It's your fault if you don't love your spouse

At lifegroup we've been doing a series based on the book "Sacred Marriage" by Gary Thomas. It puts forward the idea of: What if marriage was more to make us holy than happy? It's not that marriage will not have happiness – we will experience that. But rather, it's that the primary aim of marriage is to grow us as Christians towards holiness. 

Personally I think parts of the book apply to anyone in a committed romantic relationship. Christian or not, marriage can make us better people if we choose to let it. (Friendships too, but perhaps to a different extent). Marriage is a "circumstance" where we live in such close proximity with almost every part of our lives involved with the other, that that will test us and in turn, shape us.

Here are a few quotes from Chapter 3 of the book.

• • •

S A C R E D  M A R R I A G E

One of the cruelest and most self-condemning remarks I've ever heard is the one that men often use when they leave their wives for another woman: "The truth is, I've never loved you." This is meant to be an attack on the wife – saying in affect, "The truth is, I've never found you lovable." But put in a Christian context, it's a confession of the man's utter failure to be a Christian. If he hasn't loved his wife, it is not his wife's fault, but his. Jesus calls us to love even the unlovable – even our enemies! – so a man who says "I've never loved you" is a man who is saying essentially this: "I've never acted like a Christian."

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? God doesn't command us to get married; he offers it to us as an opportunity. 

I think marriage is designed to call us out of ourselves and learn to love the "different".

• • •