• Referenced scripture:
  • Romans 12:10
  • 1 Peter 5:5
  • Ephesians 4:32
  • Ephesians 4:2
  • 1 Thessalonians 5:11
  • James 5:16
  • James 5:9
  • Galatians 5:26
  • James 4:11
  • Hebrews 13:3
  • 1 John 1:7
  • Romans 5:10
  • Ephesians 4:32
  • Romans 12:16
  • 1 Thessalonians 5:13
  • John 13:34
  • 1 Peter 1:22
  • 1 Peter 4:9
  • James 5:16
  • Galatians 5:13
  • Hebrews 10:24
  • Romans 13:14 
  • Ephesians 5:21

• Recommended resource:
  • thenewsisgood.com
  • How A Husband Speaks
  • How A Wife Speaks

Selena: All right, the episode you’ve been waiting for. [Ryan laughs] Everyone’s been waiting for. We’ve been doing a series on trust-

Ryan: I think we should first address the visual elephant in the room. If you’re watching this, we are in a new studio, quote fingers. It’s actually in our garage.

Selena: Yes. We made it bigger so that we can do more interviews live here. Not that they weren’t live before. [laughs]

Ryan: But yeah, we’re going to hopefully, Lord willing, continue to expand the ministry that God has given us. We pray that it blesses our listeners, our viewers. This actually is not the first thing we recorded here because next week is the first thing we recorded here. It’s kind of confusing, but we recorded two episodes with Anna and Nathan Sutherland. They’re authors of new books that are coming out. So we talked about that.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: We’ll mention that in that episode. So it’s going to seem really anachronistic. It doesn’t line up time-wise. Anyway

Selena: Which is fine because it will give you all a few more weeks to get your questions into us. But we will talk about all of this on the other side.

[00:01:05]

Ryan: I’m not quite sure if the table height is right.

Selena: And I feel like I have to really like sit tall because I’m short anyways. And he got new legs for this table and the table’s thick. So I’m like, hello?

Ryan: I don’t know if the table’s too high or the chairs are too short. [laughs]

Selena: We’re just used to a table. Okay, guys, we’re used to our little round table in the office and it’s okay. We’ll figure it out. Anyhow.

Ryan: Where are we headed today? So yes, we’re continuing actually bringing to a close aside from the Q&A episode, our series on betrayal, trust, and rebuilding trust. The very first week of that series, we talked about what trust is. If you haven’t listened to that, do listen to that episode. We talked about a concept called cruciform trust, where we can’t really trust one another horizontally until we understand what trust means in terms of who God is. He’s trustworthy. He’s called us to trust him. And that then informs and equips and gives us context within which to trust one another, in particular in the covenant of marriage. So that’s a really foundational concept.

The second week, what did we talk about? Putting you on the spot. Do you remember?

Selena: So triage. So the bomb has been dropped, the betrayal has been acknowledged, trust has been broken or discovered. And so now we are in triage. Everybody’s bleeding, we’re trying to figure out what are the first next steps that you should take in that season.

Ryan: And then the third week of this… actually, we skipped one week in there. We did an interview. And then the third week in the series we talked about actively rebuilding trust, what steps you can take, practically speaking, once you’ve gotten out of the triage state.

Today we’re talking about, I’ll say this, building a culture of trust. In other words, maintaining trust. How do we have rhythms, boundaries, habits, behaviors, communication around building trust together constantly so that we’re not drifting apart, but we are clinging to one another. We’re holding fast to one another, cleaving to one another, as the Bible says.

Selena: There really is no neutrality. If we are not actively pursuing one another and building trust, we’re going to be just drifting apart. So there’s no grounds for neutrality here. We must be active in how we build and maintain trust.

Ryan: That said, let’s dive right into what it looks like to build a marital culture of trust. I’ll ask this because we like to reflect. We’re not perfect, okay? Do you think we have a trusting marriage culture?

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: Of course you have to say that. [laughs]

Selena: No, I very much like 100%, full gusto.

