"How is your wedding prep?" -- yup, people ask me all the time! haha~
and... reading this book is actually one of my wedding, ah, marriage preps :D :D
Sacred marriage by Gary Thomas.
I loooovvveee it so much!!!! really2 recommended!
The big question = What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?
Find out here, and really!!!! - this book is worth your precious time :)
If we view the marriage relationship as an opportunity to excel in love, it doesn’t matter how difficult the person is whom we are called to love; it doesn’t matter even whether love is ever returned. We can still excel at love. We can still say, “Like it or not, I’m going to love you like nobody ever has.” - Gary Thomas -
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“The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other. It is perpetual exercise of mortification.. from this thyme plant, in spite of the bitter nature of its juice, you may be able to draw the honey of a holy life.” Francis de Sales
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.
Since there is so much immorality within us – not just lust, but selfishness, anger, control-mongering, and even hatred – we should enter into a close relationship with one other person so we can work on those issues in the light of what our marriage relationship will reveal to us about our behavior and our attitudes.
The key was that I had to change my view of marriage. If the purpose of marriage was simply to enjoy an infatuation and make me “happy”, then I’d have to get a “new” marriage every two or three 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.
For the Christian, marriage is a penultimate rather than an ultimate reality. Because of this, both of us can find even more meaning by pursuing God together and by recognizing that he is the one who alone can fill the spiritual ache in our souls. We can work at making our home life more pleasant and peaceable; we can explore ways to keep sex fresh and fun; we can make superficial changes that will preserve at least the appearance of respect and politeness. But what both of us crave more than anything else is to be intimately close to the God who made us. If that relationship is right, we won’t make such severe demands on our marriage, asking each other, expecting each other, to compensate for spiritual emptiness.
Some of us ask too much of marriage. We want to get the largest portion of our life’s fulfillment from our relationship with our spouse. That’s asking too much. Yes, without a doubt there should be moments of happiness, meaning, and a general sense of fulfillment. But my wife can’t be God, and I was created with a spirit that craves God. Anything less than God, and I’ll feel an ache.
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.
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 are told that we must ask, “What will make God happy?”
Strong Christian marriages will still be struck by lightning – sexual temptation, communication problems, frustrations, unrealized expectations – but if the marriages are heavily watered with an unwavering commitment to please God above everything else, the conditions won’t be ripe for a devastating fire to follow the lightning strike.
If I’m married only for happiness, and my happiness wanes for whatever reason, one little spark will burn the entire forest of my relationship. But if my aim is to proclaim and model God’s ministry of reconciliation, my endurance will be fireproof.
Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are, while longing for them to become what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another’s glory or toward degrading each other. –Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III
If you treat a man as he is, he will stay as he is. but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become bigger and better man. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We can never love somebody “too much”. Our problem is that typically we love God too little. The answer is not to dim our love for any human in particular; it’s to expand our heart’s response to our Divine Joy.
Allow your marriage relationship to stretch your love and to enlarge your capacity for love – to teach you to be a Christian. Use marriage as a practice court, where you learn to accept another person and serve him or her.
She wanted him to listen, to understand, and to sympathize. She wanted him to let her know that despite her problems, her exhaustion, her dishevelment, he loved her – to let her know that it caused him sorrow that she was suffering and that if it were possible, he would change it for her.
Women are capable of and sometimes commit magnificent acts that manifest incredible power and awaken in us men as profound awe, if not fear and trembling. Yet when they love, they love quietly; they speaks, as it were, in whispers, and we have to listen carefully, attentively, to hear their words of love and to know them.
Many of the marital problems we face are not problem between individual couples. They are the 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.
I had to learn to better understand my wife before I could truly respect her, and I had to respect her before I could fully love her. This is a tremendously spiritually therapeutic process, an emptying of my self so I can grow more in my love for others.
“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.” Betsy and Gary Ricucci
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.
“Our souls are wired for what we will never enjoy until Eden is restored in the new heaven and earth. We are built with a distant memory of Eden.”
This calls me to extend gentleness and tolerance toward my wife. I want her to become all that Jesus calls her to become, and I hope with all my heart that I will be a positive factor in her pursuit of that aim (and vice versa). But she will never fully get there this side of heaven, so I must love and accept her in the reality of our lives in a sin-stained world.
Husbands, you are married to a fallen women in a broken world. Wives, you are married to a sinful man in a sinful world. 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 love 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.
She was being hard on herself and easy on me; and that made me want to be hard on myself and easy on her.
