‘With this ring’

MARRIED FOR GOD
By Christopher Ash
IVP. 174 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-189-2

We put together a four Friday evening marriage course at our church recently, which went very well.

Looking at the very popular course from the HTB stable, which is used by many churches, we found that, although it contains a lot of good practical suggestions and a great chapter on sex, we were rather shocked to realise how man-centred it is and how keen it seems to be to avoid biblical teaching on marriage which contrasts with the current culture.

Fortunately, we happened to have had a manuscript of Christopher Ash’s book Married for God, which had been passed on to us. Ash is securely grounded in Scripture and brings out the essential theme missing in so many marriage courses, that, first and foremost, our marriages are meant to be for the service of God. This theme puts everything else in marriage in its right perspective and brings proper balance. This may sound heavy, but actually Christopher Ash handles it all in a very contemporary and helpful way. I would highly recommend this book. It acts as a fine corrective to exaggerated claims and self-indulgent attitudes to marriage which are endemic in our culture and court disaster in husband / wife relationships.

So, having both Ash and HTB, we were able to put together material for our church marriage course which had ‘the best of both worlds’, and very thankful we were for that.