guilt and forebodings because she is finding out little by little that she is capable of hating her husband, whom she loves faithfully. She can hate him at times as fiercely and mysteriously, indeed in terribly much the same way, as often she hated her parents, her brothers, and sisters, whom she loves, when she was a child... She thought she had outgrown all this, but here it was again, an element in her own nature she could not control, or feared she could not."

He continues, "'Her hatred is real and her love is real' Porter explains of this young wife. This is reality of the human heart, the inevitability of two sinful people pledging to live together, with all their faults for the rest of their lives."

"Any mature, spiritually sensitive view of marriage must be built on the foundation of mature love rather than romanticism"

"Many will break up their relationship and try to recreate the passionate romance with someone else. Other couples will descend into a sort of marital guerilla warfare, a passive-aggressive power play as each partner blames the other for personal dissatisfaction or lack of excitement."

"If you want to be free to serve Jesus, there's no question-stay single. Marriage takes a lot of time. But if you want to become more like Jesus, I can't imagine any better thing to do than to get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you'd never have to face otherwise."

"Any situation that calls me to confront my selfishness has enormous spiritual value, and I slowly began to understand that the real purpose of marriage may not be happiness as much as it is holiness."

"I found there was a tremendous amount of immaturity within me that my marriage directly confronted. The key was that I had to change my view of marriage. If the purpose of marriage was simply to enjoy infatuation and make me 'happy,' then I'd have to get a 'new' marriage every 2 or 3 years. But if I really wanted to see God transform me from the inside out, I'd need to concentrate on changing myself rather than on changing my spouse. In fact, you might even say, the more difficult my spouse proved to be, the more opportunity I'd have to grow."

"I didn't decide to focus on changing myself so that I could have a tension-free marriage or so that I'd be happier or even more content in my marriage. Instead, I adopted the attitude that marriage is one of many life situations that help me to draw my sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment FROM God."

"God appreciates our quirks and understands our hearts' good intentions even when they might be masked by incredibly stupid behavior."

"I believe that much of the dissatisfaction we experience in marriage comes from expecting too much from it."

"The key question is this: Will we approach marriage from a God-centered view or a man-centered view? In a man-centered view, we will maintain our marriage as long as our earthly comforts, desires, and expectations are met. IN a God-centered view, we preserve our marriage because it brings glory to God and points a sinful world to a reconciling Creator."

He quotes 2 Cor. 5:9, "So we make it our goal to please Him" and asks the question, "What makes God Happy?... Will this be pleasing to Christ? The first purpose in marriage--beyond happiness, sexual expression, the bearing of children, companionship, mutual care and provision, or anything else--is to please God. The challenge of course is that it is utterly selfless living; rather than asking 'What will make me happy?' ...we must ask, 'What will make God happy?'"

"Years ago Paul Simon wrote a best-selling song proclaiming 'Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.' A Christian needs just one reason to stay with his or her lover: the analogy of Christ and His church."

"This man or this woman seems so different from you. I know. That's why it seems so difficult to love him or her. When you think one level, she thinks on another. When you're certain this perspective matters most, he brings in another angle entirely. And you ask yourself 'How can I possibly love someone who is so different from me?' And yet consider, if you can ask this question with integrity, try asking yourself this one: How could you possibly love God? He is spirit and you are encased in flesh and bones. He is eternal and you are trapped in time. He is holy, perfect, sinless, and you--like me--are steeped in sin. It is far less a leap for a man to love a woman or for a woman to love a man than it is for either of us to love God. But I think it's more than that. I think marriage is designed to call us out of ourselves to love the 'different.'... We need to be called out of ourselves because, in truth, we are incomplete. God made us to find our fulfillment in Him--the Totally Other."

"Many of the marital problems we face are not problems between individual couples... They are problems between man, generally, and women, generally. They are problems that arise because we are either too lazy or too selfish to get to know our spouse well enough to understand how different from us they really are."

"Sadly I spent the first few years of my marriage adding up the pluses and minuses of my and my wife's various personality traits. The problem was simple: I was spending too much time on my pluses and her minuses... I realized that I was being deluded in my sense of self-righteousness. Instead of focusing on what Lisa could improve I should have been on my knees begging God to change me."

"We're not married in a carefree Garden of Eden. We're married int he midst of many responsibilities that compete for our energy."

"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."

"It is guaranteed that your spouse will sin against you, disappoint you, and have physical limitations that will frustrate and sadden you. He may come home with the best of intentions and still lose his temper. She may have all the desire but none of the energy. This is a fallen world. Let me repeat this: you will never find a spouse who is not affected in some way by the reality of the Fall. If you can't respect this spouse because she is prone to certain weaknesses, you will never be able to respect any spouse."


That's about as far as I've gotten and it's a lot to read, but... oh how God has blessed my heart in reading it. I've had such a heart for couples and marriages and the more I read this book the more I keep saying that I could have written it, but praise be to God... that I didn't write it. Praise be to God that there's a man out there who is speaking at seminars and counseling couples and sharing the reality that so many people need to hear. Praise God for Gary Thomas...