Encouragment for Your Marriage!

Our small group has been reading through the book Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas! We cannot recommend a book MORE HIGHLY related to marriage! Some mentors of ours from Corpus Christi, Joe and Connie Sengler, told us we should read it....and they were right! It should be standard reading for every couple in the first year of marriage!!

As we have gone through the book, I have been startled by the number of "great quotes on marriage" that have grabbed my attention. Hope the quotes below will both encourage and challenge you in your marriage relationship!!

• “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.” Page 21


• “The key question is this: Will we approach marriage from a God-centered view of 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.” Page 32


• God lets us choose whom we’re going to love. Because we get the choice and then find it difficult to carry out the love in practice, what grounds do we have to ever stop loving?...Once we enter the marriage relationship, we cannot love God without loving our spouse as well. Page 42


• Christianity involves believing certain things to be sure, but its herald, its hallmark, its glory is not in merely ascribing to certain intellectual truths. The beauty of Christianity is in learning to love, and few life situations test that so radically as does a marriage. Page 51


• Many of the marital problems we face are not problems between individual couples....They are problems between men, 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. Page 60


• 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. Page 67


• In fact, much Christina teaching has gotten it exactly backwards. We’re told that if we want to have a stronger marriage, we should improve our prayer lives. But Peter tells us that we should improve our marriages so that we can improve our prayer lives. Instead of prayer being the “tool” that will refine my marriage, Peter tells me that marriage is the tool that will refine my prayers. Page 76


• Marriage is an operation by which a woman’s vanity and a man’s egotism are extracted without anesthetic – Helen Rowland, Page 89.


• One of the best wedding gifts God gave you was a full-length mirror called “your spouse”. Had there been a card attached, it would have said, “Here’s to helping you discover what you’re really like!” – Gary and Betsi Ricucci.


• Behind virtually every case of marital dissatisfaction lies unrepentant sin. Couples don’t fall out of love so much as the fall out of repentance. Sin, wrong attitudes, and personal failures that are not dealt with slowly erode the relationship…..Page 96