Author Gary Thomas serves on the teaching team at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, which has five campuses and over 60,000 members. His books have sold in the hundreds of thousands, and he has been given numerous awards for his many bestselling titles, one of which is SACRED MARRIAGE. Here, Thomas focused on the character that God builds within us through marriage. In his newest effort, A LIFELONG LOVE, he addresses the ever-deepening intimacy that God offers believers as they grow to cherish each other more and more as time passes.

In this three-part text, Thomas focuses on several specific areas and then breaks down each into usable, practical ways and means to implement each principle in real life. First, readers will discover what it means to experience a magnificent obsession with God (creating a marriage that blooms through worship of God). Second, Christians will gain a better understanding of what passion to excel at a deeper kind of love looks like and how to achieve it. Finally, Christ followers will grasp the meaning of intentionally pursuing oneness in their marital relationship.

"Whether a reader has been married for decades or is a newlywed, each will discover ample wisdom to begin applying in his or her marital relationship."

Specifically, when Thomas delves into the section on developing a magnificent obsession with God, he helps readers better understand that as they take responsibility for making their spiritual walk with God the dominant force in their lives, out of that deep worshipful relationship with their Creator, they necessarily will be equipped to love their spouse more fully. It only makes sense that those who completely surrender themselves to God’s will for their lives will be the same folks who are able to daily surrender their rights in order to sacrificially love their mate. Thomas also makes the point that no one is able to love their spouse in a way that honors Christ without His Holy Spirit’s enabling grace and strength. For those who think they can do it in their own strength, he states that they are either deceiving themselves or have no idea of how high the bar has been set.

In the second section on “Growing Together,” Thomas spends time discussing what artificial intimacy looks like and why so many couples live that way. He helps readers recognize the power shifts and how to push past them when they rear their ugly heads. He also equips men and women who are married to a spouse who simply doesn’t care anymore, and provides a real-life scenario of how one couple rescued their “love lost” marriage.

Whether a reader has been married for decades or is a newlywed, each will discover ample wisdom to begin applying in his or her marital relationship. Like all of Thomas’ books, he supplies countless true-to-life stories from his own marriage and tops off many of these with comical asides that will have readers laughing right along with the author and shaking their head in knowing agreement. Thomas most definitely holds the marriage relationship in high esteem and inspires others to the same high calling. Read this helpful text from cover to cover, and rest assured that you’ll never look at your mate in the same way again.