Out-Love Your Spouse - The Final Chapter?

We are ending the last week of our “Out-Love” our spouse challenge. This is only the starting place. Our challenge is the beginning of a new way of life. An intentional effort to love our spouse with the love of Christ. 

I will never forget what Shelly shared with me months ago. It has forever changed my heart and how I love on my spouse. 

This is a never look back journey. Start down this road and commit to love your spouse and to love Jesus more than you love yourself.

Things can change and amazingly just as we end this focused time together, look what arrived in the mail as my husband was on a business trip. 

Two cards arrived. Randomly. For no reason at all.

One for me and astonishingly one for my teen daughter.

Who says a man can't change.

The timing of this is impeccable and I believe orchestrated by God just to say to me, "Lynn, see you do what I ask and I will move everything along just as it should be."

We serve an all-powerful God. One who listens to the prayers of His people. A God who loves us and wants the best for us. Our God wants us to out-love our spouse just the way He out-loves us.

So put your old way of thinking away. Continue on this journey and watch what our God can do in the lives of ordinary men and women.

BIG hugs, Lynn

PS. I will be speaking LIVE about this very journey ONLINE, November 3rd at 10 a.m. PT and 1 p.m. ET with an open Q&A following at Noon PT, 3 pm. ET. To learn more and to participate in this fantastic marriage conference from the comfort of your own home, Visit Replenish Your Soul Conference.

Still amazed.    

How has Out-loving Your spouse challenged you, made a difference in your marriage, changed you, changed your spouse. Talk to me in the comments. Lynn

And the Walls Came A-Tumbling Down

Lynn’s post yesterday talked about the walls we erect that keep our guys on the outside. I want to share with you how this translated into my life.

I walked into my marriage with the expectations I’d leaned from the pages of romance novels and movies. I’d bought into the fairytale. Everything was fine in the beginning but then the reality began to settle in.

My husband wasn’t perfect. He didn’t do the things I thought he should. He didn’t get that he had a role to play in the script I’d written in my mind and heart. He didn’t even know his lines!

How dare he let me down like that? How dare he not do the things around the house that seemed so obvious to me? How dare he not pull his weight in the relationship?

So what else could I do? I jumped in and did it. After all, these are things that have to be done and done right. You know the saying, if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. So I did!

I did everything. I had to. No one else would. I took care of the kids, the house—everything. And I worked so hard to get things just right and either he didn’t notice or the kids just undid it all so that I had to do all over again.

Life wasn’t fair. Why didn’t he get that if he would just do things the way I wanted and was there when I needed him, life would be so much easier.

Let’s fast forward to a little ways into my marriage. We’d moved to Switzerland because of a work opportunity for my husband. Things started out great, then went from bad to worse. The weight of the world on my shoulders effectively doubled.

I walked into my new church one day and was approached by a soft-spoken woman. She handed me a piece of paper about a group called 1Peter3, a group for women married to unbelievers. I joined immediately and we studied the book Beloved Unbeliever together.

God began to open my eyes through this and another Bible study, Experiencing God. Not to see my husband’s faults and lack, but to see my own. I began to see how much I pressure I had put upon my marriage and my husband through my expectations. I backed off, reassessed, and started to painfully change the way I talked to my husband. I became aware of my words. My marriage began to improve greatly as God taught me to respect my husband.

Still, there was this pattern that seemed to show up. Things would go great for a while and then go down the drain again. Why? Why did this keep coming back? Why did we keep getting stuck in this place? I’d done pretty well in communicating my needs and helping to understand what I was saying without being condemning, so why did the same issues keep cropping up?

One day I was walking into my kitchen. Maybe I was praying, I don’t clearly remember. What I do remember was a very clear and sudden thought.

“It’s not him who has to change, it’s me. It’s not his perceptions that need adjustment, it’s mine.”

Like a light bulb bursting with light, this truth exploded in my head and did a number on my heart. I realized I had let go of my expectations of what I wanted and had replaced them with negative expectations. The kind where you expect your spouse to do what he’s always done, to disappoint you the way he always done, to let you down the way he’s always done.

I’d placed these negative expectations on my husband, ones he could actually meet, but never gave him a chance to do anything else. The problem was, each one added a brick to that wall around me, the one I thought would keep me from feeling the hurt of being let down. And my poor guy kept bouncing into it, feeling as if he could never do anything right.

It’s a vicious cycle. It destroys marriages. It destroys people.

