Sacred Marriage

God is good to us! This last weekend, we took between 16-18 PCF couples (I didn’t get a final count) to a Sacred Marriage conference in Lynnfield, MA. It was fantastic. Emma and I read the book Sacred Marriage while we were engaged and found it a helpful preparation for marriage. We were even more impressed with Gary Thomas in person. He was biblical, passionate, articulate, clear, and funny. He spoke for four one-hour sessions on Saturday and we didn’t look at our watches. His view of marriage as a training ground for our personal holiness is compelling.

To find out more about Gary Thomas, to see his books and even to download (for free) some of his books and articles, check out Gary’s website here.

To check out Home Improvement Ministries, which organized the conference and did a wonderful job, click onto their website here.

Here are a few observations and quotations I’m taking away from the weekend:

- a quote from Katherine Anne Porter: ‘Love must be learned; and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.’

- Gary challenged us to ask the following question: ‘Over the past month, how have I loved my spouse so that it has cost me something?’

- Gary devoted an entire session to discussing sex, since this is so often a source of tension in marriage and also because it can be such a major blessing in marriage. Speaking about the dangers of sexual addiction, he said, ‘I’ve never met a guy with a sexual addiction who is satisfied.’

- Gary said, ‘A good marriage isn’t something you find – it is something you make.’

- Gary challenged us to think about our spouses as children of God. When we love, care for, and serve our spouses, we are pleasing God because we are loving his children. In this sense, we should think of God as our Father and also our ‘Father-in-law’ (since he’s the Father of our spouse)!

- This God-centered view of marriage that Gary Thomas is teaching around the country is robustly, thoroughly biblical. But it is not by any means the only view of marriage and sexuality on offer today. This was powerfully brought home to me on Friday night. Just after participating in an evening session for pastors and their wives, Emma and I headed back upstairs to our hotel room. As we walked through the lobby and past the hotel restaurant, we saw a table full of about twenty transvestites eating dinner together. We do not live in a vacuum. The biblical view of marriage and sexuality is God’s design. It is precious beyond words. But it is rejected by many, many people in our culture. One of the best ways we have of loving our culture and attracting people to Jesus is by modeling the wholesomeness, the beauty, the desirability, the grace-amidst-struggle of biblical marriage.

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Nov 15, 04:09 PM