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Title:
Sacred Marriage
Series: -----
Author:
Gary Thomas
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre:
Non-Fiction
Pages: 324
Words:
83K
Publish: 2000
I
am always on the lookout for Christian books that will help me in my
relationship to God, in my relationship to Mrs B and in my
relationship to everybody else. I am also always on the lookout for
non-fiction books that I can squeeze into my reading rotation because
I have such a hard time with non-fiction. One of the elders at the
Sunday church was talking about this book to me and was saying how it
really helped him change his perspective on his marriage and on how
God viewed his wife. It sounded very promising, so I hunted it down
and added it to my Calibre library. However, instead of just making
it be the odd duck out with the non-fiction tag, I decided that since
I wanted to read more non-fiction this year, I would actually read
more non-fiction this year. Not necessarily all deep works of
Theology or philosophy or Christian self-help, but just several books
that the ideas appealed to me. I spent several months coming up with
five other non-fiction books alongside this one. They range from the
celebrity bio to memoirs about a movie being made to shifts in
societal expectations of law and order. I have gathered them together
and put them into a Non-fiction folder on my Pocketbook and will now
be treating “Non-fiction” like any other series or author and
cycle through it each reading rotation. That is how I will read more
non-fiction each year. It’s going to be work to choose new ones but
just choosing one at a time over the months is something I CAN do.
With that out of the way, on to the review itself.
Yeah, I wasn’t really impressed with this. I don’t know anything about the author, but from everything he let slip, he’s either Roman Catholic or some sort of Anglican (the protestant version of RC’s just without the pope pretty much). His big beef was that through the years and decades and centuries, Singlehood has always been viewed as “more holy” than being married and he wanted to counter-act that. Only the Roman Papists with their unbiblical call to being monks and nuns take that view, as far as I know, so when I realized just what the author was trying to accomplish, I felt like saying something along the lines of “Brother, join the revolution! Luther had it right.”
And that is not to say that the author didn’t have anything good to say. He did. He made some wonderful points about how being in a marriage gives you chances to see yourself like God sees you, ie, just how fallen you are and it gives you chances to express Christ’s love more, ie, sacrificing your comfort to help your spouse. But he was very big picture and big idea and I wanted some concrete ideas that I could put into practice or at least try out, like in the book Hedges that I’ve read previously.
This was not a waste of time at all, but this book did not help me like it helped the Elder who had recommended it. That’s a big thing I am finding with books like these. They do not and cannot help everyone who reads them. So I keep on reading to find the books that ARE going to help me more.
Finally, this book was written explicitly to Christian men and women. If you haven’t given your life to Jesus, this book will sound like the worst kind of foolishness and will go counter to everything you hear about taking care of yourself first. But if you are a Christian, Thomas does an excellent job of showing just how marriage can bring you closer to God and how it can make you more like God, even if only in the abstract.
★★★☆☆
