Marriage, Sex In The Service Of God

Marriage, Sex In The Service Of GodThe 'way of a man with a maiden' was too wonderful for the writer of Proverbs to understand. Preoccupying so many thoughts and dreams, the subject of countless songs, films and fairytales, the love between a man and a woman has always been a profound and perplexing mystery. And yet we do not live happily ever after. Four out of ten marriages will end in divorce. Couples now choose to live together rather than marry, and those relationships are even

The 'way of a man with a maiden' was too wonderful for the writer of Proverbs to understand. Preoccupying so many thoughts and dreams, the subject of countless songs, films and fairytales, the love between a man and a woman has always been a profound and perplexing mystery.

And yet we do not live happily ever after. Four out of ten marriages will end in divorce. Couples now choose to live together rather than marry, and those relationships are even less likely to last. People are having fewer children, later, and with a succession of partners. Ironically, just when so much is expected of love, Western societies are witnessing lower levels of public commitment in sexual relationships than ever before. The scale of this change amounts to a revolution, a major historical paradigm shift.

The statistics mask a depth of pain that every pastor and counsellor knows only too well.

We must face the inevitable questions: if faithfulness is no longer esteemed, why get married at all? What is marriage? What did God intend when he gave us marriage?

Christopher Ash argues that our modern idolization of the sexual relationship contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. To begin to rebuild a biblical confidence in marriage, we need to understand that the primary blessing and purpose of marriage is not sexual intimacy, but rather serving God in partnership. This in turn leads to the blessings of love, friendship, children, and order in society, and will help us to rediscover that faithfulness which is the heart of marriage.

Publisher: IVP
Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9780851119946

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Christopher Ash is writer in residence at Tyndale House in Cambridge. He previously served as a pastor and church planter and as the director of the Proclamation Trust Cornhill Training Course in London. He and his wife, Carolyn, are members of a church in Cambridge, and they have four children and numerous grandchildren.

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“...In this THOROUGH theological work (hint: It's LONG. But worth every single page), Ash maps out the current moment culturally with regard to sexuality and relationships, and then traces a biblical theology of marriage throughout the pages of scripture. Ash doesn't ask "how" we should approach marriage without asking WHY God created marriage, first - and understanding his redemptive, creative, community-building purposes - creates the framework for HOW we might go about finding marriage partners and building lives together. My husband and I both read this book and it was a paradigm shift for us both in how we relate not only to each other, but how we together relate to the world. We are tremendously grateful for Ash's labor of love and have commended the abridged (and less intimidating!) version of this book (entitled "Married for God: Making Your Marriage the Best It Can Be") to dating, engaged, and married couples for more than ten years now." J&B Lea