Sacred Marriage, Sacred Pathways, Sacred Intimacy | Celebrated Author, Pastor Unveils Enlightening Resources

Have you ever wished you had somewhere to find answers to your physical intimacy questions without feeling awkward? In this situation, Google responses may not be what you were hoping to find.

Pastor and thought leader Gary Thomas, renowned as the author of best-selling Sacred Marriage, has teamed up with licensed counselor and psychologist Debra Fileta to release a definitive guide to Human Sexuality – Married Sex: A Christian Couple’s Guide to Reimagining Your Love Life.

The combination of Gary, a 50-something male pastor, and Debra, a young mother in her 30s with a growing counseling ministry, opens a wonderful door to help both genders understand each other’s perspectives. So often both men and women feel misunderstood or pitted against each other in this area, Gary said. He remarked that research from tens of thousands of brain scans shows that male and female brains are different.

“We try to help people understand that male and female sexuality are different because of the way their brains are wired,” he said.  

The book explores physical intimacy from a theological, psychological, relational and practical standpoint and will help couples find answers about healthy sexuality and practical help overcoming obstacles, whether they want to bring their love life back from the dead or take it to the next level, Gary said.

Dozens of couples offer real life stories to which others can relate and may cover new ground. He is particularly proud of the October 2021 online seminar consisting of experts in the marriage ministry realm discussing married sex from a Christian perspective.  It was designed for couples to watch together in the privacy of their own homes.

“We hope to raise the quality, and in some sense, quantity, of what’s happening in bedrooms in Christian marriages,” Gary said. “If physical intimacy is good, it really blesses a marriage and adds so much. It helps us cherish each other. When it is bad, it becomes 90% of the focus. Rather than become frustrated and resentful of each other, wives and husbands will feel loved and understood.”

When to Walk Away

Gary’s recently published book, When to Walk Away: Finding Freedom from Toxic People, addresses a different topic: a biblical perspective to dealing with toxic people.  “I’m probably the least likely person to write this book,” Gary said. “It was a shock to me.”

The content grew out of his own experience with a person who was threatening to steal his joy and diminish the effectiveness of his ministry. Gary tried to respond to the needs of one who would not be appeased. When he looked back, “I realized that every conversation, every email, every piece of written correspondence had been utterly and completely fruitless,” he said.  “They were starting to live in my brain. It was a spiritual attack.”

He sought wise counsel from a godly friend whose surprising advice was NOT to engage. He reminded Gary of the many times Jesus walked away or let somebody else walk away when an encounter was unproductive. Gary searched through the scriptures and found 41 occurrences in the Gospels where Jesus let someone go without giving chase.

Even noting for duplication recorded in more than one Gospel, Gary clocked several dozen instances where an incident with Jesus led to parting ways. “I would have felt like a failure,” he said. As Gary researched further, he noted the juxtaposition of the verses recorded in Matthew where Jesus was commissioning the disciples. The phrase “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,” in 6:33 is followed shortly after in 7:6 with, “Do not throw your pearls to pigs.” “I saw how mission-minded Jesus was,” Gary said. “Jesus was teaching them to apply spiritual offense and defense.”

Jesus walked away from people many, many times, he added. To play offense without any defense is to make ourselves unnecessarily vulnerable and severely diminish our impact. What if there’s another way of looking at how we handle toxic people in our lives? If someone is getting in the way of you becoming the person God created you to be or frustrating the work God has called you to do, for you that person is toxic. It’s not selfish for you to want to be who God created you to be, and it’s not selfish for you to do what God created you to do, Gary said.

Toxic people are great at gaslighting and destroying your self-confidence. “If you think you are going crazy, you won’t encourage someone, you won’t lovingly confront, it will undercut your ability to be effective and minister,” Gary said. “Walking away would have sounded elitist to me even five years ago, but once I saw the methods of Jesus, I recognized there are times to walk in the footsteps of Jesus away and not forward.”

Gary said the book offered freedom and healing for many. “It has been so heartwarming to hear the testimonies of people having greater appreciation and awareness of how the Spirit can use them. They have learned to value their own time and confidence,” he said.

Gary stressed that every toxic person is difficult, but not every difficult person is toxic.  “I don’t want to apply the term too broadly.”

A toxic person can wreak havoc in a marriage, causing harm that may be irreparable. Gary reminds that while it takes two to build an intimate marriage, just one person can blow a marriage apart.

“Friends, pastors, counselors — encourage people. Don’t pour on more shame,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect in marriage, nobody goes through marriage without regrets.”

He remembers counseling a couple where the husband literally, “gave me the chills. He didn’t want an intimate marriage so he could love, bless, support and encourage his wife. Marriage gave him a very effective platform to terrorize this woman.

“It is so rewarding to save a marriage, but in this case, preserving a marriage would have been preserving a platform of abuse. The institution of marriage is not more important than the people involved. Marriage doesn’t give someone a license for evil.”

“Kindness approaches every topic, whether abuse or divorce, through the lens of the heart of Jesus rather than legalism,” he added. However, he has seen cases where believing couples with repentant hearts were able to leave the toxicity instead of their marriage.

He remembers a couple who were both caught in a cycle of toxicity toward each other. The husband committed to change first.  It took 11 months, but eventually the wife was convicted by God to respond to him, confessed, repented, and their marriage was restored.

