CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

marriage

By

Our God of Second Chances (In Marriage)

SOURCE:  Cheryl Scruggs (Author of: I Do Again)

Jesus must be the focal point in marriage, not your spouse. Much of the time, without being aware of it, we end up idolizing our spouse, and making them our God, instead of allowing God to be our God.

A godly marriage is one of deep abundance, peace and joy. This does not mean it is free from tough issues or without problems, as there is no such thing as a perfect marriage.

Jesus must be the focal point in marriage, not your spouse. Much of the time, without being aware of it, we end up idolizing our spouse and making them our God, instead of allowing God to be our God.

How do we make Jesus the focal point? We begin with recognizing that marriage was God’s idea. He had the plan for it. We often act like marriage is only about our happiness, but marriage is designed to glorify God.

In the New Testament, Ephesians 5: 21- 31 gives us direction and guidance on how to submit to Christ and one another. It explains how husbands are to love their wives like Christ loved the church and love them like they love their own bodies. It also addresses how a man should leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, thus the two be united into one unit. Lastly, this passage talks about how a wife must respect her husband.

This is a tall order for all of us! What stands out is that, ultimately, we are each to submit to Christ out of obedience, submit to each other, and pray to have a servant’s heart in our marriage.

Trouble is, our culture lacks an accurate concept of what serving means. Husbands, how is God calling you to serve your wife in Ephesians 5? It points out that men are to love their wives like Christ loved the church. Was Christ not the greatest servant of all? He is our protector, our provider, our covering. Men, He is your example! Jesus shows us how to serve.

Jeff and I often share with couples this analogy: What kind of marriage do you think you would have if the two of you were competing to “out-serve” each other?

During our first marriage, Jeff and I had no idea how to serve one another. We fought infrequently and were polite to each other, but there was no real attempt to understand true servanthood. We both ended up selfish and self-focused, each waiting on the other to come to our service.

Yet God gave us a second chance! This time our marriage is different. We now wholeheartedly seek to learn how to better love God and each other. We made so many mistakes in our first marriage, but now have the opportunity to do it His way. Even after 10 years back together, we remain so very grateful for the opportunity.

Our goal is to live out Galatians 5:16-25 (ESV):

But I say, walk by the spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control; against such things there is not law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.

So how can we serve each other practically in the different aspects of a relationship: spiritually, physically, and emotionally?

Scripture calls us to serve each other spiritually by learning and following what it means to take on the character traits of Jesus and living these out. We also serve each other spiritually by being obedient to God and seeking His ways through His Word.

Scripture calls us to serve each other physically by being gentle, kind, patient, and displaying self-control. The Bible also calls us to serve each other sexually: “Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Corinthians 7:5).

Finally, God calls us to serve each other emotionally through a loving nature, by pursuing peace in the marriage, and by being joyful in our relationship. 2 Corinthians 2:3 (ESV) gives us a great example of how our joy can benefit others: “Surely you all know that my joy comes from your being joyful”.

God is trying to teach you many things through your marriage. He desires to mold and shape you into what he wants you to be. Our focus in marriage, this time around, is on serving God and each other, rather than focusing on ourselves.

By

God’s Will…How the Heck Do I Find It????

I am a planner. I like to use “strategery.” If you don’t know that word, you are too young and should probably stop reading now. So anyway. I am a planner or as I like to say, a strategic thinker. Sounds so much better. I remember being in high school, coming to the end, and trying to figure out what was next. Where was I going to college? What was my career going to be? What was the PLAN????

I became very much a seeker at this time. Seeking out God’s will for my life. His plan. What was it and how do I find it? I asked Him to show me. I sought it out in every way I could. I read scripture, prayed, asked my parents. Always the same answer…He will reveal it in His timing. ARRRGGGHHHHHH!!! Are you serious? Really? Ok, I will wait. Only…I never got it. No great revelation, no burning bush, no master plan.

I spent the next 30 years following my own plan. Oh, I prayed. And bargained. Sought His strategic vision for my life, especially when things went very wrong as happened quite a lot. When He didn’t provide it to me, I just kept driving and following my own way. My own best decisions led me to unemployment, leaving my wife and family, sons who wouldn’t speak to me, spiritually bankrupt, and financially unstable. My plan worked out really well!

