Interview with Gary Thomas: A Different Look at Marriage

Most books that are blockbusters (huge best-sellers) in the Christian market are not books that impress me at all. In fact, most of them leave me scratching my head muttering, “why on earth did this sell so many copies!”

But every now and then there’s an exception to this rule.

Gary Thomas’ Sacred Marriage is a blockbuster that is one of the best books on marriage I’ve ever read. It’s not your typical marriage book. Far from it.

Instead of waxing eloquent on the uniqueness of the book and it’s powerful message, I’ll do you one better. I interviewed Gary about the book.

Read the interview, and if you plan to get married someday, get the book.

If you’re already married, get the book.

If you’re not sure, get the book.

Enjoy!

There are a boatload of books written by Christians on marriage. But your book is unique on the subject. You argue compellingly that marriage is designed to make us holy instead of happy. This will be a new idea to many and some will even be put off by it. What do you mean by this statement?

Gary Thomas: Let me state first what I don’t mean: I don’t mean that happiness and holiness are competitors. On the contrary, I agree with John Wesley that only those who pursue holiness will find happiness. No addict is truly happy. No man who isn’t in control of his anger is going to be happy. No woman who is gripped by materialism is happy. Holiness is the doorway to true, lasting happiness.

When Sacred Marriage first came out, so many Christian books on marriage simply “baptized” the world’s aims when it came to marriage: “Apply these biblical principles and you’ll have a better, happier, marriage.” I wanted to look at marriage in light of spiritual formation: how God uses this fundamental relationship between a man and woman to help us live a more authentic life in Christ. But that means we have to get rid of lesser motivations.

Jesus didn’t say, “Come to me and I’ll make you happier as you do the things you’ve always done, believe the things you’ve always believed, and desire the things you’ve always desired.” He said, “Take up your cross—die to yourselves—and follow me.” We should do entirely different things, we will believe entirely different beliefs, we will desire different desires—if indeed, we are surrendering to the work of the Spirit in our lives. And that should certainly apply in our marriages.

Many of my readers are single, in their 20s and 30s. What is your best advice for them when it comes to finding a spouse?

Gary Thomas: First, take your time and get objective counsel. Neurologically, infatuation has a shelf life of about 12 to 18 months. Prior to that, you enter a state that neurologists refer to as “idealization.” You mentally create someone who doesn’t exist—you ascribe strengths that aren’t there, and you are blind to character faults that everyone else can see.

It’s a lifelong decision, and the consequences are enormous. A good, rich, spiritually fruitful marriage is wonderful, increasingly so. A frustrating marriage is miserable and often gets even worse. Since the potential blessings are so high, and the potential for angst is also so formidable, don’t rush it. It’s far better to be richly married for 48 years, than to rush a decision and be unhappily married for 50 years.

Second, make your faith the driver of your marital choice. Jesus said to seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness (Matthew 6:33). If this doesn’t apply to marriage—arguably, the second most important decision you will ever make—where does it apply?

Ask yourself, “Will this person help me walk out my relationship with Christ? Will they encourage me and support me in my faith? Can I encourage and support them? Will God’s Kingdom be better served by us joining forces?” The richest marriages I know are ones nurtured by a joint pursuit of life in Christ. It’s not enough that they simply call themselves a Christian—do they pursue life in Christ?

To the same group, what is your advice on what they can expect when being married?

Gary Thomas: No Christian journey is identical, and no marital journey is identical. Some saints suffered with doubt and depression (Teresa of Avila). Others had to keep their giddiness under wraps (Brother Lawrence). In the same way, marriages are unique.

Having said that, expect marriage to be more difficult than you think it will be. Rich, but difficult. I once asked 500 married couples to remain standing if their marriage proved to be easier than they thought it would be. Only 5 couples remained standing (and one of them had only been married for 10 days!).

So the odds are overwhelming that you will be spiritually and emotionally challenged like you never have before. But in the midst of that challenge, God will refine and purify you and reveal so much of Himself to you. My first year of marriage was very difficult, and we went through another rough patch about 4 years in. Even so, if I had 100 lives to live, I’d still want to be married in every one of them. Marriage and family life is that rich, even in the face of the difficulty.

What are some of the ideas that they should discard from their thinking when it comes to marriage?

Gary Thomas:Selfishness, for starters. It’s what kills the majority of marriages. Most of us get married for primarily selfish reasons: we think we’ll have a better life if we marry this person instead of someone else, or than if we stay single. But what if God designed marriage to crush our selfishness and turn us into servants?

Romans 15:2-3 says that “Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please Himself.” The vast majority of us get married expecting our spouse to do that for us, all the while forgetting that our spouse wants us to do that for them. Even more important, have we ever asked what God’s agenda for our marriages might be?  We are so mindful of what we want out of marriage, and often never even ask what God wants out of our marriages.

Second, discard the notion that if you find “the one” (for the record, I don’t believe in “the one”) everything will fall into place. A good marriage isn’t something you find, it’s something you make—and you have to keep on making it. It takes work, intention, and effort.

If you stop building your marriage, you’ll grow apart from each other and become distant in your marriage. One shower doesn’t get you through the week. One meal won’t usually get you through the day. In the same way, one good year of working on your marriage won’t take you through your lifetime.

Many people in the USA who are in their 20s and 30s are not getting married, but are instead cohabitating. This practice is even spilling over into the Christian community. What do you have to say about this?

Gary Thomas: What makes me so sad is that these couples miss out on one of the most profound miracles performed in a church. As a pastor, I never lose the wonder that two individuals walk into a church and leave, by God’s decree, as one couple. Two leave as one. A Christian wedding isn’t just about what two people do or commit to; it’s far more about what God does. It’s holy, it’s powerful, it’s moving, and it’s sacred.