Ryan: Okay. I agree. What makes you say that? What about our marriage makes you think I can trust my husband? Because there are times when you could be very suspicious. Like if I’m gone on a trip thinking like, I don’t know what he’s going to do, who’s going to be around. Like you could have an opportunity to not trust me.

Selena: Opportunity.

Ryan: And I have plenty of opportunities to not trust you. Super sketchy. [laughs]

Selena: Very.

Ryan: No, I’m joking. So what exactly makes you think… I know you’re not really parsing it out in your own head, but I’m asking so that we can…

Selena: No, I think that we’ve built a lot of trust around how we communicate to one another, when we communicate, what we communicate about, and how we handle, you know, certain subjects, whether it’s sin or even adventures. Like how we talk about things and with the heart orientation that is focused on us and not just me and you not just focusing on you and what you want, like that I think has been very formative in how we trust one another and how we… yeah. I don’t know. What would you say? What would your answer be to that?

Ryan: That’s similar. Yeah. Yeah.

Selena: Right. Just take my answer.

Ryan: Exactly what you said.

Selena: Exactly what you said.

Ryan: Well, I think we have a history together. Like you’ve not given me a reason to not trust you. I mean, they’re minor, very minor things. A lies of omission, I’ll say.

Selena: A what?

Ryan: Lies of omission.

Selena: Lies of omission. Yes, that would be mine.

Ryan: We’ve talked about that in the past on the podcast.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: That’s what happens, right? It’s kind of weird because we get the weird opportunity to have our marriage be like fodder for the content that we create.

Selena: May it be used, Lord.

Ryan: May it be used for the Lord’s glory.

Selena: We’re kind of coming out of… you know, like we said, you’ve come out of the wartime, the trust was broken, it’s acknowledged, it’s been repented of, and now you’re committing to work through it at this point. So the dust is settled, you’re stepping into your new routines and habits. What are or what should be those new routines and habits? How do you continue to build trust? And it’s our conviction and our belief that it really does start with how you communicate to one another.

Communication is key. We wrote a whole book on it. Two books. I wrote one, you wrote one. And they’ve-

Ryan: They’re in the background. Right there.

Selena: They are right there. Because how you communicate, when you communicate, to what extent, and what you communicate about it matters to the Lord, right? He cares about how we communicate because part of how we communicate to one another displays whether or not we’re really placing, first of all, our trust in God, in obeying His laws and His precepts that He’s given us on how to interact and love one another and communicate that love to one another.

You know, if I trust God and we’re in this season of rebuilding trust, and we’re walking into this new season of, you know, Hey, we want to continue this culture of trust in our marriage, my heart attitude cannot be accusatory. It cannot be policing. It cannot be, you know, anything harsh or self-focused when an old temptation or opportunity or something triggers, right? There’s some sort of trigger of like, Oh no, like we might be facing that thing that broke our trust before. You know, we can’t just respond. We really have to, I think, take a moment and ask the Lord to help us to communicate in the way that He would have us.

Ryan: Yeah. We’ve talked about this at length. I’m just going to quickly recap. Communication is the only way that souls know each other, that we can know one another. I can guess, I can make guesses based on past communication. I can make guesses based on behavior, based on body language that is in itself a form of communication.

So until we open the lines up and begin to get good at, understand what’s happening in our own hearts and minds, putting words to that, and then saying those words in a way that is clear, until we do that, we’re not yet sharing the same meaning.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: So what we’re talking about here is sharing the same meaning over a sustained period of time. And so creating the habits and rhythms and skills necessary to actually get to the heart of what it is that caused the break of trust, what caused the distancing, right? Because trust is usually broken with distancing between you. So communication is the first kind of foundation to creating the culture of this.

We did a course and it’s still available. It’s called Gospel Centered Marriage. And we talk about communication and conflict there. And we use the terms wartime and peacetime communication.

Selena: Yeah. What does that mean?

Ryan: So you have different strategies for each one. So if your marriage is in a wartime, meaning that you are not communicating well, there’s coldness, you’re fighting-

Selena: There’s been a break of trust.

Ryan: Yeah. Usually, you’re in wartime because there’s been a break of trust or there’s been a steady distancing. Then you’re going to have different tactics and strategies than you would have if you were in peacetime.

