Equip your Marriage

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Two Lists Your Marriage Needs This Christmas

Posted on by Posted in Marriage Booster .
Tis the season of lists! You have wish lists, shopping lists, and TODO lists to manage. Santa is keeping track of a naughty list and a nice list. But there are two more lists that your marriage needs this season.
 
Two lists your marriage needs this Christmas
1. Truths I know about my mate
2. Lies I believe about my spouse
 
There’s a battle being waged for your marriage every day. On your best day, it’s an innocuous battle in which you must decide to give your mate the benefit of the doubt and interpret his or her thoughts and actions in the most gracious way possible. On your worst day, your marriage is under a full-scale spiritual attack. In response, you need to equip your marriage with two essential lists.

List #1 – Truths I know about my mate

Your marriageJesus declares the import of truth in John 8:32 – “Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Truth is the cornerstone upon which the success of your marriage must be grounded. However, it’s likely that neither you nor your mate have then time to identify and consciously embrace the truth you know exists.
 
As a first step in that direction, ask yourself a few questions:
  • What do you objectively know to be true regarding your life partner?
  • What sort of person is he or she?
  • Think about your mate’s character and values.

Reflect on the answers to these questions. Now build a list of objective truths that describe this unique and gifted person that blesses your life daily.

List #2 – Lies I believe about my spouse

We all have lies and half-truths that we believe. We repeat ideas to ourselves so much that we come to believe them. Sometimes these are fairly harmless myths. In other cases these are dangerous lies that distort your perspective, poisoning the relationship.
 
Common lies in marriage:
  • My mate doesn’t care.
  • When my spouse says or does something hurtful, it’s not an accident.
  • He or she doesn’t appreciate me.
  • I’m the only one actually making an effort.
  • My spouse can never change.
  • My partner is intentionally avoiding me or withholding love from me.
  • And etc.

Common elements in lies we propagate:

  • Question the motive
  • Malign the intent
  • Exaggerate the attitude
  • Assume the emotions
  • Repeat a single word/statement to give it more punch
  • Read between lines that aren’t there
  • Put words in the other’s mouth
  • Go to extremes

At the core of all of these lies you will find an assumption that your spouse intended to hurt you and/or doesn’t care or notice you have been hurt. Furthermore, you’ll find an underlying fear that your needs will continue to go unmet and that the relationship can’t or won’t improve.

The Power of Truth

On your best day, what do you know to be true about your husband or wife? What prevents you from living in the bliss of that knowledge? An internal dialogue crammed full of doubts, half-truths, assumptions, and fears. These manifest themselves as lies that you repeat to yourself often enough that you begin to believe them. On rougher, more difficult days when you are tired and stressed, you’ll readily reach for one or more lies to use as a filter for actions and words. Suddenly, you’ve gone from optimism and clarity to a clouded mess of bitterness and growing resentment grounded in assumptions and a steady mental diet of lies.
 
How do you break this crazy cycle? Hold tight to Truth and reject the lies. Earlier this year we shared Five Lies that Can Wreck your Marriage along with five truths to counter-act those lies. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that in order to be victorious in spiritual warfare, they must “take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ” (II Corinthians 10:3-5).
 
Truth counteracts lies the same way that light counteracts darkness. You and your spouse must each take ownership of your respective thought lives and battle against the temptation to entertain these lies and pessimistic assumptions.

Challenge

Let’s put all of this into action with a hands-on challenge:
 
  • Assume the best about your spouse in every situation for one weekCommitment – Assume the best about your mate in every situation. Every action. Every word. Every non-verbal expression. Interpret every point of contact in the most gracious way possible. When something seems off, assume that you misunderstood rather than assuming that your spouse intended harm.
  • Duration – Try the challenge for one week. Next, stretch the challenge out to two weeks. Eventually work your way up to a full month.
  • Accountability – Journal daily regarding how the challenge is going. Also, identify at least one person that can hold you accountable to the challenge. Pray together and connect periodically to help keep you on track.
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Six ways to equip your mind for spiritual warfare

Posted on by Posted in Marriage Booster .

Spiritual warfare — it’s all in your head. How you feel about good days. What you think when you have bad days. Your response to circumstances is a choice. It’s all in your head. You can choose to be a glass half-full or a glass half-empty type of person. You can choose to look at things in the best possible way or find some reason to be grumpy. It’s all in your head. The apostle Paul recognized this simple truth centuries ago:

“I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know both how to have a little, and I know how to have a lot. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being content — whether well fed or hungry, whether in abundance or in need.” – Philippians 4:11-12
In today’s post we’ll take a look at what a movie taught me about marriage, six ways to equip your mind for spiritual warfafe, and the importance of trusting God’s path for your marriage and your life.

