• Referenced scripture:
  • 1 Timothy 5:8, LSB

• Recommended resource:
  • thenewsisgood.com

Ryan: All right, Selena, let’s get this recorded.

Selena: I just did that.

Ryan: It’s 4:45 on a Friday and the days are short and I had a migraine today. Let’s just get it done-

Selena: Get it done.

Ryan: …for these lovely people, these fierce-

Selena: That sounds very good attitude.

Ryan: …marrieds… that’s a great attitude. It’s efficient. It’s an efficient attitude. Is that not an adequate way to open the episode?

Selena: I don’t know. You can.

Ryan: Okay. [laughs] Hello.

Selena: But I feel like we’re back. Last week was post-conference. We’re here. We’re just kind of frazzled, but we’re here and we’re processing. And now we’re like, okay, we’re back. We’re back into the-

Ryan: Then we were out of town for a week.

Selena: Then we were out of town. Yes.

Ryan: That was also very disorienting.

Selena: We’re back. We’re back, I think.

Ryan: Yeah. What are we talking about today?

Selena: We’re addressing a question that we got from one of our listeners or viewers, which by the way, if you have any questions that you would like us to address, please send them into fiercemarriage.com/ask. And we would love to check those out. Because today we are gonna answer one of those that we got from our good friend, my good friend Anon, if you know. The questions they really hold a lot for… We’re not on the other side yet, are we?

Ryan: We’re not.

Selena: Oh my goodness. [laughs]

Ryan: So what’s the intro? Tiltirate me.

Selena: We’re gonna answer a question that you too are gonna want to know the answer to. Is that good enough?

Ryan: I guess. [both laughs]

Selena: It’s getting goofy over here, guys. All right, we’ll see you on the other side.

[00:01:29]

Selena: Gosh, I look over at our timer and I’m like, how is this… we’re only like a minute in and I’m getting to the meat of the conversation already. Did we even go to the other side?

Ryan: I just wish you came prepared, you know. I just wish that this was something you took…

Selena: I wrote this the best I could. Can just somebody help this guy? Help this guy.

Ryan: I wasn’t kidding. I had a migraine like an hour ago. So I get these ocular migraines.

Selena: Aw.

Ryan: Okay. If you listener, viewer, you get ocular migraines… [both laughs] I get ocular migraines. She’s laughing at my-

Selena: I’m laughing at you’re like… [laughs]

Ryan: I see you. I see you. I kind of don’t see you though because of the ocular migraine. Anyway, it doesn’t make my… I can still function. It just makes me a little loopy.

Selena: Aw.

Ryan: After I get my vision back, which takes about an hour. So I’m a little loopy. So let’s have some fun here. Maybe fun’s the wrong word. [both laughs]

Selena: It’s like at the expense of a person’s writing in.

Ryan: It’s Friday, like I said, 4:45. So-

Selena: It’s fun day Friday. Friday fun day. So-

Ryan: If you don’t know who we are, my name is Ryan. This is my lovely wife Selena. We are the Fredericks. If you’re still here, thank you for hanging out with us. This is the Fierce Marriage Podcast. We do these pretty much every Tuesday. We do the Fierce Parenting Podcast on Thursdays. If you’re parents, check that out. We have some fun over there as well.

This is all part of what we call Fierce Families. Speaking of which it has had our first Fierce Families Conference. God is growing this ministry into all things fierce because we believe that family is the original institution that was instituted before the fall, the only one that was instituted before the fall, and it is for human flourishing. So we need to not grow further away from God’s vision for marriage and family. We need to press into God’s vision for those things. That’s why we’re here. Thank you for joining us. Here’s the question.

Selena: “Should a wife expect her husband to give up excessive material things, such as enough guns to start a modest size militia and several classic cars. So should a wife expect her husband to give up these things to buy his family a permanent home? We live with a roommate who is a woke man-hating liberal, who at times is divisive in our marriage and subtly hostile to our faith. One perk is that she helps with the housework, which is my sole responsibility at all times, even when sick. Conversations about stuff accrued before we were married, so the car and the guns, will usually turn into an argument. Perhaps I should pray about this and God will change both our hearts so we can let go of the things we don’t need. Is this what it means to follow your husband gladly and pray boldly?” From Anon.

Ryan: Is this what it means to follow your husband gladly and to pray boldly? And by this, she means to pray that instead of nagging, I’m guessing, instead of poking… I’m sure that Anon has asked her husband, can we do this?

Selena: Yeah, clearly.

Ryan: And it’s falling on deaf ears or there’s no action being taken to that end.

Selena: Sure.

