Quotes from Gary L. Thomas

We bring nothing to God, and He gives us everything.

Having children made me confront my true fears and trust in God many times over in a much more intensified manner.

Fear is intensified by passionate love. The more I care about someone, the more I'm concerned about their welfare. The less we have to lose, in one sense, the easier it is to be "brave."

Long-term marital intimacy requires accepting this truth: to stop giving yourself to your spouse is to spiritually divorce them.

Any mature, spiritually sensitive view of marriage must be built on the foundation of mature love rather than romanticism. But this immediately casts us into a countercultural pursuit.

Discerning someone's character, true values, and suitability for marriage is hard work. It takes time, counsel, and a healthy dose of objective self-doubt and skepticism. Identifying someone as "God's chosen" or Plato's "soul mate" is comparatively easy. You "feel" it in your gut. It seems right. You can't imagine anyone else. You must have found the one!

The mark of a spiritual man or woman is a listening heart, not a lecturing tongue.

You won't hear a character's friend say this in a romantic comedy. Taylor Swift won't sing this, Eminem won't rap it, and Suzanne Collins won't write it, but it's true: just because you're "in love" with someone doesn't mean you should seriously consider marrying them.

If there is one thing young engaged couples need to hear, it's that a good marriage is not something you find; it's something you work for. It takes struggle. You must crucify your selfishness. You must at times confront and at other times confess. The practice of forgiveness is essential. This is undeniably hard work. But eventually it pays off. Eventually, it creates a relationship of beauty, trust, and mutual support.

Our Lord has sovereignly ordained that our refining process take place as we go through difficulties, not around them. The Bible is filled with examples of those who overcame as they passed through the desert, the Red Sea, the fiery furnace and ultimately the cross. God doesn't protect Christians from their problems — he helps them walk victoriously through their problems."4

It's better to admit your weaknesses and make provision for them than to pretend you're something you're not and suffer the consequences when your true character surfaces. Caring about not hurting girls or tempting boys you've not yet dated trains you toward compassion. And compassion will serve you very well in marriage.

That's what's so difficult about Jesus' call to love others. On one level, it's easy to love God, because God doesn't smell. God doesn't have bad breath. God doesn't reward kindness with evil. God doesn't make berating comments. Loving God is easy, in this sense. But Jesus really let us have it when he attached our love for God with our love for other people.

I'm going to ask you to do something that may feel even more painful: when you get close to becoming engaged, put any public announcement on delay for a few weeks and spend several sessions talking through all these issues again with someone else present.

Marriage is a good thing, and being intentional about your pursuit of it is commendable, not shameful.

Instead of trying to make toxic people happy or satisfied (which is a waste of time, since they can't and won't be mollified), live to help reliable people serve and worship God. Our job is to open up new avenues of worship with people who want to reverence God. Rather than living to make toxic people feel good about us, let's live to make reliable people excited about God.

This is the journey marriage calls us to, to seek to understand and empathize, for each of us to strive to become a redemptive partner rather than a legal opponent.

if you remove the cross from Christianity, all that remains is some wise moral teaching not terribly different from any other religion.

we can use marriage for the same purpose—to grow in our service, obedience, character, pursuit, and love of God.

When she gets into an argument, a humble person considers the fact that she may be wrong and that there may be something she has missed or is overlooking. She is more concerned with walking in light and truth than with being right. Aware of his spiritual poverty, a humble person prays and studies and confesses and asks people to hold him accountable, as he knows he is a work in progress.

In this generation, we parents have gone out of our way to protect our children from pain and to see that they succeed. The problem with this approach is that the kids don't learn wisdom, and they don't learn decision-making skills. I believe we learn more from failure than success, but when parents keep kids from failure, our children inevitably end up lacking wisdom.

Virtue, though often mocked and ridiculed, is as beautiful as wickedness is ugly. Self-denial curiously spawns joyful happiness, while selfishness and arrogance produce desperation and obsession. Being faithful to duty brings great fulfillment, while following unchecked passions eventually leads us to despise ourselves. And the greatest truth of all: There is no higher end, no more glorious life, no better aim, than to live in the fear and favor of Almighty God.

When our happiness is dependent on what happens to us and when our self-focus determines our daily mood, our joy will necessarily be limited to whatever good thing happens to us. But when we learn to truly delight in the welfare of others and rejoice in what God is doing in their lives, the potential for increased joy skyrockets.

Done well, marital sexuality can be a supremely healing experience.

Finding fulfillment in God is the most powerful antidote to any sin.