22: Five Essential Strategies to Strengthen Your Home (Ch 5: Jump-START-ing Your Marriage) | S4E22

Stephanie (00:03): Welcome back, Fellowship of the Trail, to Season 4, episode 22.

Hello, Father.

Marcus (00:10): Hello, Daughter. Good to be together.

Stephanie (00:13): Always. It is a very exciting week. Happy Valentine’s Day week to all those who celebrate. We, Father and I, shall be celebrating this week. We shall be celebrating this week the marriage of his son, my brother, our producer, Benjamin, to a godly, wonderful, fantabulous woman that I’m very excited to call sister. So, exciting, exciting things happening here.

Marcus (00:48): I know how many people get married on Valentine’s Day and we couldn’t be happier. She’s a wonderful, wonderful person and we love her family and so, looking happy for Ben.

Stephanie (00:48): Mm-hmm. Yep, it’s so good. So yes, you can celebrate with us. Keep them in your prayers.

We are continuing our study of The Spirit-Filled Home, and our chapter this week is apt, because this is Chapter 5, “Jumpstarting Your Marriage.” Now, usually when I hear jumpstarting your marriage, I’m thinking in the context of strengthen your home, bring some repair.

But also this is going to be a great list for starting your marriage. Huzzah for that. And I’ll also say, again, as the single person in the room, it’s great foundational relationship advice, whatever kind of relationship that is.

So we’re going to continue. Okay, I’m sorry, I’m coming down, I’m coming down, there’s too much joy. La la la la.

Marcus (01:37): Yeah.

Stephanie (01:59): All right, Father, “Jumpstarting Your Marriage.” This advice is going to be laid out in an easy to remember format. You guessed it, we’ve got an acrostic for you this week, and that is START: Seek the Spirit’s leading, Take Thoughts captive, Attack the real enemy, Resolve Resentment, and Train yourselves in the habits of joy.

So here we have a whole seminar. This is a nice checklist. This is a nice overview. Father, anything you want to say? Where did this acrostic come from?

Marcus (02:41): That’s a good question. This acrostic actually served as the outline for the marriage retreats I used to do. Where it came from is not complicated. It’s sort of a summary of what’s involved in walking in the Spirit. When you talk about Spirit-filled families, the Spirit-filled home, what does that look like? How do you walk in the Spirit and how do you take those things and apply them to marriage and parenting and all the other family dynamics?

And so we start with the idea of seeking the Spirit. There are just the fundamentals of, what is walking in the Spirit? Let’s get this thing defined. When I was pastoring and I would do a lot of marriage counseling, I told people that the only hope for anything here to change is if at least one of you learns how to walk in the Spirit instead of the flesh.

You’ve got to identify what walking in the flesh looks like in your home versus walking in the Spirit. Because what I’ve found is a flesh-filled home will always be a conflict-filled home. A lot of the conflicts to deal with were going to only get resolved as they learned to walk in the Spirit. And so that’s what led to all of this.

Stephanie (03:59): So let’s talk more about seeking the Spirit’s leading.

Marcus (04:05): So we almost have a subacrostic for every one of these. Around Deeper Walk, when we teach walking in the Spirit, we use SLOW, the idea of Stop, Listen, Obey, and Watch.

Stephanie (04:21): Which we did cover earlier in this series, yes.

Marcus (04:28): One of the first examples I heard was from Bill and Annabel Gillum of Lifetime Guarantee teaching about their marriage. They were the ones who just had a horrible marriage, that they talked about in terms of being horrible. And then they got saved and some things improved, but some things didn’t.

Along the way, Bill in particular was talking about what it meant for him to learn how to walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh and how that changed the way that he treated his wife. One of the things that he did is, there would be these moments of temptation to treat her badly. He learned that in those moments of temptation, the thing to do was to stop and listen.

So there was one day where he did something he knew his wife wouldn’t like. And that was, basically, he took a jacket out of the closet and left the closet door open, even though she had specifically asked that he please close the closet door. He remembered that he was on his way out of the room. He had the jacket, and this thought came into his head, “It’s just a door.”

At first he was going to blow it off and keep going. But he had it again, “The door.” So he stopped and listened and realized, “I think that’s the Holy Spirit. Let’s face it, it’s probably not the power of sin tempting me to go close the closet door for my wife.”