Gary’s concept can be applied in the vein of James Dobson’s Love Must Be Tough. He interviewed a drug addict who had miraculously beaten his addiction and regained his wife and family. Gary asked what had been the factor that convinced him to change.

He told Gary he beat his addiction when he became absolutely convinced that his wife would walk away from him and deny access to his child. “If I had thought there was a 1% chance that she wouldn’t leave, I would have taken it,” he said. Gary credits the woman with the act of love that saved their marriage. “It is not safe to have a drug addict at home with your kids,” he said. “I applaud her courage and faith to stand up and mean it.”

Peers Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott, authors of Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, recommend Gary’s book:

“Gary Thomas has done it again. He’s given us a biblically grounded pathway toward healthy living—especially in our relationships. In When to Walk Away, he provides the steps we all need in managing toxic people and high-maintenance relationships. It’s encouraging, practical, and desperately needed. Don’t miss out on this life-changing message.”

Sacred Marriage

Sacred Marriage, published in 2000, is Gary’s seminal work. It put him on the map as a thought leader in the marriage ministry realm.  Since then, the content of more than 1 million copies has been used by schools, counselors and pastors as a basis for countless sermons and courses. In Sacred Marriage, Gary pioneered the concept that marriage is difficult, yet the difficulties serve a purpose as they bring people closer to Christ. He sought to make the idea normative, to help people reframe their expectations as they encounter frustrations in marriage.

“We all stumble and sin because we live in a fallen world. It’s like being on mile 20 of a marathon. It’s difficult because a marathon is a hard race, and you’ve run 20 miles.” (Gary is a marathon runner himself, so he identifies first-hand with this analogy.)

“All marriages will have hard times. It doesn’t mean someone married the wrong person or that something is wrong with their marriage. 

“Difficulty has a purpose. God builds in negatives and positives to help us become more like Christ.” He compares marriage to a workout. “You know you will sweat, be a little sore, but in the end, you’ll be faster, stronger and healthier for it. Marriage helps us learn to be more patient, humble, gentle. It is not just about marriage itself, it’s what it shows to the world.”

Gary felt compelled to diffuse the popular cultural myth that marriage is supposed to make us “happy.” “So many couples justify divorce because they say, ‘Doesn’t God want me to be happy?’ They have a very primitive definition of happiness.

“I’m not anti-happy,” he said. “Somehow, a non-biblical view that God is anti-pleasure has slipped into the church. (a concept he further expands in his book, Pure Pleasure.) Neuroscience says we are only able to say so many ‘no’s’ in any given day.”  He suggests building a marriage on real and satisfying intimacy in which no room exists for thoughts of another lover.

“You could spend your time actively raising your children, becoming engaged in their lives in such a way that your heart overflows with love for your family, making any thought of tearing apart your family repugnant. You could faithfully pursue the work to which God has called you so that you have neither the time nor the inclination for something as sordid as an affair,” he said. “See the difference? We can build lives of true, lasting pleasure, and so fortify ourselves against evil, because evil has lost much of its allure — or we can try, with an iron will, to ‘scare’ ourselves away from evil while still, deep in our hearts, truly longing for it.

“Which life do you want to live? Which life do you believe will ultimately succeed? Thomas Chalmers, a nineteenth-century Scottish preacher said, ‘Let’s give them visions of something better, something nobler, to fill their hearts. Let’s set the church on the path of exalting vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph. Let’s advertise the good life by becoming living examples of truly satisfied souls.’”

Cherish

Another one of Gary’s books, Cherish: The One Word That Changes Everything for Your Marriage, and its accompanying Cherish Challenge, builds on concepts found in Sacred Marriage.

“Cherish was a word hiding in plain sight in the traditional marriage vows,” Gary said. “Sacred Marriage and A Lifelong Love focused a lot on love. The vows raise the bar from love to cherish. Love brings connotations of obligations, service, sacrifice, commitment. Cherish creates a different dynamic as it challenges couples to focus on the excellence, beauty and wonder of their spouse.

“Something about being cherished releases a new motivation,” Gary added, “and marriage is 50% motivation. Most people know what to do, we just have to have the motivation to do it.” 

He contrasts cherishing with infatuation. “Infatuation starts out red hot,” he said. “You can’t make infatuation happen, and you can’t stop it from fading. You CAN choose to begin acts and attitudes to grow cherishing. It is the opposite of infatuation.”

He highlights practices that help couples cherish their spouse, beginning with training the brain to look for positive things throughout the day to build a cherishing mindset.

“Stop taking your spouse for granted and start seeing what has become status quo,” he said. “One woman kept a dry erase board in the couple’s bathroom where she could write compliments and encouraging messages. Gary created a journal in which he wrote something affirming about his wife daily, a gift he presented her for Christmas.

In 2020 Gary updated another of his best-sellers, Sacred Pathways: Nine Ways to Connect with God, which takes the concepts in Sacred Marriage and applies them to ways people can deepen their personal walk with God.

“It was a spiritual challenge rather than a relationship challenge,” he said. The closer we get to Christ, the closer we can get to others.” Since its publication in 1996, Sacred Pathways has offered many understanding of the ways they best communicate with God and freedom to engage in the practices most meaningful to them.

Gary has released more than 20 books. Find samples chapters of When to Walk Away, Cherish, Sacred Marriage and Pure Pleasure, as well as study guides, blogs and other resources at garythomas.com.