I had to tear down the bricks and it would take a while. First, I had to break this habit of negative expectations that I’d developed and see in my husband the potential God had created in him. Until I did, my husband would never become the man God had fashioned him to be. And two, I had to rebuild trust in our marriage. I had to show my husband I believed in him, that I truly supported him, and trusted him. Respected him.

My desire to change my husband shifted to a desire to change me. I wanted to change. I needed to change. I was desperate for freedom! I prayed for God to change me, to change my heart, to change my thinking, and to help me love my husband the way Jesus loves him.

God took my pain and desire and used it to tear down the walls I had built around my emotions. He freed me from lies and bad habits and showed me how to affirm, appreciate and out-love my husband.

Friends, this is not easy to share with you. I have no shame admitting my path because I know God has forgiven and redeemed me and my past. But to write this out brings me tears. It’s not been an easy journey. It’s been painful but so worth it!

God is gracious, kind and faithful. I shared in our Weekend Devo what my husband did for me last week. That is not how it’s always been. It has taken work and time to reach this place of where I can love him without expectation and the more I do—the more I love my husband through Jesus—the more our marriage has healed and thrived.

For so many years I wanted my guy to fit a mold that I had created for the perfect husband. To finally release him from that and to just love and appreciate the man he is, and then to out-love him as we’ve been doing here, brought something from his mouth I thought I would never hear. He actually referred to a task that needed to be done in our home as a “job for him, a husband’s job.” Something I never would have imagined I’d hear him say.

I still stumble at times and God is quick to show me and pick me up so I can apologize to my husband. The results of this journey are still coming in. I’ve changed dramatically and my husband has responded in so many unexpected ways. Now he’s starting to out-love me. That was never my motivation for out-loving him. I wanted only to be obedient to God for the sake of my husband’s future salvation, to show him Jesus.

The world will tell you that your perfect mate will meet your every need. God will tell you that He is all that you need and will show that He’s already met your every need in His Son Jesus. When we live in this truth, we are free to love Jesus and everyone He puts in our path. We truly love because He first loved us.

God sees your desires and efforts, your pain and struggles in your marriage. He wants to show you a better way. Ask him. He’s just waiting for you to make the first move.

Praying and believing,
Dineen

Out-Love Your Spouse - The Result

Why?

Why make the effort to out-love my husband. Why must it always be me to make the first move? Why can’t he change for once?

Why?

Several months have passed since I first met Shelly Weaver. She has been used by God to inspire many of us here at Spiritually Unequal Marriage to live outside of the norm and to love our spouse with the love of Christ and to trust Him to transform our marriages.  

But the most profound part of this journey that Shelly shared with me is what I am going to share with you today. This is it:

Our husbands are trapped. And, we are the ones who have them tied down in an endless bumper-car ride.

You see, over the years out of our insecurities, pain, our past failures, our selfishness, we have erected many walls. He forgets our birthday, construction begins. Cinderblock is placed down in thick blankets of cement. He works late to many nights; piles of bricks are added to that fortress forming about our tender core. Over the years, with a precision that surpasses the finest architect, we build walls of protection, defenses, higher and higher.

Until eventually, the walls are insurmountable. Your husband isn’t allowed in. In fact, even Jesus at times can’t get through because we are sealed off completely.

The walls have names; bitterness, resentment, cynicism, distrust, unforgiveness , anger, apathy, hatred, loathing, .........

And here’s the thing, our men keep bumping into these walls and bouncing away. They don’t even know they are strapped into this menacing bumper-car cycle and are at a complete loss on how to undo it all.

It’s no wonder they continue to behave and react the way they do. They don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s the same old ride, the same old reaction, the same and familiar responses.

But that all changes when we truly begin to out-love our spouse. When we choose to place Jesus on the throne of our lives, to lay down our “self” and let the Lord release our spouse from our insidious carnival ride.

When we purposely choose to forgive our man when it doesn’t make sense. We win. When we offer love in the face of anger, we win. When we live to have a Christ-centered marriage and not a spouse-centered marriage that is where our spouse discovers freedom. And the best part of this, so do we. We discover freedom.

Let me give you an example. Shelly shared this story with me about a time she went against everything within her heart and mind and chose to obey God. You be the judge.

Shelly has a teenaged daughter. I also have a teen daughter so I know the angst of living with a teen. If we could harness the emotional power of a teen girl, we would never experience an energy crisis again. With that said, I will I also tell you that as a mother, we share the emotional journey of our girls to a great extent, right along with our kid.