And so now he found himself in this battle because he really didn’t want to, because his whole battle with his wife was one of control, and who was going to be in control, who was going to get their way. And so it felt like this was just, “Why should I do it her way? Why does she get to win this?” And he was actually having an argument with God in the hallway over how to handle this.

But in the end, he obeyed. He went back and he closed the closet door for his wife, and he got to watch what happened, the peace that he felt afterwards, and the improvement in their relationship that he saw. But it all followed that model that he had to stop and listen. And when he obeyed what the Spirit was prompting him to do, he got to watch how God used that.

Marcus (06:48): And I’ve just seen that over and over and over again in life and not just in marriage, but in all parts of life, that when we face difficult decisions, when we face tempting situations, God wants us to stop and seek, “Well, God, what do you want me to know about this? What’s your approach to this?”

And if we pay attention, there are almost always these thoughts. There might be a lot of thoughts. But in the middle of them, there’s going to be one that you know if you follow that, it’s going to produce the fruit of the Spirit. And so it takes some training, but that’s the goal and that’s where that comes from.

Stephanie (07:28): I think this is a wonderful segue into taking thoughts captive. So how do we recognize our thoughts and what does it mean to take them captive?

Marcus (07:38): Well, in this situation, he had an image in his head about his wife that said that she was controlling and that she wasn’t respectful and that he was in a battle with her. And so he tended to see her as an enemy to be defeated. Well, if that’s your mental image in your thought life, how’s that going to make you feel about your wife? How do you want to respond?

We talked about this in the last podcast, that we don’t interact with people as they actually are. We interact with people as we imagine them to be. And so God had to get a hold of this. And one of the things he had to stop, listen, and obey on was his view of his wife and begin to see her differently in the way that God wanted him to see her.

And it worked the other way too, because she was so used to being mistreated that she had developed an image of her husband that she did not respect, that she did not like. What you find here is that with every image that we have of the person, there will always be true facts that support it, right? And there will be enough truth in that image that you can defend it.

What God wants us to know is that sometimes the images that we create are a little bit like an illusionist’s trick. And that is, they show us just enough true things that we come to the wrong conclusion about what’s going on because they hide other true things that if you knew would change your entire perspective of the situation.

That’s how the devil lies to us a lot of times. He gets us fixated on those true things about our husband or our wife, those true things about our kids that create a caricature of them, and we end up interacting with that caricature instead of interacting with their real heart and who they really are.

And so we need the Holy Spirit’s guidance to learn how to take those thoughts captive so that we can interact with people the way God wants us to see them and not the way that Satan is trying to get us to see them.

Stephanie (09:38): On that note, how Satan is trying to get us to see them, that brings us, Lovely, to attack the real enemy. So let’s press on.

Marcus (09:48): Yeah. Attack the actual adversary. AAA, Attack the Actual Adversary. Whenever this comes up, I always think of a conversation I had with a young married lady early in my ministry. She was like, “I just wish that my husband and I could fight together against something instead of always fighting each other.”

And that was kind of what prompted, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if he and I were fighting on the same team against the enemy who’s trying to take out our house, but instead we always seem to be fighting against each other. And so the idea here is, what if we actually did prioritize coming together and getting on the same team to attack the actual adversary,

Stephanie (10:32): Friendly fire.

Marcus (10:47): It does help us to make that transition in our marriages to see each other as allies in a battle rather than seeing each other as enemies to be defeated.

Stephanie (10:58): And even if you’re not on the same page with them initially, it’s still helpful to have that perspective if the other person wants to fight and you’re like, “No.”

Marcus (11:06): Well, I can already hear that there are some people there. Their spouse isn’t in a place to join them in this and that is maybe they’re not not a Christian, maybe they’re just not open to it. They don’t want to participate. I understand that that’s the exception to it.

But the ideal here is if you can find a way to get together on this, and if you can’t, then you do what you can to attack the actual adversary as opposed to attacking your husband or your wife all the time. You want to do it together as allies if possible.

If you can’t, then this still needs to be kind of your battle cry, as Paul said, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood. We wrestle against the principalities and powers in the heavenly realms.” And so we don’t want to turn our family into the adversary. We want to make sure we treat the actual adversary as the enemy that we need to defeat.