After much forced humility, soul searching, surrender, and brokenness, God has shown me His will…daily. Not in a large, strategic, forward looking way. Just day by day. It took me learning to live one day at a time to realize that He was right beside me, hoping to guide me if I would just surrender.

God’s will becomes apparent to me a step at a time. He reveals it in His timing but in how I didn’t expect. After I worked step 3, turning my life and my WILL over to the care of God, I began to see how He reveals His will to me. When I listen, seek His guidance in my daily minute by minute life, He reveals more. Only He hasn’t so far given me the larger plan.

I recently began work on a Masters in Addiction Counseling degree. God made it very plain to me through prayer, His word, and many of you that I should pursue this. So I have. Only He didn’t tell me how to pay for it, how to navigate, how to get to graduation and practice. He let me know much as He let Abram know…get up and go. I will get you there. Scary but freeing.

In 2016, as I stared down the end of my marriage and life as I knew it, I first truly recognized God’s guidance in my life at the age of 48. He clearly told me that I needed to do a full disclosure of my sexual immorality to my wife. He promised me I would survive. He didn’t reveal how that would look or what would happen in between. That is the first time in my life that I stepped aside, and as my friend Dan says, “let Him drive.” 

What I found was His decisions and plans are better than mine. The last 4+ years have been wonderful, ugly, painful, full of joy, full of sorry and damage. I survived. My marriage survived. My boys speak to me. I don’t know how we got here. I just know I didn’t drive.

By

How’s your side of the street?

Psalm 94:19 When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought me joy.

Since COVID-19 took over our lives, I have struggled with worry. No, worry isn’t right. Anxiety is more accurate. It’s weird. I know I have experienced much worse situations. My wife discovering my infidelity. My sons not speaking to me for months after that. Losing my job multiple times. The death of both of my parents within 1 year of each other. Real devastating issues. For some reason, though…my anxiety has been crippling. Which really makes me laugh when I stop and think about how my current situation compares to previous experiences.

I haven’t slept well. For the last few weeks I have probably averaged 4-5 hours a night, tops. My schedule, stability, all are off. I like routine. I didn’t realize how important that was to me until recently. My routine isn’t routine. I can’t get into a groove. Work, life, marriage, my kids, my job, church. All are off. I don’t quite know what to do about it. So far I have just not done anything. Except whine, obviously.

My wife and I take walks every day. It’s part of our routine. A major part of our intimacy building. And something we just both crave. Even when I travel, which I usually do a lot for work, we take a walk together on a video call. It’s our time to catch up, listen, talk about our lives, the future, our boys, our struggles, our hopes, dreams…and then we stop on a bench along the lake and we pray together. This part of my day has been transformational for my marriage…and my own recovery. 

One of my wife’s strengths is that she is a truth teller. I didn’t recognize this until very recently. She has always been a truth teller. I just didn’t realize how important that part of her character was to me. I come from a family of untruth tellers. We hide stuff. We cover up. We don’t talk about things. We try to ignore them so they go away. We don’t want anyone to see under the tent. To know what exactly happens. That is my family of origin. And only later did I realize how shocking my wife had to have been to my family. She certainly was to me. 

So we stopped along the lake the other day, and we did what we always do. We started talking about what was on our minds. What we wanted to pray about. So she asked me,

“You have been really on edge. I am worried about you. What’s going on? Do I need to be worried?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just all this. Everything. My job, you, the boys, our finances. It’s a lot.”

“Is something wrong at work,” she asked? “What happened? I know you are having a hard time with your boss.”

“Yes, it’s just getting to me. I hate working on this project but I don’t want to not be on a project right now. Not a good time.”

“No, it’s not. Do you like the work still. Is it that? Or just your boss on this?”

“I don’t appreciate how this boss treats me. Nothing is ever right.”

“So let me ask you something. What do you tell your guys when you hear them complain that their wife isn’t responding fast enough, isnt recovering quick enough? What do you say?”

“I say to control what they can control. Take care of their side of the street. That’s all they can do. The rest is God’s job.”

“Yes, that is right,” she said. “So why are you spending all your energy freaking out about your boss? Why don’t you just do what you can do…your work. Do it the best way you can.”

