• Referenced scripture:
  • James 4:1-10
  • Matthew 18:21-35
  • Ephesians 4;26
  • Ephesians 4:31-32

• Book mentioned:
  • Because He Loves Me, Elyse Fitzpatrick

• Recommended resource:
  • thenewsisgood.com

Ryan: Selena, I contend one of the truths I think that shaped us early on in our marriage. Now, I think I’ll say early in the not dumb years of our marriage. So maybe like four years in.

Selena: Last year. No, I’m just kidding. [both laughs]

Ryan: We had this realization that to keep the lines of communication clear, our axiom was, be quick to apologize, fast to forgive. It has to do with keeping short accounts, which, coincidentally, we’re talking about that here today. Right?

Selena: Right.

Ryan: Right. All right, folks, you’re in for a treat. Selena wrote the rundown. So we’ll see you on the other side.

[00:00:38]

Ryan: So when I have high expectations for this episode because-

Selena: You know how I love pressure. [laughs]

Ryan: I love it when Selena writes Charles Miner rundown. No one knows who that is. But Selena knows so she is yet to tell me.

Selena: Do you know you know? You know you know? [Ryan laughs]

Ryan: Do you know you know? Do you know you know? So if you don’t know who we are… Do you want to introduce the Fredericks?

Selena: No, go ahead.

Ryan: I’m the Fredericks. [chuckles] No, we are the Fredericks. I’m Ryan, this is my wife Selena. Baby Sunny is here with us once again. She’s not off to college yet. [both chuckles] She’s what? Seven weeks old.

Selena: Seven weeks old.

Ryan: Thank goodness, because I’ve got lots of time to get to know this one. So she may be making an appearance here. But thank you for joining us. We do this ministry. We feel like God has given us this ministry to just point couples to Christ so that we might be families created for the glory of Christ. And we pray that this is edifying to you.

If you haven’t yet, smash that subscribe button on YouTube. If you’re a subscriber on the podcast, make sure you subscribe. You don’t want to miss an episode.

If you’re a parent, hop over to the Fierce Parenting Podcast on the audio. If you’re on YouTube, it’ll just come out in two days, the parenting episodes.

I’m excited for this week’s parenting episode.

Selena: It’s gonna be good.

Ryan: We’re opening up a new conversation. It’s going to be a lengthy series of more in-depth conversations around very specific topics. It’s titillated as you love. So you have to go check off Fierce Parenting Podcast or just hanging out on YouTube channel in two days when the parenting episodes drop—on Thursdays. So speaking of parenting, there she is. There she is. Selena, what do we got today?

Selena: Well, like you said we’re talking about keeping short accounts, being quick to forgive and repent fast… What did you say? Quick to-

Ryan: Quick to apologize, fast to forgive.

Selena: Yes. That has made us faster at fighting and fast at resolving conflict. And that took us a long time to learn. I wish somebody would have… Oh wait, it’s in the Bible. [Ryan chuckles] But I do wish somebody would have said, Hey, you know, you could be faster at forgiving, you could be quicker to apologize.

Not that we ever held grudges, I think, but sometimes I think how we interact with one another, how we choose to talk to one another or not, if we decide to give the cold shoulder, often depends on how we’re feeling towards one another instead of just resolving to offer an apology or forgive one another quickly when those apologies are offered.

Ryan: It’s good. [baby crying] Once you get that baby, I’m gonna read this passage. This is James 4:1-10. “What is the source of quarrels and what causes fights among you?” This is the NASB version by the way. “Is the source not your pleasures that wage war and your body’s parts? You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. And you are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend what you request on your pleasures.

You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the scripture says to no purpose, ‘He jealously desires the Spirit whom He has made to dwell in us’” But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, ‘God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’

Submit therefore to God. But resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come close to God and He will come close to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable, and mourn, and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.

Selena: All right.

Ryan: That’s a spicy verse.

Selena: It is a spicy verse. I feel like it fits kind of the conversation and direction we’re going because in order to talk about keeping a short account in order to extend forgiveness, to be able to apologize, we have to first acknowledge the reasons why we are doing things. Because inevitably we’re going to have conflict in this beautiful covenantal marriage, right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Selena: We are two fallen sinners, broken. We have desires. It says that the quarrels are not necessarily [00:05:00] because of the other person, right? It’s because of the war that wages within us for desires that are maybe not of God. I don’t know that the desires God gives us would lead us to quarreling.