Stephanie (11:58): So what can this look like practically?

Marcus (12:01): There’s an old saying, the family that prays together stays together. And there’s actually statistical evidence to show that that’s true. A lot of people call themselves Christians and they are Christians, but prayer isn’t really that much of a priority in their lives. And it’s not that much of a priority together.

And so the first thing and the most simple thing is carve out time to pray together. And if you can’t do that, make sure that you carve out time for prayer in your own life. The second thing is to learn to pray offensively. Spiritual warfare isn’t all defensive. It’s not all protecting yourself from the enemy. Some of this is taking the battle to the enemy.

If you go through the book of Psalms, one of the very first Psalms, number three, I think it is, Psalm three says, “God, would you break the teeth of my adversary?” And I love that. I don’t know, maybe it’s the boy in me, but I’m like, “God, would you just break the teeth of my enemy,” with the idea that I’m asking God to do that to my spiritual adversaries?

I’m not saying break the teeth of my wife or something. I would say break the teeth of my actual adversary and pray aggressively against the enemy who is coming against your home. So learning to pray offensively is something else that we can do. Praying to cleanse our property,

Stephanie (13:18): Psalm 37.

Marcus (13:27): And then praying about our own personal freedom issues. And then, what do I need to get free from? If I could get free from the enemy’s influence in my life, this would really help the relationships that I have.

And so those are kind of the main things. Prayer in general, praying offensively, praying for the cleansing and protection of our property, and then praying for personal freedom are all ways that we can be engaged in attacking the actual adversary.

Stephanie (13:53): Like how you just on the fly decided to make that an AAA.

Marcus (13:58): Yeah, well, I’ve got an updated version of this somewhere where I did make it all A’s.

Stephanie (14:04): In the seminar, yeah. This is awesome.

All right, so the next in our START acrostic is Resolve Resentment. The two most powerful forces in any relationship are appreciation and resentment, as you teach. Would you unpack that a little bit?

Marcus (14:24): Yes, appreciation builds joy and resentment builds fear and anger. I was on the board of a ministry, Brenda and I were both on the board of a ministry for marriages. And the core thing that they did was weekend events for people who were already talking to a divorce attorney or had already filed papers.

So they’re dealing with marriages in pretty bad shape. The weekend event only really did one thing: it helped them resolve resentment. And they just walked session by session through the principles and the exercises to help them identify what needed to be forgiven and identify the steps that were going to be needed for reconciliation.

What they found was that the learning to forgive was such a powerful force in resolving the resentment that 85% of the people that attended these weekends were still married five years later, even though they had shown up planning to divorce.

And so this is why we say they’re very powerful forces in relationship, that the more that we practice appreciation, the more that there’s going to be joy in the relationship. But the longer we let resentment fester, the more it opens a portal into our lives for bad and evil things to enter. And so the faster we can close that, the better things are going to be.

Stephanie (16:05): That’s amazing! So what does it look like to resolve resentment?

Marcus (16:10): So I have, I don’t think this is in the book, this new acrostic. It’s the three steps to forgiveness. I call it ACT, the act of forgiveness. A is basically, I’ve got to Admit what happened and I’ve got to be completely honest in admitting how big the forgiveness is needed.

If they’ve really harmed me, I don’t want to forgive them for just a little thing. I want to forgive them for the whole big thing. So there’s an element of accusing that goes on here. Now you’re not doing this to their face. You’re doing this before God. You’re saying, “God, they have wronged me. I’m accusing them of wronging me. I’m admitting that it’s been big for me what they have done.” That’s the A part of this.

And then C is, “ I’m now Choosing to Cancel my resentment against them. I am choosing to forgive them. And that’s the C. And then we get to the T, and the T is, “I now Transfer what debt they owed me over to you, God, and over to the kingdom of God.”

And so I start by, here’s the problem. I’m admitting what the issue is here. Then I admit that I have resentment about it. I am now choosing to forgive. And I am choosing to cancel any permission that’s given to the enemy. And I am now transferring all of this over to you. So that’s a simple three-step process we can use for forgiving people.

And you might find that there are a lot of things you’ve got to go through this with. There may not just be one thing to forgive, right? So sometimes you need to make a list of all the things that you need to forgive your spouse for. And one issue that sometimes people forget about that I like to remind them of is consequences of things that they’ve done too.