Shelly told me that her daughter and her best friend of many years somehow landed in a place in their relationship where their friendship was rocked to the core. Hurtful words were said and emotional wounds were inflicted and a permanent tear in their relationship resulted.

Now I will tell you that when your teen daughter has been hurt like this, you are hurt like this as well.

The girls no longer talked to one another and the life-long friendship was over. And Shelly, as most moms, was hurt, devastated and like her daughter, likely to never speak to that “mean” girl again.

However, through the transforming power of Jesus Shelly decided to be different. And in fact, ran into her daughter’s “no-longer best friend” at school. It would have been easy to speak a casual greeting of “Hi” and walk away but Shelly who was living to out-love people with the love of Christ, purposely took her emotions to the cross and decidedly started a conversation with the girl.

She complimented her and her new hair style. Exchange a smile and a kindness that certainly surprised the youth. Shelly recounted this story to me to say everything in her actions was the opposite of how she would have reacted in the flesh. But Shelly decided she was done with the walls. She was willing to take a chance of more pain and remove the walls that were recently constructed.

Shelly went on the tell me this: Lynn when I stepped out and offered kindness instead of a stoic response it opened a door. This young girl felt safe that Shelly wasn’t mad. There wasn’t a parental barrier now to deal with and that within a week the two girls had mended their relationship and it was back to where it once was. BFF’s and happy as two pees in a pod.

Shelly said: This is exactly what happens with our men. They keep bumping up against these walls we have erected and have no other choice but to respond (bounce back) in exactly the same way they always have.

BUT, when we remove those walls and allow them FREEDOM to move closer, to experience a different reaction, to see a part of us they haven’t glimpsed in a long time, it changes them. They are free to make moves toward our heart and discover what you have both been missing. They will make mistakes and it’s easy to put up those walls again but that is where our relationship with Jesus changes everything.

We can trust Christ with our pain. We can love our imperfect men out of a vast reservoir of Christ’s power. We don’t need to keep score or always be right or win. We truly can trust Christ with it all and that is out-loving our spouse. That kind of love moves mountains, it unties men who are stuck in a bumper-car night ride and it releases women to love with an open heart.

To be vulnerable, to be authentic, to be a wife that a man adores and is honored to have on his arm.

It’s about Jesus. It’s trusting Him to out-love us so we can out-love others.

This week our challenge opportunity is to trust God with the walls we have constructed. To tear them down with intention and put God to the test. Let us become so secure in our relationship with Christ that we can love others with authenticity and transparency. THAT kind of love changes everything. Husbands, wives, daughters, sons, neighbors and mostly it changes us. That is the freedom described in scripture. It is for freedom that Christ set us free. Galatians 5:1

Today, ask God about this. Ask Him if it’s true that if you actually let down your walls that there is freedom. Ask Him to pour His supernatural love into you so that you have the courage to walk where you haven’t in a long while. I realize this is really, really difficult to truly step back, forgive and trust but ask God to help you. He will.

Stop back during the week and share with me how you found the walls, tore them down and how the people around you reacted. I’m praying for a mighty change for you and your marriage, hugs, Lynn

Weekend Devo — Don't Give Up!

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. — Hebrews 12:1

It's been an overwhelming week and one night I was pretty grumpy with my hubby because I didn't feel like he was doing enough to help me. Glad I kept that thought to myself and took it to God. My guy was kind and listened to me vent my overwhelming to do list. And I apologized for being grumpy.

In the meantime, God showed me "WE" would get it all done (I'd left God out of my list, imagine that? ;-) and we did get it done, which taught me again of God's faithfulness. Thank you, Lord!

The blessings didn't stop there though. I asked my hubby to grab a few things from the store a couple nights ago. He came home with five bags of grocers with items to make my life easier. Included in those items were a wedge of my favorite cheese, two jars of apple cranberry butter from Trader Joes and a gorgeous bouquet of fall flowers. I was floored, surprised and humbled. My guy had out-loved me that night.

One of our Facebook readers shared that a simple act of respect had brought a kindness from her husband that she hadn't seen in a long time.

If you're struggling with this challenge, friends, please keep going. God is faithful, always! He sees your efforts and blesses us in unexpected ways.

Praying and believing,
Dineen

Who Are You Fighting With? Out-Love Your Spouse

I have been writing about walking the Christian walk in a spiritually mismatched marriage now for a long time. One thing I have discovered is that when we take on a challenge here at SUM it is met with enthusiasm and hope by many of you. 