That woman pisses me off sometimes. Especially when she is right. I would like to say since that conversation, I have slept well every night. I haven’t. I have stopped when my anxiety is ramped up and remembered step 3…that I committed to turn my life and my will over to the care of God. Including my anxiety. How’s your side of the street? Mine is still messy…but improving.

By

Journal Through Recovery – Bonus Podcast #22: God, How Could You?

Bonus Episode 22 – God, How could you?

I didn’t understand how could God let the things happen to me that led me to addiction? How could he let them happen to my wife? God, How could you?

By

Does Faith Reduce Divorce Risk?

Originally posted at: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/20935/

Religious belief and activity—particularly prayer—matter in important ways. They make a deeply practical difference in how husband and wife interact with each other in daily life.

Many Christians believe that the divorce rate among believers is on a par with that of the unbelieving world. That’s simply not true—particularly for those who take their faith seriously in both belief and practice. The best research from sociology’s leading scholars has established this fact time and again over the last few decades.

Most recently, research conducted at Harvard’s School of Public Health reveals that regularly attending church services together reduces a couple’s risk of divorce by a remarkable 47 percent. Many studies, they report, have similar results ranging from 30 to 50 percent reduction in divorce risk. Happily, this holds largely true for white, black, Asian and Latino couples.

Research conducted at Bowling Green State University, a major center for ground-breaking family-formation research, affirms this conclusion. A leader in this field, Professor Annette Mahoney of Bowling Green’s Spirituality and Psychology Research Team, reports from her decades-long research that a couple’s spiritual intimacy and church participation is “very, very important and undeniably a construct that matters” greatly in boosting marital happiness and longevity. Additional research conducted by Mahoney and her team demonstrates that marriages are stronger and happier when the husband and wife understand the deeper spiritual significance of marriage. These findings have remained consistent over many decades and across socio-economic differences. The Bowling Green team notes:

Three recent longitudinal studies tied higher religious attendance, particularly by couples who attend the same denomination together, to decreased rates of future divorce. These results imply that great depth of integration in a spiritual community can help prevent divorce.

This is because religious belief and activity matter in important ways, making a deeply practical difference in how husband and wife interact with each other in daily life. It helps them manage their conflicts in kinder, more forgiving, and collaborative ways.

Adding to this research, scholars from the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University found that how often a couple attends church together has a strong impact on marital stability. The more often they attend, the stronger their marriage. The researchers report, “When both spouses attend church regularly, the couple has the lowest risk of divorce.” Moreover, couples holding more conservative Christian beliefs had a markedly lower risk than those with no or more liberal theological beliefs. Couples who marry in a religious service show a modestly lower risk of marital separation or dissolution than those who marry in a non-religious ceremony.

Unequally yoked couples—in which one spouse is a Christian while the other is not—are especially prone to divorce, affirming the biblical charge against it. However, when the husband is the regularly church-attending, strong believer, the marriage is much more durable and happier than when the wife is the sole believer. Similarly, in equally yoked couples, there is a demonstrable marital benefit when the husband is the spiritual leader. This speaks strongly to the importance of the man’s spiritual leadership in the home, as a wife is generally more likely to follow and appreciate the husband’s leadership in religious matters than vice versa.

The faith benefit is strong even for couples facing serious difficulties in their marriage. Mahoney and her team explain, “Couples who belonged to the same denomination at the time of their wedding were twice as likely to reconcile as couples in religiously [different] marriages. Couples where either partner had converted to the partner’s denomination prior to marriage were four times more likely to reconcile” than those with no or dissimilar faith (emphasis added). That is a tremendously powerful marriage-strengthening dynamic for a relatively simple relational component.

Church attendance and shared belief are not the only protective faith factors. A couple’s shared prayer life is extremely powerful. A 2015 study discovered that husbands and wives praying together for each other individually and offering forgiveness for personal offenses has “significant positive” effects on marriage overall. It helps them deal with the troubles that naturally arise in marriage, making them both accountable to God, who tells us not to hang onto past hurts and to sacrificially love and forgive others.