Ryan: Whereas saying, well, you spent 1,500 bucks on a new AR setup or an old car that you’re gonna fix up and you’re gonna spend another thousands of dollars fixing that car up, well, you’ve done that again, even though we talked about our family needing a house. And she’s thinking, well, the savings is not building up. How are we gonna get a down payment? The housing market’s insane right now. It’s literally insane. What are we gonna do? That’s what I’m guessing the scenario is.

Selena: Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t give us anything else. I think the important part of this conversation is we’re really addressing and talking about the orientation of our hearts, right? The orientation of our heart it really determines the order of our priorities. So your orientation determines order.

So if my heart is oriented towards God, towards the things of God, towards what scripture says I should value, how I should treat my husband, how I should love my husband, then the order of my priorities should reflect my value of God and His word and the scriptures. All the way down. And you say, especially down to how you spend your money, right?

Ryan: Right.

Selena: Those decisions should reflect the orientation of your heart because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Ryan: That’s not a Ryan and Selena idea. That’s Jesus idea, that store up treasure in heaven where moths and rust will not destroy because where your treasure is-

Selena: There your heart will be also.

Ryan: …you’ll also find your heart. In other words, care about the things of God higher, better, more than you care about the things of this earth, the things of your life. And that’s not always an overnight shift in affection. It’s always gonna be a function of sanctification. It’s always gonna be a function of drawing near to God and getting aligned with what He cares about. That verse that says, delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.

This is fairly basic, but I wanna explain it anyway. A lot of times we’ll read that verse and think, if I just love God more, He’ll give me the things I want.” Is that what that verse is saying? Again, like I said, it’s pretty basic, but we need to get it. If we delight ourselves in God, it’s not that we get what we want, it’s that we start to want what He wants. And He implants in us new desires.

Selena: His desires.

Ryan: His desires.

Selena: That’s right.

Ryan: So that’s what we’re talking about in terms of our heart orientation determines the order of our affections or our priorities. And so-

Selena: None of these things are essentially bad. Like having cars, having guns, those kinds of things. We always talk about, like… it’s when things get out of order or we put too much weight in something that the Lord has asked us not to. We’re loving them more than we should. We’re valuing them, we’re putting our time, energy, resources into them more than we should.

Ryan: That’s good. I wanted to read this verse that came to mind as we were talking. It’s 1 Timothy 5:8. And this comes from the NASB. I’m gonna read actually the Legacy Standard Bible. That’s the version that we’re reading through right now.

Selena: Currently going through. Yeah.

Ryan: And we love it. It’s the most, I’ll say, literal translation of the Bible updated to be extra literal. [laughs]

Selena: So good.

Ryan: It says this, “If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” Is this husband providing for his household? Now buying a house is not synonymous with providing for your household.

Selena: There you go.

Ryan: I wanna make that very clear. That’s not what this passage is saying. So if you’ve got a roof over your head, you know, I believe, you know, it’s a husband should provide for his family. That’s what he’s saying. Now that means that you’re taken care of. Well, what does taken care of me? Well, it means they’re taken care of. You figure out the details. It means they’re protected, they sleep at night, they’ve got food, your kids are growing in the nurturing admonition of the Lord, your wife is the fruitful vine. These things are all falling into place because a husband is standing at the post, standing at the ready saying, I will provide, I will protect, I will preside over this family. Right?

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: So that’s the question. Is this man somehow neglecting one of those three things, protecting, presiding, or providing, by going all in on the hobbies?

Selena: Well, and it’s interesting that she mentions the roommate because I’m assuming, and this may be too big of a leap, but I’m assuming there’s a reason why they have to have a roommate. It’s gotta probably be a financial reason. Right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Selena: So are the finances that are going towards the guns and the cars, could that have been going to, you know, where the roommate would come in and financially help with responsibilities there?

Ryan: One thing I wanna tease out real fast.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: Because her wording I think is intentional here. She says, “Is it bad for a wife to expect her husband to give up excessive material things to buy his family a permanent home?” What do you think? Could it be that they’re in a house, but it’s just maybe too small?

Selena: Yeah. I mean, part of my mind just jumps to maybe they’re renting and they’re sharing this space and time, and to what end? Maybe that’s what her question is, is like-

Ryan: Our first house would not work for us today. I will say that.

Selena: I mean, if we had to make it work, it would’ve worked.

Ryan: We had renters in there for a while that had three or four kids. That was interesting. They wrecked it. So we would have wrecked it. [laughs]

Selena: But anyways, in this situation, I mean, we’ve already kind of asked a few questions to just try to understand the situation more and be able to provide some clarity biblical instruction, I think. But you know, kind of the hard questions here are like, have they been able to get to the heart of the matter, right? Is it really about the stuff that’s been accrued, like the guns in the cars, or is it something else?