…..at the beginning. 

Here we are in week three. Guess what? Many of you have already thrown in the towel. You have given up because you don’t see immediate results. You say to yourself, “Well Lynn, this is all very well and good for you but you don’t know "my" husband. You don’t know what I live with every day of my life.” 

That is true. 

That is also a lie. 

I don’t know the details of your life but I do know that if you are a child of God, you have every resource available to you to live in victory. So, I’m talking to all of us who may be camped in the village of discontent and living in the house of discouragement. It’s time for a refresher course in exactly what is really going on here. 

Hold on to your hats because God has given me a word today and it’s going to shake a few people up and work some change in these houses of gloominess. 

The Accuser has been busy of late. Have you heard any of these voices in your head lately?

• You’re no good.
• You’re a terrible wife.
• You’re not a good Christian
• You’re a bad mother.
• No one will ever love you.

Guys:

• You’re not good enough.
• You don’t do anything right.
• You aren’t man enough.
• You are a terrible dad. 

These voices are NOT of God. They are straight from the pit of hell. 

Ephesians 6: 10-12 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 

It’s at exactly this point in a challenge that you can and should begin to discover something new in your relationship with God and your spouse but this is exactly when the devil moves in to do his work. 

What is his work? Look at verse 11. The word -schemes. These are strategies to deceive you. Now let me be clear here. The spiritual realm is REAL. There is an invisible realm that is all around us. Let me take this a step further, it is a realm that is at war. Either we are a pawn of the devil in this war or we are living out of victory through the power of Jesus Christ. It’s one or the other. 

It’s precisely now that the enemy will do everything in his power to bring strategies to bear to deceive you, to draw you away from God and to fill your heart with partial truths and lies. And let’s be clear here again, our struggle is not against our spouse. Our struggle is against what? See verse 12. 

We are involved in an invisible war with eternal consequences and that war primarily plays out in our head. 

2 Corinthians 10: 3-5 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 

The war is largely in our mind. 

But now get this. What happens when we resist the devil? James 4:5  You don’t need to be afraid. It’s true, you need to know what you are doing and you need to pray but you need not fear the serpent. As believers in Christ, we do not fight for victory we fight from victory. 

Write these scriptures down and memorize them.

1 John 4:4

1 John 5:4-5

James 4: 7-8 

It is our intercessory prayer for our spouse, our kids, and our life that makes every difference and can change the eternal destiny of many that our life touches. So right now, pick yourself up. Bind the belt of truth around you, put on the shield, tie up the shoes. Tell the devil, out-loud, that he MUST flee and begin again to pray with fervor and fierceness for your spouse that God will open his eyes. Pray for fresh filling of the Holy Spirit. Pray against the plans and schemes of darkness and live out of the victory that is yours. 

Now repeat after me: I resist the devil and he must flee.

I resist the devil and he must flee.

I RESIST THE DEVIL AND HE MUST FLEE. 

By the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. Amen. 

Catch up here again on Monday as we talk about the next step in our challenge and discover the pivotal point of this journey. 

In the comments, leave your prayers of power and victory. Pray for your husband by name and Dineen, Shelly and I will pray along with you. 

For me: I pray Mike is overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit and his spiritual eyes are blown wide open to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. In Jesus name, Amen 

(Thanks Pastor Chip Ingram, I am inspired)

Spouse-Based or God-Based?

What is the difference between a spouse-based marriage and a God-based marriage?

This is the question my Sunday school leader asked our group this past weekend. We’re currently doing Gary Thomas’ video series, Sacred Marriage, which goes with his book by the same title. It’s a great course, and I have loved hearing different perspectives on marriage and how God works in our marriages and uses them to refine us.

The answer to this question also fits into our “Out-Love Your Spouse” challenge. So here it is:

A spouse-based marriage is performance based. In other words, I’ll do something nice for him if he does something for me. Or, why should I do that for her? She never does anything for me? And how about this one: He was grumpy last night. No way am I going to be nice to him today.

Basically, as long as our spouse is performing to our standards, and meeting our needs, we will love them, help them, and be a good spouse in return. As soon as they stop meeting that standard, we withdraw our affection, love and help.

In a God-based marriage we love our spouse because that is what Jesus has asked us to do—love one another. We love our spouse whether they are grumpy or happy. We help our spouse without the expectation of getting something in return. We serve our spouse as an act of serving God.