So we spent the last three-plus episodes getting out of wartime. And now this whole thing is about what do we do during peacetime that is going to maybe, Lord willing, make the wartime less likely, less intense-

Selena: Or equip us for when the wartime comes to fight more fiercely and quicker. Right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Selena: And to kind of navigate those conflicts with faith.

Ryan: Right. What you do in those times, I think about, gosh, when, Selena, your grandmother used to squirrel away all kinds of food. Remember that?

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: She was post-depression era, grew up like many of our generation’s grandparents. So they had a different view of food. They had a different view. Like my grandfather, probably your grandfather as well, they had miscellaneous hardware items just kind of tucked away somewhere just in case, because you could always kind of make use of those items if scarcity ever hit or…

And so there was a different strategy that those folks had having kind of been through that wartime, so to speak, and World War II, literally, you know, also the depression. So we almost have to have that sort of attitude when it comes to your communication and you’re squirreling away where you’re actively building closeness, in your words, you’re actively building the habits and you’re drawing boundaries. Because when you’re in the wartime, it’s not the time to be like, we need a boundary. The boundary is broken. Obviously, something’s been missed. That’s just going to come off as ill-timed. It’s going to come off probably as snarky.

Selena: It won’t be a good boundary. It just won’t be a good boundary.

Ryan: It probably won’t be. Yeah.

Selena: Because it’s a response and not an actual-

Ryan: Yeah. So that’s what we mean by peacetime and the tactics that have to do with communication around it. Now we could talk about communication, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole much further because I want to focus in on the trust building. So how do we create rhythms, habits, and boundaries that would kind of make it less likely for there to be a breach of trust?

Selena: Well, I think maintaining trust begins just by acknowledging that we’re going to… it’s active. Like we’re walking in trust and that’s an act of faith. We talked about this in the past episodes, that we need to… everything we do needs to be faith-filled. So we’re not acting out of fear. We’re not acting out of, you know, resentment, but we’re actually taking that step of faith, you know, doing the things, even though our feelings may not be there, right, at the moment. But we’re being obedient and we’re doing it in faith, believing that God will help us build. Because we’re trying to rebuild a bridge so that, again, one day we can place our full entire trust on that.

Ryan: Right. So if you sit in a chair, a certain type of chair, and that chair collapses underneath you, you probably won’t sit in that same type of chair-

Selena: Or not the same way.

Ryan: …until you’re fairly convinced that that chair has been fixed adequately enough to support the full weight of a human being.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: The same goes for, you said building bridges, right? There’s a bridge near us. We live in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a bridge pretty close to our house. It’s called the Narrows Bridge. It’s one of these suspension bridges.

Well, back in the day, it was called Galloping Gertie because when the winds picked up, this thing would rock like crazy. There’s footage, there’s like old black and white footage of this. I can’t believe people drove across this bridge. Well, the inevitable happened is that there was a really hard storm or wind just blew and this bridge collapsed. And so they had to go back and rebuild it.

But while you’re rebuilding that bridge, what brought it to collapse in the first place? We’ve talked about that. Well, a lack of trust, a lack of closeness, drifting apart. But as you rebuild, you don’t rebuild it exactly the same. You rebuild it stronger. You engineer it better. And then you set to work doing the maintenance on the bridge as you continue to put your weight on it, as you continue to use the bridge to get from A to B type of thing.

So what does that maintenance actually look like? And what I want to talk about alongside of that is how does communication facilitate the maintenance. Because the maintenance can be seen as, you said this just now, policing. Of course, that’s not the goal.

Selena: No.

Ryan: We want the same thing. Now, how do we go about it?

Selena: Are we on the same side though? I guess that would be the question because if my heart is more concerned, I think about myself and getting hurt, then I’m going to definitely be more guarded. And my tone and the way I deal with you is going to be from a distance. I’m going to be more, I think, abrasive, policing, suspect, you know, because it’s about me. I don’t want to get hurt. But if-

Ryan: But it goes back to last week where we talked about forgiveness. We have to believe that forgiveness and repentance actually bear some real fruit. It’s not just words we say, but it actually should change our orientation.