For example, you may have forgiven your husband or your wife for something they did, but you are still living with the consequences of what they did. And so sometimes you not only have to forgive them for the deed itself, but you have to forgive them for all the consequences that it has created for you in your life.

And the same ACT process can help admit that you have resentment about it. Yeah. Cancel it. You know, choose to forgive and transfer that debt.

Stephanie (18:32): Excitement for this acrostic. This is a good acrostic. And could you, before we move on to the T of START, could you just briefly address the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation?

Marcus (18:48): We say in a nutshell that forgiveness takes one and reconciliation takes two. I can choose to forgive somebody even if they don’t want to be forgiven. But reconciliation is about the restoration in a relationship. It’s about rebuilding trust.

Reconciliation means we’re going to be about all the repair work that goes on in the relationship. Forgiveness can be a one time thing that you do and you take care of and you’ve done it. And now you may have to come back and choose to forgive again and again, but it’s less of a process. Whereas the reconciliation is always going to be a process of restoring a relationship, particularly restoring the trust in the relationship.

Stephanie (19:38): Thank you. That is helpful. I find when I talk to people about forgiveness, that’s one of the most common things that comes up. Is this reconciliation versus forgiveness? Is it the same or applying one set of principles to the other term? So I think that’s really helpful.

Marcus (19:58): Yeah, you know, when the Bible says when you’re on your way somewhere, reconcile with your brother, what they’re saying is restore the relationship. It doesn’t mean you have to become their best friend, but it means restore the relationship enough that this thing is resolved between you.

And that’s level one reconciliation. But in a marriage, you want to go beyond that, right? You want a fuller reconciliation, more complete trust. So it’s a little bit different.

Stephanie (20:22):. And trust can take time.

Marcus (20:22):  Trust takes time, yeah.

Stephanie (2:24): You know what else takes time but is fun? Is training yourselves in the habits of joy. And you have a “plan” for that.

Marcus (20:39): Yeah, that’s a good pun. I now call this “train your brain”. When I teach this now, the T is Train your brain, training and joy. And this gets into the whole book that Chris Coursey and I wrote on The Joy-Filled Marriage and joy-filled marriages. And there, we say that in every marriage, there’s a joy gap, and to close that joy gap, you need a plan. Hence, you know, we have a PLAN for that.

Stephanie (20:45): PLAN is an acrostic thing.

Marcus (21:08): It’s an acrostic to help people remember the steps. And so the P of the PLAN for shrinking the joy gap is make sure you Play together. Sometimes running a family can be like a business and all you’re doing is dealing with all the business issues involved: paying the rent and paying the bills and making plans and keeping the calendar and fixing things.

There’s a lot of work involved and making sure the kids get here and there, that sort of thing. So you have to make sure you take time to play together. The L is Listening for emotion. And what we mean there is that if I’m not careful, I only listen for the problem.

And as soon as I hear the problem, I tune out because I think I’ve got this all figured out now. And that’s what makes people feel unseen and unheard and uncared about is when you only listen for problems. But if you can listen for the emotion behind the problem and you can validate the emotion, then that’s going to make the person feel seen and feel heard. And that’s going to make the ability to navigate problems in the relationship much easier.

So playing together helps to build joy, listening for emotion helps people feel seen and heard. Then A is Appreciation. We just said that one of the two strongest forces in any relationship is either appreciation or resentment.

So the more that you can do to daily tell people what you appreciate about them and not just say, “I appreciate you. You’re so wonderful.” That’s kind of nice, but it’s really big. And you can’t always just say it’s better than nothing at all.

You want to say things like, “I really appreciated when you took out the trash. I really appreciated when you folded your laundry like that.” And we always tell people, when you’re sharing appreciation, there is one forbidden word and that is the word “but”.

Stephanie (22:41): Good starting point if you’re not saying it at all.

Marcus (23:01): Yeah, you cannot say, “I really appreciated it when you took out the trash, but I wish you’d do it more often.” That kind of defeats the whole thing. Yeah, I appreciate when you do this, but I sure wish you’d learn to do that. You can’t combine your appreciation with a “but”. It just sucks the life out of the appreciation.

But finding specific things to appreciate on a daily basis will help to grow joy in the relationship.