Ryan: And even if the desires that are from Him, James is saying that you ask, yet you ask in a faithless way, therefore you do not receive. So on some level, there’s a sin or at least a faithlessness.

Selena: Yeah, there’s a warning about what we’re valuing, what we’re treasuring. So I wanted to read a quote out of this book. It’s Because He Loves Me by Elyse Fitzpatrick. She’s one of my favorite authors. She’s just real solid.

She talks about this verse and in terms of anger, because obviously, if you are in conflict, there’s going to be some element of anger involved. It doesn’t mean you have to be raging and yelling. But even giving him the cold shoulder and not responding is a form of anger. So talking about conflict, talking about the elements of conflict, and what are the actual… what’s the actual… if we get down to the issues, you know, what does it boil down to?

So I’m just gonna read a quote here in this chapter about God cleansing us and forgiveness and all that. “The gospel declarations the Lord has made are meant to free us from our never ending craving for more. Because He has made us His own and given us everything in Christ, we don’t have to shove others aside, envy them, fight with them, or murder them.” She’s talking about this passage in James. “We’ve got something better: a God who delights in drawing nearer to us, exalting us, and granting us grace (James 4:6-8). The Gospel frees us from demanding our own way because nothing we desire to obtain is worth sinning against such love and kindness.”

She’s trying to lead us back to the problem.

Ryan: She’s freeing us from the striving that come from this belief.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: Actually, embracing the fact that… You know, 2 Peter says, in Him we have all things necessary for Godliness-

Selena: Life and godliness.

Ryan: Life and godliness. Thank you. And she’s basically calling us to that and saying that anytime we experience something like this it’s because we’ve somehow forgotten that we do in fact have everything that we need in Christ in the Gospel.

Selena: Right. So our fighting amongst each other… I mean, just think about what your fights usually are about with your spouse. What do we fight about?

Ryan: Your malfeasance. Every time.

Selena: Every time. Your malfeasance. [both laughs]

Ryan: It’s changed. Okay, so we’re almost 20 years in. It’s evolved a lot. I think we had a season of just you ruffle each other’s feathers because of misunderstandings or selfishness that has bubbled to the surface, things that I want that you don’t want or things that you want that I don’t want, and the conflict therein. And then in the middle, I think we would fight about life circumstances a little bit more. We say fight. That’s kind of our vernacular. We would argue. We’d have contention, we would have conflict.

Selena: What do you mean life circumstances?

Ryan: Well, like our finances were off the rails and I would just be stressed. You would sense that stress or maybe I would snap at you in a way or you would snap at me because you could sense-

Selena: You would snap. [chuckles] I’m kidding.

Ryan: You would make me snap. [both laughs]

Selena: So there’s some passions that are warring inside of us, right?

Ryan: Yes.

Selena: Desires for-

Ryan: And a faithlessness in that season. To turn the turntables on you a little bit, you had a season of really a frustration around being a mother of our young first daughter and feeling as if, you know, our community wasn’t nearby. And there was a kind of a… you were [inaudible 00:08:51] in that period of our marriage.

There’s a lot of chaos around child rearing as well and that has caused a good bit of tension that we’ve had to work through and find new ways to process.

And then there’s always the sexual stuff, right? Like missed expectations, disconnection that’s not happening, and frustration that ensues from all those sorts of things. And I think the theme through all of that is this (a)… Okay, usually it’s passions are warring within us, internally or against each other.

Selena: Well, and it be within us—Sorry to interrupt—it means it’s deep. There’s something that is… Like we may fight about something and quarrel but there’s a deeper issue, like Elyse was talking about, a deeper, like, either disbelief or… I think even I would throw idolatry out in the ring there because you’re warring for something that you desire maybe above what God desires in that instance.

Ryan: Sure. So that theme being that depth of the kind of dysfunction, that warring within.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: But another thing being the fact that almost in every one of those being quick to apologize, [00:10:00] eager to repent, fast to forgive. In other words, keeping short accounts, like we’re talking about. That I think was a theme in terms of the breakthrough from that season. When we kind of stopped… This is gonna sound weird. But we kind of stopped caring so much about the various offenses we were experiencing.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: In other words, like-

Selena: We weren’t seeking justice so much as we were seeking, I think, just reconciliation.

