017 Trust the Lord - With Your Marriage

A 3 Minute Read that Will Bless Your Marriage All Week

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones. Proverbs 3:5-8

Proverbs 3:5 is consistently among the most Googled and downloaded passages of Scripture on line, year after year. Many rely on the truths of these verses as a source of spiritual strength, balance and re-centering. But how about for our marriage?

Here are 5 Ways You and Your Spouse Can Elevate Trust in the Lord - In Your Marriage:

1. Trust in the Lord with all your heart: I often ask couples, “What if when he lost everything, Job’s trust was in his wife?” {Read Job 2}. Things happen (or don’t happen) in marriage that shake our trust in our spouse either for the moment or for a long while. What we discover along the way & are shocked by, is not new news to God. He brought the 2 of you together knowing all the twists and turns you are now just realizing. Be honest with God to be honest with each other: Lord, I don’t understand this. I don’t like this. I didn’t see this coming…Lord I trust You.  

2. Be Strong Enough to be Weak: Dr. Charles Stanley used to say the most important distance for Christians is the 18inches between their knees and the floor. His point was that we can be too strong, too self confident, too self reliant to just surrender, fall on our knees (literally or figuratively) and pray. True: you are smart, you do have feelings but trust God enough to lose your self strength and rely on God’s strength as a couple.

3. Acknowledge Him: Acknowledging God in every-thing reshapes your perspective of what happens in your marriage. Not every thing that happens in our marriage makes sense. When we can acknowledge the presence of the Lord in the good and not so good points of our marriage we gain a superpower that changes our focus to be more about God’s point in what is going on, than the details that we don’t like.

4. And He Will: I like to say He not me. This is my fave part! It took years of life and specifically marriage to realize, I don’t have to figure everything out and always know what to do. God is responsible for making the path of your marriage straight. Trust God with the pain points of your marriage, and He will straighten out the path forward.

5. Be Not: A.W. Tozer said on the first page of his classic book, The Knowledge of the Holy, The most important thing about a person is what they think about when they think about God. I love it! If in my marriage I know everything and overvalue my own thoughts and feelings above the Lord’s, I end up running in my own strength and that’s when I and/or my wife become overwhelmed with the weight of being married. If instead we surrender to the wisdom of God present and available in our marriage we find healing and refreshment - I need that.

Next: Set a time to read, discuss and pray through this week’s newsletter. Please don’t skip the prayer part.

My friend Pastor Everette Pope put this passage and topic on my mind when I had him on the EYM podcast last week to talk about his new book on overcoming shame, Who Told You That You Were Naked, and the point was that we have to trust God in our marriage to be honest with our spouse.

Watch this short clip of what he said about trusting the Lord. 

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