I mean, clearly those are fruit that have been produced on some tree. So what is the root of the tree that is producing these things, right? For the husband, maybe are there control issues? Are there insecurities? Are there fears? Are there just like “They’re a good distraction and I enjoy them and I don’t wanna give them up”?

Ryan: You mean buying the guns to stockpile for some…?

Selena: Yeah. What are the reasons? Yeah.

Ryan: Impending struggle?

Selena: Right. And then for the wife, is there something that she’s longing for, safety in wanting a permanent home? If you both want safety… I mean, you recognize you want the same things, but maybe you’re just going about it the wrong different ways. And how can you come together? Why do you want these things? Is there something that they haven’t discussed yet? Is there a plan to…?

You really need to clarify kind of the expectations and desires, which is the third question on here. Because if you haven’t come together and you haven’t said, Hey, this is what I’m hoping for, or this is what I want… I mean, we still have those conversations of, “I thought you said you wanted this,” or “I thought we wanted this.” And one of us is like, “Nope, never said that, you know? [laughs] And you’re like… But why are you spending this money if we had talked about this? And it’s like, well, I thought we talked, you know? So taking that time to really get to the root of what the problem is.

Ryan: I hear this woman writing in and I’m thinking, Okay, if she’s got a husband who is caring for her in this, she’s not writing this email. Right?

Selena: Sure.

Ryan: Now, it’s not that he can’t provide, won’t provide, it’s that he doesn’t seem to care is what I’m trying to say.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: It’s that she’s expressed a desire and it’s a multifaceted desire. I’ll say forever home, permanent home. It’s-

Selena: Without a roommate.

Ryan: Maybe it’s a permanent home because it’s too small. Maybe the neighborhood is terrible. Maybe the roommate situation is part of it. That’s all logistically speaking. But then there’s the roommate piece, which is she’s divisive to our marriage and our values because as a man she undermines our faith with all the woke-isms and whatnot. That’s a whole worldview in itself. It’s antithetical to the gospel, by the way.

So what I hear is that she’s expressing to him, “I feel like you’re placing your desires at a higher priority than the things that I feel like really need to change in our lives.”

Selena: For the good of our marriage.

Ryan: For the good of our marriage, and for the good of our lives. And I cannot enjoy guns with you, I cannot enjoy cars with you. That’s your thing. And it seems that it’s disproportionately giving your time, attention, money. That’s what I hear.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: So if we address this question from those… if that’s a right hearing of this, I’m looking at this husband and saying, listen, does Christ care for his church in the way that you’re caring for your wife right now? Did Christ do anything out of selfishness? Did Christ do anything that wasn’t selfless? These are the questions I’m asking.

Selena: Sure.

Ryan: So it’s not whether or not guns and cars are bad, or you shouldn’t buy it and you shouldn’t have X number. It’s are you being selfish?

Selena: Well, and that’s what I mean by getting to the heart of the matter, getting to the root of the matter is, okay, you have all these things, but these desires were produced off of some tree in your life. Tree. Metaphorical tree. So what is that tree? What is the root of the reasoning of why-

Ryan: We don’t know.

Selena: You know, you’re coming at it another way though too of like, yes, are you-

Ryan: Well, I would just leave it at he likes the stuff, not that he’s afraid of whatever.

Selena: Well, and I like how you said it though, is just like, are you being the loving husband as Christ has loved the church? Are you being that to your wife? You’re asking that husband,-

Ryan: Are you dying to yourself?

Selena: …are you dying to yourself? And wife, are you respecting your husband? Are you submitting to your husband? Those are the bigger questions. Those are the heart issues that we’re trying to address in some of the, Hey, he’s spending too much money and hey, we’ve got this. You know, these are all peripheral, I think, red flags pointing into the heart of what’s going on.

So here we have a bridegroom Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father mediating on behalf of His people, making supplication on behalf of His people. Still to this day, actively serving His people in that way. He’s King Jesus, He sits on the throne, but He is still serving in that way. So we have a savior who we can pray to Him, we can bring our requests to Him, and He will lovingly care for us in that.

Now, as a husband, you have to do that. If you want to be a Christian, and being a husband, you want to husband your wife in a Christian way. [Selena laughs] You do not have an option. You need to care for your wife. Whether you are looking her in the eye and saying, “Sweetheart, I hear what your requests are. I’m sorry that I’ve been selfish, whatever. I still don’t think we can afford a house, or we cannot go that direction. I have not taken you seriously because I don’t make enough to buy a forever home right now. Have you seen house prices? Have you seen interest rates? Have you seen what, you know, the insane housing market?” That’s caring for your wife, even though you’re not able to make the thing happen. So that’s, I think, the bigger picture. It’s not really about the house, it’s about are you caring for your wife?