Ryan: That’s when the breakthrough began to happen. Now, justice can be served in that sense. And that’s why repentance is so important. Repentance is a means by which we get a sense of justice in light of the gospel, when I can recognize in my own heart a disbelief in what God has promised and what He’s done, or that I’ve sinned in some way against my wife, to confess that sin is to acknowledge it. To me, that’s a sense of letting justice work its course is when you confess a sin earnestly.

But then I think the fruition of that is the eagerness to repent, which repentance biblically is a turning and a rejection of the sin. So it’s not just like, “Oh, I’ve sinned, but I’m gonna let the same coexist.” But I’m going to reject it. I’m going to mortify it, and I’m going to turn from it.

Selena: Right. I think it’s more than an apology. I honestly think repentance is more than an apology. Like you can apologize and say, “I’m sorry,” but until you actually repent, right? If you’re not repenting and turning from what you’re doing, it feels almost impossible to forgive. But yet we are still called to forgive. I mean, Jesus says seventy times seven, because we’ve been forgiven so much.

Ryan: I think there’s-

Selena: There’s no argument there. [chuckles]

Ryan: Well, the apologizing, and then the repenting, and then the forgiveness would be kind of like… I’ll use the word consummation of that process.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: Now, Jesus raises an important thing. Is your forgiveness contingent upon my repentance or my apologizing? I think the full reconciliation is contingent upon those things.

Selena: Right. But forgiveness…

Ryan: Forgiveness is not contingent on those things. Forgiveness is a statement from the offended person to the offender to say, I’m not going to hold this offense against you-

Selena: And I can’t.

Ryan: …on the moral T account of our lives. And that goes back to what Matthew – what? Eighteen or eleven. I can’t hold this offense against you because Christ hasn’t held my offenses against me. My T account has been brought not just to current but has been credited with the righteousness of Christ, by the grace of Christ. And He’s commanded not us, He’s commanded me to extend that same level of forgiveness to you, which we’re going to read that at some point here. Are we gonna read that passage from Matthew 18?

Selena: Matthew 18, yeah.

Ryan: Okay. Matthew 18 starting verse 21. “Then Peter came up and said to Him, ‘Lord, how many times shall my brothers sin against me and I still forgive him? Up to seven times?’ And Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy-seven times. For this reason, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. And when he had begun to settle them, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. But since he did not have the means to repay, his master commanded that he’d be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and repayment be made. So the slave fell to the ground and prostrated himself before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you everything.’ And the master of that slave felt compassion, and then released him and forgave him the debt.

But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and he seized him and began to choke him saying, ‘Pay back what you owe!’ So this fellow slave fell to the ground and began to plead with him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you.’ But he was unwilling, and went and threw him in prison until he would pay back what was owed.

So when his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were deeply grieved and came and reported to their master all that had happened. Then summoning him, his master said to him, ‘You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way that I had mercy on you?” And his master, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he would repay all that was owed him. My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.”

Just a little convicting there. And also unequivocal in what it’s saying. It’s like there’s not a lot left for interpretation there.

Selena: Right. Right.

Ryan: Jesus is painting this picture of the Heavenly Father as someone who would hand over an unforgiver to the torturer until the debt is repaid. Now here’s the thing, we’ll never repay our debt to God.

Selena: We never could.

Ryan: I forget what the modern-day equivalent of what this servant owed the king, but it’s like millions of dollars. It’s like as if you pitched the king on a business idea that was the new and he gave you all the money you needed, [00:15:00] and it completely flopped. It would be the equivalent of that. It’s like a mortgage is what I’m trying to say.

So the point here is that, and especially when you’re in the middle of being tortured, there’s no way you can work to earn money to pay back the debt. So the point is, is that we are unequivocally called to forgive others to the tune of millions of moral dollars. An unsurmountable moral debts that’s been paid for us.

I know that’s hard to hear if you’ve been hurt badly. So I would ask you to ask the Lord to help you with that and to come to grips with what that might look like for you. But there’s no biblical way for us to hold forgiveness back, to withhold forgiveness from somebody who’ve sinned against us, especially our spouse.