“A magnificent marriage begins not with knowing one another but with knowing God. “Betsy and Gary Ricucci
“Prayer is a work to which we must commit ourselves if we are to make sense of our lives in the light of eternity.” Terry Glaspey
Without prayer, we live as temporal people with temporal values. Prayer pushes eternity back into our lives, moving God ever more relevant to the way we live our lives.
Peter tells us that we should improve our marriages so that we can improve our prayers 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.
Making someone else feel smaller so that we can fell larger is antithetical to the Christian faith, a complete rejection of the Christian virtues of humility, sacrifice, and service.
Godliness is selflessness, and when a man and woman marry, they are pledging to stop viewing themselves as individuals and start viewing themselves as a unit, as a couple. In marriage, I am no longer free to pursue whatever I want; I am no longer a single man. I am part of a team, and my ambitions, dreams and energies need to take that into account.
If, for instance, a man views his wife solely as someone to cook for him, provide him with sexual satisfaction, and keep a quite home while he alone serves God, he will also browbeat others to “fall in line” regardless of whether that specific role is suited for them. 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.
If you want to grow toward God, you must build a stronger prayer life. If you’re married, to attain a stronger prayer life you must learn to respect your spouse and be considerate.
Sleeping with your spouse can leave your heart, mind, and soul free, for a time, to vigorously pursue God in prayer without distraction.
Paul is a practical pastor. He recognizes that the sex drive is a biological reality. By engaging in sexual relations within a permanent lifelong relationship, a major temptation and distraction is removed and our souls are placed at rest. This is especially important for contemplative prayer, a type of prayer in which the mind must be unusually free of distractions.
Many marital disputes result precisely from this: “You want something but don’t get it.” James says we don’t get it because we’re looking in the wrong place (James 4:1-2). Instead of placing demands on your spouse, look to God to have your needs met. That way you can approach your spouse in a spirit of servanthood.
Marriage can cause us to reevaluate our dependency on other humans for our spiritual nourishment, and direct us to nurture our relationship with God instead. No human being can love us the way we long to be loved; it is just not possible for another human to reach and alleviate the spiritual ache that God has placed in all of us.
Marriage does us a very great favor in exposing this truth, but it presents a corresponding danger – getting entangled in dissension. For the sake of prayer, it is essential that we live in unity. For the sake of unity, our passions and desires must be God-directed.
Struggle makes us stronger; it builds us up and deepens our faith. But this result is achieved only when we face the struggle head-on, not when we run from it.
Christian love is an aggressive movement and an active commitment. In reality we choose where to place our affections.
Intimate relationships, as opposed to intimate experiences, are the result of planning. They are built. The sense of union that comes with genuine spiritual closeness will not just happen. If it is present, it is because of definite intent and follow-through on your part. You choose to invest, and do. It's not left to mere chance. "Donald Harvey"
The opposite of biblical love isn't hate, it's apathy. To stop moving forward our spouse is to stop loving him or her. It's holding back from the very purpose of marriage.
First, men tend to be less communicative, perhaps not realizing the message of disinterest this sends. It's one thing to think warm thoughts about your spouse; it's quite another to express them. Many men don't realize the damage they do simply by remaining silent.
Secondly, men tend to view independece as a sign of strength, maturity, and "manhood". Interdependence is more than a long word- for men it is often a bitter pill to swallow, a sign, even of weakness.
Even in the moments of anger, betrayal, exasperation, and hurt, we are called to pursue this person, to embrace them, and to grow toward them, to let our love redefine our feelings of disinterest, frustration, and even hate.
This call to "fall forward" puts the focus on initiating intimacy. We cheapen marriage if we reduce it to nothing more than a negative "I agree to never have sex with anyone else." Marriage points to a gift of self that goes well beyond sexual fidelity. Mary Anne Oliver calls it an "interpenetration of being."
Getting married is agreeing to grow together, into each other, to virtually commingle our souls so that we share a unique and rare bond. When we stop doing that, we have committed fraud against our partner; we made a commitment that we're not willing to live up to.
Communications is thus the blood of marriage that carries vital oxygen into the heart of our romance.
P155-161- #The Male Masquerade# sorry - i felt like writing the whole part, so read it by yourself yaaa.. ;)
Learning not to run from conflict, learning how to compromise, and learning to accept others.
Unless you truly enjoy hanging around a sycophant, the absence of conflict demonstrates that either the relationship isn't important enough to fight over or that both individuals are too insecure to risk disagreement.