Selena: Well, and sometimes it’s just uncovering and speaking… not speaking, but saying those things. Because a lot of times, you know, when a husband says no, it can be off-putting, or when they don’t respond or something like that, when all the while… like, we’ve had a few of these situations where you say to me, like, “I know you want these things or you want to do these things, but financially, we just cannot right now. Here’s the reasons why. It’s not because I wanna withhold from you. It’s not that I wanna keep us in this place forever.”

It’s like, “Oh, you’re telling me that you have the same desires that you share in this and you want these things for our marriage, for our lives. But it’s just a timing thing. Or here’s the real issue here. And I think that, you know, it just can break down the walls, bring some agreement, and really work through those in a productive manner instead of just ending with an argument like we all are prone to doing.

Ryan: So that’s what I hear being expressed in this. It’s not so much about the cars. It’s not about the guns, it’s not about the house. It’s not even so much about the roommate. All that stuff does need to be addressed. But the heart of this wife that I’m hearing come through is that “I have a husband who’s not caring for me”. And so my encouragement to that wife would be pray. Like, you can’t make someone change their heart. And you can’t reach in there, turn the knobs and change their heart.

Selena: There’s a few things that we can do. I love that she ended it with, you know, “should I just pray and like trust that…? Is this what it means to just follow God blind… not blindly. Sorry. [laughs] If you can follow my husband gladly and pray boldly. And I think, you know, you and I talked about this. Just because you can’t change his heart doesn’t mean you can’t pray about a heart change. Right?

And like you said, praying I think doesn’t mean you’re just standing by and waiting for, you know… praying is you’re taking an active role in your faith and in your marriage. It’s a powerful thing to be able to go to the God of the universe and actually commune and talk with Him. Yes, pray for yourself, pray for your own heart to be submitted to the things of God, respecting your husband, coming… Ask the Lord to help you go to your husband in love and respect and have loving communication through it all. Pray together. Pray apart for each other. It’s powerful and it’s an important piece to this thing we call marriage, right?

Ryan: Yeah. So that’s an encouragement for the wife. Encouragement for the husband is, open your eyes, man. You don’t have to buy the house. You truly don’t. But you are obligated. It’s your Christian duty to provide for your wife. Hear me. Not in terms of material things. That’s part of it. Yes. And it sounds like you’re doing most of that. But you must provide also for your wife the care that she needs to walk through whatever this struggle is. That’s part of providing is showing up and saying, Here, I’m gonna give to you, I’m gonna provide for you support, I’m gonna provide for you an explanation, I’m gonna provide for you, the place for us to discuss this so that we can get to the bottom of whatever it is, and we can agree on it.

If we can look at each other at the end of the day, we’ve had a hard conversation, we say, now’s not the time, we can agree on that.

Selena: And we can move forward.

Ryan: Or if we look at each other and say, we want the same thing. Now, if you don’t want the same thing, if she wants a house and you’re saying, well, I like this situation, well, you have to walk through that. You can work through it.

Selena: And that is actually the second to do here. Right? The first one is to pray. The second one is to discuss. So first get on the same page of what your desires and expectations are. You gotta have clarity around that. Second would be to talk about money and set aside time to intentionally discuss the finances, discuss how the money is being spent. Big questions like, are we honoring the Lord? Are we stewarding what He’s given us? Or has our spending just gone unchecked and this is where we’ve ended up? So talk, talk, talk. Discuss-

Ryan: I’m gonna add a question to that. Money conversation, I’m gonna ask this question. What is the purpose of money in a Christian’s life? Is it just to get what you want when you want it as much as you want? No, it’s not. The purpose of money in the Christian’s life is to glorify God, to know Him, to make Him known, to fulfill His great commission. It’s to steward it for His glory and your good.

Selena: Yes. Yes.

Ryan: If you have zero thoughts of stewardship with your finances in light of all that God has asked of you, that’s a problem. So that needs to be part of your discussion as a married couple. Husband, wife, how has God asked us to steward our money. Well, let’s look up some scripture. Let’s open the Bible. Let’s look-

Selena: Look at you just going into that third point right there. [Ryan laughs] See, this is why we work so well. I probably wouldn’t put this at the end. I would say go to scripture first. But first one was again, pray. Second one, discuss. Talk about expectations. Talk about the purpose of money within your life and marriage according to scripture. And go to scripture. What does the Bible say about how we spend our money or how we should? So you have a right relationship with money? You know, how does the Bible provide the authority and clarity for us when it comes to our roles as husband and wife and how we love one another and again, how that trickles down into how we spend our money and our time with one another?