Selena: Right. And I think, you know, you brought up the question of, is there a biblical timeframe for when you’re supposed to forgive? Because, you know, as married folks, sometimes it’s easier, it feels easier anyways to be unforgiving. And anger isn’t necessarily a sin, as we see in Ephesians 4. Paul is writing… Let’s see. 4:26. I don’t know if I should start further up. It’s talking about-

Ryan: He’s speaking really… yeah, the Christian walk talking to the Ephesians.

Selena: To the Gentiles. Sorry, yes.

Ryan: Verse 26, “Be angry, do yet do not sin; and do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity.”

Selena: Right. So he’s showing us that by not forgiving, you are actually opening the door for the enemy to be able to begin working on your heart, I guess, or to allow bitterness to take root.

Ryan: Let’s talk a little bit though about the interplay, I guess, between anger and forgiveness.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: Because one of the questions we raised is what begets what or what precedes what? You raised the question, is there a timeframe on our forgiveness?

Selena: On when we should-

Ryan: On when we should forgive. Well, I think wisdom compels us to do it as quickly as we can. But biblically speaking, I don’t know of a command like the anger command that we’ve just read in Ephesians. Which the anger command, I would argue is not time-bound. He just said, “Do not let the sun set on your anger.” But I think what Paul is doing there is he’s trying to remove the tendency for some to let the anger stew.

Selena: Right. He’s trying to light a fire and say, You really need to deal with it. You need to deal with it, and not let it just kind of lazily pass by or even-

Ryan: Well, you think about whenever you’re making a decision, one wise thing to do is to sleep on it. Why? Because when you sleep on it, your brain has a chance to reset. You wake up you’ve got… it’s all new in a sense. You can think about it with a fresh mind without any of the previous kind of other stuff of the previous day in there.

Now, that’s great. When you’re making big decisions, I think it’s wise. When you’re angry, what can happen is if you have an anger that, you know, your spouse does something against you, say you sinned against me in some way, and I’m angry about it and I choose not to address it that night. Now instead of addressing it, I go to bed and I’m angry. I’ve got my brow furrowed as I’m laying my huge head on my pillow at night. [both laughs] And I fall asleep with my brow furrowed and while I’m sleeping it unfurrows, and I wake up refreshed, I’ve forgotten about how I felt. Now, I remember the offense but I no longer have the emotional impetus to deal with it.

So what can happen is if we’ve not used that as an opportunity to draw closer to God, we’ve not used that as an opportunity to understand each other, to confess our sins to one another to be known and loved by one another. Instead, we’ve swept it under the rug and there it will begin to fester. There it will begin to rot the floorboards of our marriage. You know, if we do that long enough, pretty soon you’ve got your whole crawlspace is full of rot.

Selena: Right. Well, and I think it’s also you know, we’re probably talking to people who their trust has been broken in a big way, and they’re like, “Well, how can you say you have to forgive him? He cheated on me or she did this and she lied to me.” Those are things that you definitely need to be working towards reconciliation. Part of reconciliation is addressing the anger in order to be able to forgive. And forgiveness still needs to happen quick. But don’t mistake the words forgiveness and trust. Because just because you forgive someone doesn’t mean, again, you go back to that same level of trust. Trust requires time, it requires being rebuilt. God has forgiven us so much immediately. I mean, He’s already forgiven our sins of the future.

Ryan: I’m thinking about that how profound that is.

Selena: I know.

Ryan: Like how God has told us, forgiveness is not an option for you. But He’s not said, trusting again in the same way is not an option for you. [00:20:00] He’s not said that.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: So it leads me to at least think along the lines of forgiveness is mostly about the one forgiving.

Selena: Absolutely, absolutely.

Ryan: Like when we’ve received the forgiveness of God in Christ, it’s all about Him.

Selena: Right. Right. Yeah, it’s all about the person.

Ryan: And I just want to share this because it’s timely.

Selena: Go ahead.

Ryan: I was with some men last night. We were having dinner, talking about theology, who’s awesome. One of the guys I’m getting to know he shared his testimony. He has incredible testimony. I’m not going to share it, but it’s incredible. I shared with you last night. What stuck out to me was he said he had spent his entire life blaspheming God, rebelling against God, rejecting the gospel.

Selena: Like outright.

Ryan: He said, “I was given Christian parents and I rejected the Gospel. I rejected what they taught me.” And then he went through a really kind of traumatic thing, and in the middle of that he’s crying out to God. He said, “I rejected God my entire life and the second I cried out to Him, He responded to me,” and he said, “And He loved me and He accepted me.”