Couples lose this when they approach sexuality and living with a small-minded and selfish perspective. Marriage isn’t just for our happiness or benefit. It’s to present a picture of Christ and the church to the world. It’s a necessary step to fulfilling the command to be fruitful and multiply.

It’s to recognize, as Martin Luther said, that God created us most of us to get married to one person for life, and to have children. That’s how God wants most of us to live. To set your life up on another plan—apart from his call—is to rebel against what God has decreed.

For Christians in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are having a hard time getting along with their spouse, what is the best advice you can give that will help them find peace in their situation and see improvement?

Gary Thomas: They need the bigger picture—in other words, the “why” of marriage. That’s what I try to provide in Sacred Marriage. Have you ever seen the people who drive circles around a gym, trying to locate a close parking spot—before they go in to exercise? They’ve sort of lost the point, haven’t they?

That’s what we do with marriage—we miss the big picture in search of “comfort” and a facile “happiness.” People who go to a gym don’t resent that the weights make their bodies sore. They don’t curse at the treadmill for going too fast. They don’t “hate” the rowing machine for not being easy. Because they want to get stronger, faster, and leaner, they welcome the hurt because they see the end goal—physical fitness.

If you desire greater spiritual maturity and a more intimate walk with God, then you’ll accept the challenges of marriage as His tools to help you achieve both. No one would go to a gym and make themselves hurt if there was no purpose. But with purpose, millions of people pay $75 a month to spend time on machines designed to make them sweat and suffer. Go figure.

If your marriage is making Christ seem more present to you; if it’s turning you into more of a servant; if it’s helping you widen your witness by proclaiming God’s message of reconciliation; if it’s all but forcing you to be ever more dependent on God’s empowering presence and the work of the Holy Spirit, why would you ever leave, if, indeed, your goal is a deeper life in Christ?

One of the quotes in your book is by Robert Burton who said, “One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is and that’s his plague.” Please expound on this quote.

Gary Thomas: It’s a lop-sided truism, largely for comic sense, but it is true in many lives. I can’t tell you how many singles have sweated over getting someone to marry them, and then later in the day a married person will ask me, “Do you think it’ll displease God if I get a divorce?” One’s grief is occasioned by their singleness, while another’s is focused on their marriage. This is a good warning for singles. One of my friends has written, “Marriage doesn’t solve problems, it exposes them. So choose wisely.”

What I’ve witnessed is that contentment is largely an aspect of character, not of circumstances. People who aren’t very content as singles usually won’t be content as married people either. This is not to shame or disparage singles who want to get married—that’s a holy desire. It’s just that contentment is by and large a choice devoid of circumstances.

Many of my readers are authors themselves. Tell us the story of how your book ended up selling a half a million copies.

Gary Thomas: To be honest, the book nearly got swallowed up in anonymity. Four months in, sales were dismal and bookstores were ready to pull the plug. But it started slowly moving by word of mouth, at least enough to keep one or two copies in a store. Then second year sales exceeded first year sales, and third year sales exceeded second year sales.

The marketing campaign was about what you’d expect for a B-level author. Sacred Marriage was my fourth book, and the best-selling book before it hadn’t sold even 15,000 copies. You rarely get away from your prior sales numbers as an author—they have a huge impact on a publisher’s marketing budget (or lack thereof).

It took three years for me to be invited onto Focus on the Family and Family Life Today, and both of those forums gave it a big boost. (To give hope to future authors who feel ignored, Focus just asked me to do an interview on a book that isn’t even finished yet! Times can change…) Book sales have also benefited from so many colleges and seminaries requiring it in their classes, and churches using it with couples.

For over ten years, I was on the road doing about 20 Sacred Marriage conferences per year, so that helped seed the interest as well. Zondervan doesn’t count the books we sell at the book of the room, but I suspect we were the largest seller for many years.

No other book of mine has come close to these sales numbers. The spiritual formation books are a particularly hard sell. They find some die-hard fans who sometimes call them life-changing, but it takes those books years to reach even a tenth of what Sacred Marriage has sold.  

How has your book been received?

Gary Thomas: It certainly started a conversation, and that’s all an author can ask for. A pastor told me that there is a distinct difference in Christian marriage books pre- and post- Sacred Marriage (giving it a few years to make its mark). The interesting nugget of truth in that fact, if it is a fact, is that the reason Sacred Marriage was so different is because of my personal limitations, not because of my strengths. I’m not a trained psychologist or therapist. I wasn’t qualified to write another “how to” marriage book. So I had to write a different book: a “heart to” (how to preserve our heart for marriage) book. And, apparently, the church was thirsty for that perspective.

A couple years ago, I heard a young pastor say, “As the old saying goes, ‘what if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?’” and I just smiled. Old saying, indeed. Once an idea permeates the church and gets squeezed into sermons and other books, you no longer “own” it—not like I ever did anyway (I extrapolated a similar idea from Francis De Sales to make it sound more contemporary in formulating my own quote).

The most frustrating thing is that when I see bloggers debate it, they make “happiness” and “holiness” go to war with each other. That’s silly, it’s not biblical, and it’s not true to life. I also grieve over the pastors and counselors that have used it to tell women who were being abused that the purpose of marriage isn’t to make them happy, but holy, and therefore they should stay put in abusive situations.

That’s such a gross misapplication and that’s why I was very thankful to get to release this updated edition—to fine tune the message and hopefully give the church an even more precise tool about how to think more biblically about marriage.

Order Sacred Marriage at a discount