The movie Inception says that its all in our headsWhat a movie taught me about marriage

Leonardo DiCaprio taught me the importance of mastering your own mind in the blockbuster movie, Inception. In that film, characters embark upon a mental odyssey by experiencing layers of dreams (dreams within dreams) to unlock information and explore new possibilities. Unfortunately, some characters lose a grip on what is real and what is mere fiction. As DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, explains: “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” The solution, according to Cobb, is to maintain a totem (a unique object with a particular size, shape, and weight) which keeps you grounded, knowing which world you are in.
 
Are our lives so very different? Don’t we have trouble maintaining our grasp on what is real and what is an illusion? The enemy is cunning and will attempt to distort your view of reality. Paul cautions the church at Corinth:
“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 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.” – II Corinthians 10:3-5 
Indeed, we must be on guard and “take every thought captive” by testing it’s origin. Is this thought holy or harmful? Is this thought consistent with what I know to be TRUTH? It’s a mental battlefield out there and it’s so very easy to run away with our thoughts.
 

Six ways to equip your mind for spiritual warfare

In our up-coming book, The Phoenix Marriage: God creates beauty out of ashes, I acknowledge the importance of preparing yourself to combat the enemy’s lies against your marriage:
“The renewal of your relationship depends upon your ability to reject the lies of the enemy and hold firm to the truths of your marriage.” – Kyle Gabhart, The Phoenix Marriage p125
In chapter 8, I go on to describe the value of creating reminders or cues to maintain a vigilant grasp on the reality of spiritual warfare. I offer six ways to establish mental reminders:The Phoenix Marriage - God creates beauty out of ashes
  1. Memorize scripture.
  2. Keep scripture and encouraging quotes on note cards and keep them in places you will see them.
  3. Christians have used physical reminders for centuries (prayer beads, prayer bracelets, some even feel comfortable getting tattoos).
  4. Set visual reminders such as pictures of armor or weapons.
  5. Find encouraging songs and listen to them repeatedly.
  6. Engage social media for reminders and tips. Join marriage-building Facebook groups and follow pro-marriage feeds on Twitter.
Victory goes to the prepared. If you are going to withstand the constant onslaught of doubts and fears that will invade your brain, you must feed your mind a steady diet of optimism and biblical wisdom.

Trust your path

Hindsight is not always 20/20. Sometimes as you reflect on past decisions, you start to second-guess yourself. Distanced from the particular circumstances, facts, and emotions you felt at the time, you can begin to question your own judgement. So when you hit a rough season in your marriage, it can be easy to think back and be unable to clearly recall why the two of you got together to begin with. Or you might reflect on other pivotal points in your relationship and lose confidence that it was handled properly or even fairly.
 
To survive the mental quagmire, you have to trust the path that God has walked you down. 
  • Trust God’s ability to bring you the right person, no matter how long ago it was. (Proverbs 18:22, Psalm 103:19, Matthew 10:29)
  • Trust your decision to marry that person. (Proverbs 3:6)
  • Trust that any difficult times the two of you experience are part of God’s refinement of you both through your marriage. (Psalm 66:10-12, James 1:2-5)
  • Trust that God has a plan and a purpose for your marriage. (Romans 8:28, Jeremiah 29:11)
EYM_Podcast_FeaturedThumbnailIn this week’s podcast, The Creep and The Cougar, Tammy and I reflect on our own courtship. We note how God brought us together and confirmed his intention for us to be together. When we met years ago, this was crystal clear! It was so obvious how God was moving in our hearts and lives. But as we point out in the podcast, we lost sight of these truths as our relationship stretched from weeks to months to years. In time, it became easy to lose sight of these fundamentals and start to question God’s plan. Holding firm to the path God set you on and trusting in that path and that process is essential. When patience wanes and stress is applied in your relationship, you have to lean on God’s wisdom, not your own.
 

It’s all in your head

As believers and as spouses, we are called into a mental battlefield. Each of us must daily fight to prioritize God and prioritize our spouse. Establish mental cues to remind yourself what is reality and what is fiction. Trust the path that God has set you both on following. Finally, reflect upon how and why God put you both together in the first place. Celebrate that shared history and prepare to battle daily with your thoughts. It’s all in your head and in your mate’s head. Speak life into one another daily and find comfort and peace at the feet of your loving father.
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