The University of Virginia’s W. Bradford Wilcox boldly explains in his book Soul Mates that “shared prayer completely accounts for the association between church attendance and a happy relationship.” This means that prayer as a regular part of a couple’s relationship, according to this research, is the most important spiritual practice in relational success. This is equally true for Latino, Asian, black, and white couples. Prayer not only invites God into the relationship at times of unhappiness and struggle, but also helps the couple become more intimate and concerned with one another. Regularly sharing one’s thoughts with God in the presence of another is extremely intimate, perhaps rivaled only by physical intimacy. It binds people together. They both require great transparency and trust, enhancing the marital relationship.

Church attendance doesn’t merely increase marital happiness and relational health. It is also associated with the likelihood of being married in the first place; church attenders get married at markedly higher rates. Professor Wilcox explains that “For men and women of all races and ethnicities, attending church regularly increases the odds of marriage by at least two-thirds.” African-American men and women are 46 to 51 percent more likely to be married if they attend church regularly. The same measure for Latino men is 62 percent more likely and 58 percent for white men.

Clearly, it is proven by many measures that marriage and church attendance go together in profoundly important ways. For couples who desire happy, fulfilling and enduring marriages, vibrant faith participation is as positively consequential as nearly all other beneficial factors.

While it is not fully understood why faith practice affects marriage so positively, the author of the Harvard study offers a nice round-up of some of the most widely held possibilities. Namely, regular church attendance and religious practice can:

– Reinforce a couple’s understanding that marriage is a sacred thing, larger than the couple and must ideally last for a lifetime.

– Reinforce biblical teachings against divorce, pornography, and marital infidelity.

– Reinforce the nature and importance of marital love, sacrifice, and attending to your spouse’s needs.

– Put couples in contact with numerous resources – encouraging friends/peers and marital education – that help them prepare for and strengthen marriage as well as resolve inevitable conflict. (Wilcox found that encouragement and advice from church friends accounts for more than half of the marital benefit of church attendance.)

– Increase many other important measures of personal health and well-being as well as a deeper sense of meaning in life, all things generally associated with greater marital happiness and protection against divorce.

Faith does matter. It makes a difference in all areas of life, including marriage. It is important that leaders and members of every church know this, as well as all marriage counselors. It’s one of the most powerful secret weapons in marital happiness and longevity—and this should no longer be a secret to anyone.

Glenn T. Stanton is the director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of eight books on various aspects of the family, including The Ring Makes All the Difference: The Hidden Consequences of Cohabitation and the Strong Benefits of Marriage and Loving My LGBT Neighbor: Being Friends in Grace and Truth.

____________________________________________

Studies Referenced

  • Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Religion and Health: A Synthesis,” concluding chapter in Michael Balboni and John Peteet, (eds.) Spirituality and Religion With the Culture of Medicine: From Evidence to Practice (Oxford University Press, 2017).
  • Mohammed K. Fard, et al., “Religiosity and Marital Satisfaction,” Social and Behavioral Sciences 82 (2013): 307-311.
  • Vaugh R. A. Call and Tim B. Heaton, “Religious Influence on Marital Stability,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36 (1997): 382-392.
  • Jonathan R. Olson, et al., “Shared Religious Beliefs, Prayer, and Forgiveness as Predictors of Marital Satisfaction,” Family Relations 64 (2015): 519-533.
  • Annette Mahoney, et al., “Religion in the Home in the 1980s and 1990s: A Meta-Analytic Review and Conceptual Analysis of Links Between Religion, Marriage and Parenting,” Journal of Family Psychology 15 (2001): 559-596.
  • Prabu David and Laura Stafford, “A Relational Approach to Religion and Spirituality in Marriage: The Role of Couple’s Religious Communication in Marital Satisfaction,” Journal of Family Issues 36 (2013): 232-249.
  • Barbara H. Fiese and Thomas J. Tomcho, “Finding Meaning in Religious Practices: The Relation between Religious Holiday Rituals and Marital Satisfaction,” Journal of Family Psychology 15 (2001): 597-609.
  • Joe D. Wilmoth, et al., “Marital Satisfaction, Negative Interaction, and Religiosity: A Comparison of Three Age Groups,” Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging 27 (2015): 222-240.
  • Evelyn L. Lehrer and Carmel U. Chiswick, “Religion as a Determinant of Marital Stability,” Demography 30 (1993): 385-404.
  • Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos (Oxford University Press, 2016).