See the difference? I know this challenge to “out-love” our spouse isn’t an easy one, especially if you’re in a difficult marriage. Especially if you’re in a situation where there is hostility and rebuff. But I want to encourage you to persevere, because I am confident of two things:

1. When we love our spouse from the motivation that we are serving God—being obedient to God—God sees our efforts. Our spouse may not, but God sees. And He is faithful!

2. In some way, our spouse will be affected on some level. They may not respond right away. They may not respond in a way that you’d expect. But when we are loving our spouse from the motivation to serve God—in essence, if we are loving our spouse from a place of loving Jesus—we become a conduit for the love of Christ to reach our spouse. That’s powerful!

Look at Hebrews 10:23-24:

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.

My friends, we heard what Shelley shared with Lynn in the video about what her pastor told her. Our calling to love and serve begins right in our own homes. God wants us to start there before He can bring us out into the mission fields of our workplace, our neighborhood, or even our friends and extended family.

Don’t give up. God calls us to love even the most unlovable. Even if that defines our spouse at the moment. And if we’re totally honest here, we aren’t always very lovable either, are we?

Last week, I did small things for my hubby, like sitting on the couch with him instead of the chair I usually sit on. I looked for little things that would make his life a little easier and his home a haven to return to. God put this on my heart as away to comfort my stressed out guy. One night, this poor guy thanked me for making dinner—twice in one meal. I didn’t ask for that appreciation. I only sought to do what God was showing me to do.

And finally, let me say that just because our spouse isn’t a believer (yet) doesn't mean we can’t have a God-centered marriage. You are the conduit to bring God into your marriage. Keep the faith and remember that through that very same faith, your spouse partakes in your sanctification (read “Sanctified Unbeliever” here) and God’s covering.

Praying and believing,
Dineen

Out-Love Your Spouse - Your Ideas

Hi My Friends,

Well, I think this post is going to be a little off track and unorganized. For some reason I have another cold and the headache is persistent today, so I will be brief.

This Friday I'm going to share with you what happens in an ordinary marriage when you put the principals of "out-loving" your spouse into practice. THERE ARE some amazing and unexpected changes that come out of our efforts.

At Kathi's book Club they are sharing ideas on how you out-love your husband. One of the women said, "I also want to make a dry erase sign for the bathroom that says I love you because…. and change the message frequently for him so that he can see all the reasons that I love him."

What a great idea! I'm going to do that as well. So, what ideas do you have or what has worked for you? Can't wait to learn from you and let's help each other out with some ideas to out love, romance, delight, surprise and love on our spouse with intention. Hugs, Lynn

Weekend Devo — God's Timing

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him. — Psalm 37:7

The biggest challenge we often have is patience, wouldn't you say? I see this all the time in others and in myself. We want things to change now, to get better, get easier, go smoother. But what if we knew those very changes we're so impatient wouldn't be as effective if they happened in our time frame? 

Our October challenge has the potential to bring amazing changes in our marriages. Some we'll see fairly quickly, others may take a while. So let's keep going and trust God not only in the results but in the timing as well. His plan and timing are always best. Amen?

Praying and believing,
Dineen 

Out-Love Your Spouse - It's time for the Next Challenge

I have to tell you that this first part of this challenge, God really put me to task. I discovered it is monumentally difficult, at least for me, to change speech patterns that are decades old. What is hilarious to me is that concurrent to working through this challenge, I am also facilitating a Bible study at church entitled, Conversation Peace, The Power of Transformed Speech. 

This study and the road map of Out-loving your spouse are parallel in motion. Go figure. God really wants me to “get this.” 

I am. 

Truly, I have made progress after much learning, much surrender, much apologizing, and a humbling of my pride. 

Mercy! 

Today it’s time to move our challenge forward to the next step. 

Words of affirmation. 

If you remember the video, Shelly Weaver, shared the steps of her challenge and the next step is to be purposeful to say words to our spouse that are affirming. Shelly shared that she struggled to say, “I love you.” I thought it was brave and vulnerable of her to share that these, even simple affirming phrases were a struggle. And if you are in a rocky or challenging season of marriage, it may taste like vinegar rolling off your tongue to speak them to your spouse. 

This challenge is going to be especially difficult but I promise the rewards of this challenge are waiting. 

Shelly began to say kind things to her husband. She thanked him for what she felt were ordinary, expected, things that he did, such as mowing the lawn. I love you was spoken with frequency and she acknowledged him. 

Shelly said, “I began to appreciate and thank him for things that you take for granted or that you expect them to do on a regular basis.”