Sometimes that's what marriage is like: our spouse has confessed sins and weaknesses to us, and we've kept every confession in a mental file cabinet, ready to be taken out and used in our defense or in an attack. But true forgiveness is a process, not an event. It is rarely the case that we are able to forgive "one time" and the matter is settled. Far more often, we must relinquish our bitterness a dozen times or more, continually choosing to release the offender from our judgement.
What homemaker hasn't found herself asking, after the fiftieth load of laundry in a week or when facing yet another sink full of dirty dishes, "is there anything significant about what I'm doing here?" Yet in God' eyes, nothing is more significant than servanthood. The path to genuine greatness lies in serving.
Grasping for power or recognition is natural. Servanthood is supernatural. So many women are missing out on the supernatural today because they are caught up in the "search for significance". Ironically, the more they search for it, the less satisfied they feel. Why? Significance is found in giving your life away, not in selfishly trying to find personal happiness.
God is always worthy of being obeyed, and God calls me to serve my spouse - so regardless of how she treats me at any particular moment, I am called to respond as a servant.
Strong personalities are tempted to assume one-sidedly the whole responsibility for their marriage. Rather than ask the partner to perform certain services they want to do everything themselves.... While it looks like sacrificial love, this in fact a passion to dominate the other person.
"Service" includes allowing your spouse to give - if, of course, they are willing to give. In other words, service isn't just washing somebody else's feet; at times it's letting your own feet be washed.
Quarrels over money and time usually reflect a demand to "own" our life rather than to serve the other with our wealth and existence. The typical fight over who ought to pick up the kids usually is about whose time is more valuable, who works the hardest, and who is least appreciated. It is not wrong to alternate chores or divvy up responsibilities, but the hurtful interactions usually reflect drawing battle lines over more petty matters.
How do a husband and wife use money and time to serve instead of dominate or manipulate? By appreciating your spouse, by seeking first to understand him or her, by emptying yourself and not immediately assuming that your task, your time, your perceived need is the most important.
How can I spend my money in a spirit of service? By remembering that I will be most fulfilled as a Christian when I use everything I have - including my money and time - as a way to serve others, with my spouse getting first priority (after God). This commitment absolutely undercuts petty power games. If I humiliate my wife by pointing out how much more important I am to the family's financial well-being, or if she points out how utterly helpless I am in doing certain domestic chores, we don't just cheapen each other; we cheapen ourselves. We destroy the entire notion of Christian fellowship by denying that every part has its place in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:14-31)
A godly marriage shapes our view of beauty to focus on internal qualities. The Holy Letter argues that when a man chooses a woman for her physical beauty alone, "the union is not for the sake of heaven." Beauty is wonderful, but it is not the only or even the highest value when we seek Christian marriage.
A single woman is likely to face strong temptations to become the type of woman a man would want to marry - and that might very well compete with the type of woman who lives a responsible life before God. But single women know that men are attracted to a certain physical shape and so might be inclined to put more effort into changing physically than changing internally by growing in godliness. Marriage can set women free from this vain pursuit; once they are married, they can focus more intensely on the internal beauty that God finds so attractive.
This is not to suggest that either men or women should shun the care of their physical bodies and become unfit. Keeping in good shape is a gift we can give to our spouse. But so is the grace of acceptance - particularly on the part of husbands - in recognition that age and (in the case of women) childbearing eventually reshape every individual body. Marriage helps to move men from an obsession over bodies "that do not exist" into a reconsideration of priorities and values.
Marriage calls us to redirect our desires to be focused on one woman or one man in particular rather than on society's view of attractive women or men in general. We men are married to women whose bodies we know intimately. And out of these bodies, our own children have been born. God gives us each other's bodies as gifts in which to delight. But in receiving our gift, we must not covet another's.
I knew from proverbs 5:18-20 that I was to take delight in my wife, not in women in general.
Married sexuality helps from us spiritually by shaping the priorities of what we value and hold in high esteem. Many of us don't realize how truly shallow this world and its values really are.
Marriage teaches us to give what we have. God has given us one body. He has commanded our spouse to delight in that one body - and that body alone. If we withhold from our spouse our body, it becomes an absolute denial. We may not think it is a perfect body but it is the only body we have to give.
The family that will enjoy Jesus' presence as a customary part of their union is a family that is joined precisely because husband and wife want to invite Jesus into deeper parts of their marriage. They are not coming together in order to escape loneliness, more favorably pool their financial resources, or merely gain an outlet for sexual desire. Above all these other reasons, they have joined themselves to each other as a way to live out and deepen their faith in God.