Stephanie (23:07): “But I wish you’d closed the garage door before you…” Bubble-blown. Let me correct what you did here.

Stephanie (23:26): I just want to linger there a little bit too because it’s really good for any relationships, again, not speaking as a married person. But it’s really good for relationships to express appreciation and find ways of expressing. But it’s also a really important taking thoughts captive skill.

Are the thoughts that you are thinking appreciative. Are they joy? Are you joy mapping your world? Are you thinking of reasons? Like, is the first thing coming into your head a reason to criticize somebody or is it something that you appreciate about someone?

And if you’re tracking your thoughts and find that you’re consistently thinking of the critical things or the fear things, that’s something to look to and to work on because appreciating daily is not just an act, it’s a thought life.

Marcus (24:22): That’s a point and it’s completely true. Again, we’re training ourselves in joy. Play together, Listen for emotion, Appreciate daily. The last one is Nurturing a rhythm. I remember where this first hit me in my marriage was when Brenda and I had spent eight hours together painting an apartment we had just moved into. At the end of that, she said, “I just wish we could spend more time together.”

I just about lost it.  I was like, “Wait a second. Did we not just spend eight hours together?” And she had to explain to me. What she meant was that when we dated, there was a lot of time where the point of that time was being together. Once we got married, it felt like we’re going to do stuff and as we do stuff, we’ll be together.

We’re going to work and we can be together. We’re going to play, we can be together. But the point of the time wasn’t to be together. And so part of this was nurturing a rhythm of knowing that when you could count on time together, the point of that time was us enjoying being together.

In the early days of our marriage, we just called it couch time. We’re going to sit on the couch for 15 to 30 minutes, and the whole point of this was we’re going to have a conversation with each other, eye contact, you know, that sort of thing. Knowing that you could count on that began to create a rhythm. Like, I know I can count on the fact that I’m going to get this time at some point today.

There are also the rhythms for how you start your day, rhythms for how you end your day. There are rhythms for how you transition from work back home. There’s a lot of things that you can do to nurture rhythms that keep the joy level higher in the home.

One simple one, for example, is when you’re transitioning from work to family, is actually having a little bit of a decisive break in between. I noticed when I was a pastor, that I would often come home from the church, but on the phone. And so I would be wrapping up a phone call and walk into the house still on the phone.

I had to learn to stop doing that, to put that phone away and to get my mind mentally prepared for the transition. Like, I am done with work, I am putting that behind me. My focus now is when I walk in this door, I’ve got one job and that is to be happy to see my family. And just that one little thing there could help to nurture a rhythm and help to make things much more enjoyable as a family.

Stephanie (27:08): That is awesome. So this whole episode, just a treasure trove, thank you Father for putting this list together. This is really good. I’ll try to cultivate a couple links for follow-ups. I can’t promise every single category here, but I’ll try. We’ll see. The proof will be in the description of what I come up with here to help people go a little bit deeper in these various areas.

In the meantime, we are so pleased to be on the trail with you, to be able to offer this worldwide for free. Thank you to every donor and prayer warrior and volunteer and just person who shows up and listens and shares with a friend. Thank you for everyone who’s on the trail with us. We are so happy to be here with you.

Marcus (27:53): Well, honestly, I run through my mind too. We had a conversation with a consultant recently who told us that we’re in the top 3% of podcasts or something like that. What would you say? That was kind of shocking to find out. So thank you to everybody who’s been following us and sharing us with other people.

Stephanie (28:02): It depends on how you cut it. We’re at least in the top 10. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, again, statistics, it’s always what you’re monitoring, but Buzzsprout says top 10, so thank you. Thank you for putting us there. And it’s a joy. And we’re going to go off to the joy of this week celebrating a special start to a marriage.

But for now, Father, would you give us any final thoughts for this episode?

Marcus (28:46): Yeah, today was kind of, as it was, a seminar in a podcast. I’ve literally got events scheduled this year where I’m going to be unpacking that whole START model over a weekend. So, you know, if it felt a little overwhelming, a little bit like a fire hose, there’s a reason for it.

But hopefully it’s just designed to give you some food for thought and some tools to get started in some areas where God might be nudging you like, “Hey, maybe you should try that one.” So hopefully that’ll be helpful.

Stephanie (29:18): See you back next week.