Here are some thoughts to get you started:

• You look handsome today.
• I love you for the way you laugh.
• Thank you for handling the garbage.
• Thanks for helping out with driving little Joey to soccer.
• You still rock my world.
• I would walk through fire for you. (I said this recently to my husband and he looked like deer in headlights for a second. When he recovered, he looked gently at me and said, “Thank you Sweetie.”)
• I so appreciate how you set a great example for our kids by ________.
• That was a great Daddy moment (Catch him in the moment of play, reading, talking with one of the kids). 

Okay there are more words of affirmation here. We want to add to the list. So, PLEASE, if you have some affirming words and/or phrases, share them in the comments. We need to help one another. 

I’m looking forward to what this challenge brings in the week ahead. I promise I plan to explain what happens when we stick with these challenges. Big things can happen. Stay tuned and now go share some of Christ’s love with your man and your family. Hugs, Lynn

If you need to hear Shelly's story again, listen in.

 

Out-Love your Spouse from The Intentional Marriage on Vimeo.

The Silent Talker

So far, we’ve been talking about our words—how we use them and even when. I have to share with you that early on in my marriage, I didn’t always use my words wisely when I did speak up, but my biggest issue was not speaking up at all.

Instead I held things in, choosing my own discomfort over dealing with a conflict or disagreement. I swallowed hurts at times that should have been expressed or shared in good ways in order to seek resolution.

If you’re a “stuffer” like me, you know what happens eventually. You blow like a volcano, spewing your resentment and anger on anyone who happens to be around. I functioned this way for many years and my family likened my outbursts to a small volcano that occasionally blew just enough to let off some steam. They even had me pegged down to how long between outbursts.

The thing is, I didn’t like being that volcano. Even in the middle of a “steam release,” I can recall asking myself, “Why am I doing this?” The lesson I painfully learned was that though we had spans of what seemed like peaceful times, the waters beneath my seemingly calm exterior were slowly reaching critical mass.

The reason I’m sharing this is to make a distinction between being a doormat and actually speaking when something needs to be said. Sometimes we’re put in a position where we do need to let our spouse know they crossed a boundary, when something they said hurt our feelings, or when something they promised they would do didn’t get done.

But it comes down to how we speak up and what our attitude is. No matter how good our marriage might be, it’s not easy living with another person on a daily basis. Roommates can be changed, marriages can’t (or shouldn’t). So how do we communicate in ways that bring understanding and edification at the same time?

Let’s look at what God has to say:

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. — Ephesians 4:14-16 (emphasis mine)

This is a great piece of Scripture, because even though Paul is referring to spreading the Good News, it’s a model for all communication. When our motivation and attitude stem from a desire to speak truth in order to bring understanding and peace, when we speak from a place of concern not only for ourselves but for the other person as well, we’ve shifted from a place of blame to partnership.

In marriage this is critical. It’s what I call a “we mentality.” As opposed to an “I mentality,” where we wind up speaking out of anger and resentment.

Let’s look at another great peace of Scripture:

Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. — Colossians 4:6

Again, Paul is referring to how the disciples were to speak to “outsiders,” how they were to witness to unbelievers.

My friends, may I propose that we are in that same place? We have an “outsider” in our very homes on a daily basis. How much more critical is it that we speak words full of grace and seasoned with salt?

Speaking the truth in love means expressing our care, our hurt, our frustration with the goal of bringing peace. Instead of seeing our spouse as the enemy in these moments, what if we spoke with the goal to restore the “we” in our marriage? What if we spoke with the objective to bring understanding and to find a mutual solution? What if we spoke with the mind and heart of Christ so that our spouse would have the opportunity to witness what that is?

Yes, sometimes it is best to not speak but other times, we need to in order to help our spouse grow and learn. Just as we need to. This is part of the function of marriage, as iron sharpens iron, we are helping each other to grow into better people. Marriage is teamwork.

This does not mean keeping our mouths shut and not speaking up when a boundary has been crossed, nor does it mean we are in a place to become critical and confrontational. It means we consider our words and motivations, then pray before speaking.

There are still times that I have to remind myself that I need to say something. No more stuffing! And there are times that as the words are coming across my lips, that I literally rephrase because I realize my words convey an “I” mentality instead of a “we.”

We are not perfect. Neither is our spouse. But as Paul says in Ephesians 4, “speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.” In all things, I want to grow up to be like Christ. How about you?

Praying and believing,
Dineen