And to me that is just the quintessential gospel, like we spend our lives rejecting God, and then as soon as we call out to Him, He says, Yes, come. So that forgiveness is all about Him. It’s not about it… It’s almost like that passage in… I think it’s 1 Corinthians as far as the east is from the west, so He has removed our transgressions from us. I think that might be a psalm.

Point is, try to measure the distance between from the east to the west. What’s the distance there? It’s infinite.

Selena: You cannot.

Ryan: Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep going on that point. But that’s just so profound how forgiveness is not tied to trust in a way because the forgiveness is not… there are of different categorical significance.

Selena: Right. And if you go a few more verses down in this passage in Ephesians 4, it ends the chapter was saying, “All bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and slander must be removed from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has also forgiving you.”

So forgiveness is definitely an action that is continual, that is going to be a practice and a discipline within your own marriage. And by the grace of God, you can forgive. And it requires trust, it requires humility. When I say trust or it requires trust in God and His Word, that his way is higher, it’s better, it’s bigger, it’s gonna lead to reconciliation in life versus trusting in our own emotions and feelings in that very moment of not wanting to forgive, right? It requires self-control—reining in those emotions that would rather keep us distance and divided from our spouse. I mean, self-control is a fruit of the Spirit and the fruit is there to be consumed and use when it’s time to use it.

Ryan: It’s good.

Selena: And we glorify God when we submit in whatever we’re feeling. When we submit to Him we give Him glory. And it’s an act of love, right? Ultimately, forgiveness stems from an act of love, acknowledging that your spouse is valuable, you know, that grace is given, and it’s something that we have to continually focus and remind ourselves that we can’t just sit in the failings of our spouse or sit in our own inability to get it and to not mess up or to not sin so much. We are sealed for the day of redemption. That was Ephesians 4. And it’s by God’s strength that we can forgive even the gravest sin within our marriage.

Ryan: I want to take a moment and just kind of separate some of these things categorically. In marriage, there’s varying degrees of being hurt.

Selena: Offences.

Ryan: Or even offended. A surface offense would be kind of, you know, I said I would take the garbage out and I didn’t. So in a way, I offended you. But it’s more of an annoyance. If I lie, I sinned against you, but it’s not like deep-

Selena: It wasn’t intentional, yeah.

Ryan: Then there’s the other stuff where it’s you have kind of the festering stuff, where it’s the dysfunction that… It’s the tinder that gathers on the forest floor of your marriage that is waiting for the lightning bolt to set ablaze. So that’s the second category.

And the third category, I would say is the catastrophic failure, where, you know, a Husband, husband or wife has an affair or an emotional affair, or, you know, the husband is addicted to pornography for years and finally, the wife catches him in it, or the wife is reaching out to an old boyfriend or whatever and are tiptoeing into the waters of an emotional affair.

So there’s gonna be different categories in how you deal with this, but I think the call is the same: keeping short accounts. Now, what happens if you have a big catastrophic thing that happens where one of you offends the other, it’s going to take more work to get that account back up to current. So it’s not like [00:25:00] I accidentally bought… You know, instead of spending $100 at the grocery store, I spent $200, so I’m $100 in debt. Now, this is like, “Oops, I bought a house. So now we need to pay down that debt.” Well, it’s gonna take time.

Now, keeping short accounts isn’t… we’re not saying deal with that quickly, get over it. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying, get to the work of dealing with that now.

Ryan: Right. And forgiveness, I think, opens the door and begins that process of getting to the work. Like I forgive you and then going back when you are angry with them for maybe that large offense, and reminding yourself Christ has forgiven me, I have forgiven him… not him meaning Christ, but I have forgiven my spouse, okay, I need to like get to this point where I can take this next step. We need God’s strength to help us do those things.

Ryan: And that’s key. Like, if we try to do that on our own strength, you’re gonna fail. And that’s where we have to really keep our eyes fixed on Christ. R. C. Sproul he had that famous moment when he’s kind of… he’s talking about something, I can’t remember, and the audience… It’s like a panel and the audience kind of chuckles. And he looks at them, he goes, “What is wrong with you people?” And they all laugh again because they think he’s joking. He’s like, “No, I’m serious. You have too high a view of yourselves and too low a view of God” or something to that effect.