Ryan: That’s good. Our daughter’s teething. She’s behind us right now walking… Well, she’s shimming around. She’s not walking yet, but she can stand up on things. And she almost bit my finger off.

Selena: She will. I don’t stick them in her mouth.

Ryan: Oh my goodness.

Selena: They’re like sharp little razors right now. They’ll just take it right off and she’ll smile about doing it. So-

Ryan: You know, like, when you’re playing with a dog and a dog gets a handhold of your finger, they’ll know when to stop. I don’t feel like she knows when to stop.

Selena: She doesn’t know when to stop. No. I just about lost my finger the other day too. So, anyways. Hopefully this conversation has brought to light some of the important questions about, you know, expectations, desires, stewardship, money, communication. The orientation of our hearts, are they ones that… are the orientation towards God, and therefore are we orienting our hearts rightly towards our spouse and towards what the Lord’s has given us? Are things in order and is the weight put in the right spots? Am I just not caring and not stewarding and just throwing all of my money resources at one thing while ignoring my spouse? There’s just a lot of big questions here and hopefully it’s been clarifying. Whether you’re struggling with this type of thing or not, it’s always a heart issue. It always comes back to sin. It always comes back to our need for a savior.

Ryan: Yeah. And if we are not living and walking in the fear of the Lord… now, we can call ourselves Christians and still functionally fail to walk in the fear of the Lord. Meaning that we’re not actually measuring who we are, the actions we do according to who God is and all He’s required of us. Not unto salvation, but because of salvation.

So if we’re not walking in the fear of the Lord, one or two things will happen. We’ll become like the beasts driven by our appetites, driven by our bellies and our cravings and our desires and we won’t really question those things. We’ll just go toward whatever the next thing is and we’ll max out whatever that thing is because that’s just how we’re driven by that. Or if we’re not even believers and we’re not walking in the fear of the Lord, I mean, we’ll not only be beholden to our every whim fancy, and appetite. We will try to get it right and we will just inevitably fail. We will hear the concerns of our wife. You know, as husbands we’ll hear our wives crying out to us saying, please help change and we’ll want to meet that concern. There’s something in us that wants to do, but we’ll try and fail because we are unenlivened by the Holy Spirit.

So I guess at the end of our episode, we always wanna make sure you hear our reminded of the gospel. If you’re a Christian, we wanna remind you of the gospel and what you believe. If you’re a non-Christian, we wanna present you with the gospel so that you can actually tap into true life and not just, you know, what’s white knuckle your way through this life, but instead live by the grace of God and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

And that’s how you open your eyes and your ears to hear and love your wife well in these situations, passed and through your own selfishness, you can say, yeah, I wanna love you more than I wanna love myself right now. That’s a Holy Spirit thing to say. That’s not something you just say in the flesh.

So if you don’t know who Jesus is, we want you to know Christ. If you have been told who Jesus is, but you’re not walking with Him, we want you to know Christ. Because it’s one thing to know of Christ and there’s another thing to actually know Him yourself. So to that end, we recommend that you find a friend who is a Christian, who you know they’re actually a Christian, and say, “Show me Jesus. Let’s read the Bible together.” Find a church that preaches outta the Bible. That’s number two. If you can’t, if you don’t have a friend like that, you can’t find a church like that, we have a website that hopefully will help you. It’s the newsisgood.com.

Let’s pray. Father God, we pray for this couple, this wife who’s writing in and her husband. I pray that You would guide them, that You would enliven their hearts by the power of Your Holy Spirit, by the power of Your scriptures. Lord, that they would open up this conversation together, they would open up Your word, they would read Your word together, and they would actually read their hearts and it would instruct them in what to do and they would obey. Lord, I pray that they would find all the joy and hope and the peace that comes along with pursuing You, with walking in Your grace and learning to walk by Your spirit.

Lord, I also pray for other couples that are struggling wherever they are with, whatever issue they’re dealing with. Lord, be with them. May they first and foremost know that they are not alone because they have You. Lord, secondly, I pray that You’d help them put their path or put their foot on whatever that next step is down the path toward reconciliation, toward healing, toward a healthier, stronger marriage. In Jesus name, amen.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: All right, thank you for joining us. If you wanna partner with us, thank you, if you already are a partner. If you haven’t yet partnered, but you’d like to, go to fiercemarriage.com/partner. With that, this episode of Fierce Marriage is-

Selena: In the can.

Ryan: We’ll see you again in seven days. Until next time-

Selena: Stay fierce.