Even if you didn't enter marriage for this reason, you can make a decision to maintain your marriage on this basis. The day you do this, you will find that marriage can be a favorable funnel to direct God's presence into your daily life. Marriage invokes the presence of God through prodding us to communicate, reminding us of our transcendent ache, helping us to behold the image of God, and allowing us to participate in creation.
In marriage, it is our duty to communicate. To be sure, every marriage needs time of silence and meditation. But in our relationship with our spouse, communication is a discipline of love.
God loves us with words, rather than physical arms with which to embrace us. We can love our spouses with those same words and grow more like Christ in the process.
There comes a time when silence is healing, but there is also a malicious silence. You know your heart. You know whether you are being silent in order to promote healing or whether you are being self-centered, cowardly, or malicious. When I refuse to speak out of cowardice, selfishness, or weariness, I am taking a step back as a Christian.
Let your relationship with your spouse point you to what you really need most of all: God's love and active presence in your life. Above all, don't blame your spouse for lack of fulfillment; blame yourself for not pursuing a fulfilling relationship with God.
We are reminded of the transcendent ache in our soul that even this one very special person can't relieve entirely on his or her own. As odd as this may sound, I have discovered in my own life that my satisfaction or dissatisfaction with my marriage has far more to do with my relationship to God that it does with my relationship to my wife. When my heart grows cold toward God, my other relationships suffer, so if I senses a burgeoning alienation from, or lack of affection toward, my wife, the first place I look is how I'm doing with the Lord. My wife, is quite literally, my God-thermometer.
Part of this springs from my theological belief that as people created in the image of God, we have a responsibility to create. Whether a business, a house, a family, a book, a life (through education or medicine), or whatever else we choose to build, we shouldn’t waste our lives but spend them productively.
If we don’t nurture a godly sense of creativity, we will experience an emptiness that we may perversely and wrongly blame on our marriage. The emptiness comes not from our marriage, however, but from the fact that we’re not engaged in our marriage. We’re not using this powerful relationship in order to create something.
You were made by God to create. If you don’t create in a thoughtful and worshipful manner – whether preparing meals, decorating a home, achieving a vocational dream - responsibly raising children - you will feel less than human because you are in fact acting in a sub-human mode.
But a man and woman dedicated to seeing each other grow in their maturity in Christ; who raise children who know and honor the Lord; who engage in business that supports God's work on earth and is carried out in the context of relationships and good stewardship of both time and money - these Christians are participating in the creativity that gives a spiritually healthy soul immeasurable joy, purpose and fulfillment.
"Let us be what we are, and let us be it well".
In other words, if we are married, we are married, and we must not try to live as if we were otherwise. Francis noted that by living with this attitude, we "do honor to the Master whose work we are."
Christian men in particular might be tempted above all others to let ambition erode their marital devotion, even to the point of using religious language to justify shortchanging their spouse, but de Sales warned that even spiritual devotion can be taken "out of bounds". When we get married, we make a certain promise to our spouse that we will devote a considerable amount of energy, initiative, and time into building and nurturing the relationship. It is spiritual fraud to enter marriage and the to live like a single man or woman.
The means of gaining perfection are various according to the variety of vocations: religious, widows, and married persons must all seek after this perfection, but not all by the same means." He encouraged the woman by suggesting several spiritual exercises, but then he warned, "in all this take particular care that your husband, your servants, and your parents do not suffer by your too long stayings in church, your too great retirement (for prayer), or by your failing to care for your household.... You must not only by devout, and love devotion, but you must make it lovable to everyone"
When marriage becomes our primary pursuit our delight in the relationship will be crippled by fear, possessiveness, and self-centeredness. We were made to admire, respect and love someone who has a purpose bigger than ourselves, a purpose centered on God’s untiring work of calling his people home to his heart of love.
We allow marriage to point beyond itself when we accept two central missions: becoming the people God created us to be, and doing the work God has given us to do. If we embrace – not just accept, but actively embrace – these two missions, we will have a full life, a rich life, a meaningful life, and a successful life.
If we view the marriage relationship as an opportunity to excel in love, it doesn’t matter how difficult the person is whom we are called to love; it doesn’t matter even whether love is ever returned. We can still excel at love. We can still say, “Like it or not, I’m going to love you like nobody ever has.”
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