And what he’s getting at is when we behold God for who He is and we behold ourselves for who we are, the only response is the need for a giant, massive cross, a giant, massive Savior. Christ becomes more glorious, the greater the gap between us and God.

That has to be the starting point for true, authentic, sustainable forgiveness, especially in these moments when you feel like your marriage is shattered, you feel like your trust has been shattered. If you are looking to your spouse and saying, “How can I forgive you again?” you’re not going to find the answer. You must look to Christ. We must turn our eyes, fix them on Christ.

And that is really the essence of the gospel is that we are forgiven in Christ not because of what we’ve done, but because of who God is, what He’s done, not because of our love for God, but because of His love for us. He came down and He rescued us. Like in Ephesians, we’re reading out of Ephesians today. In Ephesians, it says, “You know, you were once dead, but you’ve been made alive in Christ.” Dead people don’t cry out. Dead people don’t reach. We have to be rescued. We have to be brought back to life. I can’t cry out for myself. I’ve been rescued. And that’s the message of the gospel.

So if you want to know that truth for yourself, in other words, if you want to place your faith in Christ and you want to be made right with God because of what He’s done, not because of your moral merit but because of Christ’s perfection, we want that for you. And we believe with all our hearts that that is the only way to salvation. We have a website set up for you so you can go start that journey.

We encourage you to find a pastor, a friend, a Christian friend, somebody to talk to, so you can begin being discipled. And the website we have to use thenewsisgood.com. Is that it? Is that the episode?

Selena: It definitely can be.

Ryan: I kind of-

Selena: I think I just want to encourage people to be quick to repent, be quick to forgive. Do what it takes to reconcile, address the anger immediately. Submit to Christ, forgive one another. Remember the compassion and mercy that He has shown you. And if you don’t know that, again, go to thenewsgood.com and begin digging into who God is, and you will not be disappointed.

I just want to, I think, shine a little bit of light on forgiveness really does help preserve and protect your covenant for the purpose that God has ordained that is even beyond your own family, right? There’s generations that are to come. So protect your covenant, strengthen your covenant, keep your unity strong through forgiveness that God’s called us all as believers to embrace.

Ryan: I would highlight there are very practical reasons for why that forgiveness is a good idea. One of the most obvious ones is divorce. It’s a horrible process and divorce is, in every way, damaging. That’s a practical reason. But I also want to say, like, responding to the commands of God with obedience, submission, and humility toward Him will almost always have a better material outcome. And what I mean by that is it’s gonna go better for you if you learn how to forgive others the way Christ has forgiven. That’s going to be materially better for you.

Now, it’s not a guarantee that everything’s gonna go well all the time. But I’m saying that these commands are not arbitrary. God has not just given us rules because He’s a rule-giving God. He’s giving us rules because He knows how we flourish because He designed us.

Selena: So good.

Ryan: Let’s pray. God, I know this is a hard topic for some, forgiveness, keeping short accounts. That sometimes it’s easier to not deal with hard things, with an offense, when trust has been betrayed or there’s been a significant pain. [00:30:00] So Lord, I pray that You would give a special grace to the husbands and the wives who are dealing with kind of that next level of pain, whatever that is for them.

I pray that You would help them first and foremost to behold You and Your glory as much as they can. Lord, help them also to see themselves rightly in light of not only who you are, but God who they used to be before You, before they knew You. Lord, that they might experience forgiveness in their own hearts toward one another and keep short accounts. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Selena: Amen. [baby crying]

Ryan: There she is. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. I want to encourage you once again, if you haven’t yet, check out the Fierce Parenting Podcast. That one we’ve been doing for about a year. We love it because obviously we’re right in the thick of it. And we don’t pretend to know everything. We do share kind of what works for us. We kind of process through things.

We’re starting a new series this week. And I don’t know how long it’s gonna be. It’s gonna be at least 10 weeks, maybe 15 weeks. But we’re going to be going through in great detail, some of the kind of the hot… Is that right term? The hot kind of cultural things that as parents we need to be considering in how we disciple our children, not just for their sake, but for their children’s sake and for their children’s children’s sake, and their children’s children’s children’s sake. So we’re going to be walking through that on the parenting side. So we’d love you to join us if you are a parent or looking forward to being one.

Other than that, this episode of Fierce Marriage is—

Selena: In the can.

Ryan: See you again in seven days. Until next time—

Selena: Stay fierce.