Selena: Because when we forgive one another, then we are then oriented like, you know, back together. So I’m not concerned as much ideally about me, but I’m more concerned about we, you and me, like us. And so if I’m concerned about us, the maintenance is going to come from ideally a place of love, right? A place of, I care about our marriage. I care about the health of our marriage.

So there’s four things that we’ve listed out as a maintenance kind of analogy to help you keep your bridge of trust intact. Right? And we see this, literally, we see this on this bridge that we drive across every couple of weeks or so. You see maintenance workers going up. You know, they’re tied in everything. You see them going through all the maintenance. One of the first things they do and they did when it collapsed is they inspected it. They inspected it.

Ryan: So inspection without good communication will be policing.

Selena: Yes. I would say loving communication, godly communication.

Ryan: Right. And so an inspection without acknowledging the boundaries and the habits necessary for it will also seem like it’s ad-hoc or it’s even, to use another Latin ism, ad hominem. I mean, that feels like an attack as opposed to… Like we’ll use the example of a husband or a wife who’s been caught looking at pornography habitually at all really. Well, how do you inspect that? Well, you ask, how have you been doing? How’s your heart? Where’s your head at?

Well, if a husband goes to his wife and says, “Yes, we want the same thing. This thing broke your trust. I know it’s a sin. I repented of it. I’ve turned from it. I want to rebuild your trust in it. So here’s the habit and routine that we need to have. Let’s talk about it more often. Feel free to ask me.

Selena: Anytime. Yeah.

Ryan: “Ask me anytime.” We always say this, make two promises when you do that. Promise that if you’re asked you won’t lie. But then if you’re on the asking side of it, then you’ll still love your spouse even if they tell you something that you don’t want to hear. Because how else are you going to create this atmosphere of actual transparency?

Selena: Right.

Ryan: That’s what the inspection is. If inspection is around something like finances, I mean, what’s… say, you know, someone overspends or spends selfishly or whatever, and that broke trust. Same thing, right? “Let’s look at our accounts together. Let’s talk about our goals together. Let’s remember the vision for the future that we have.”

Selena: Well, and I also think there’s an introspection of your own heart, right? I mean, I’m going to inspect my own heart. And I think we should inspect, why did that breach of trust happen? Why did you feel like you needed to overspend again after we have talked about it? And this is kind of the culture and habits that we’ve been living out of. Let’s acknowledge it and uncover it and shine light on it so that we don’t have to be here again and Lord willing, we won’t. But let’s uncover, see the elephant, get it out. Let’s fight this head-on and not just kind of dance around it. So I agree, there’s a piece of inspection that needs to happen on both parties and within your hearts and then within your marriage.

Ryan: Yeah. So that’d be step one. the next one that we have is assess. That’s kind what you were just saying. So we’re finding, are there cracks in this bridge? If there aren’t-

Selena: Where are they?

Ryan: If they are there, how intense are they? Meaning like if we’re inspecting this and we’re getting the sense that the habit is way harder to kick than we thought, okay. So you’re assessing the actual results of the inspection, and you’re thinking, okay… so this is not going to work. I can tell that this needs to be repaired more.

Selena: And this is going to take communication, right? Delicate and probably patient-

Ryan: Because you’ve already made it out of the trust. There’s a fear that you’re going to rebreak it if you show any cracks or any sign of cracking. And we’re here to tell you-

Selena: I think it’s the opposite.

Ryan: The opposite is true.

Selena: If you show the cracks, tell them immediately, that’s more trust-building in my opinion.

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. And then you can actually get to the work of actually truly repairing the bridge the way it needed to be repaired in the first place. So what does that assessment result in? Well, if you haven’t already, you need to get biblical godly counsel from Christian friends, from a pastor, an elder at your church, somebody who can see into your situation from the outside. An expert.

If I continue the analogy, if you’ve got an issue with one of the welds on the bridge, well, you’ve got to call the structural engineer and find out what are the specs for the new weld because this weld is not holding. Well, that’s not going to be the people standing on the bridge. It’s going to be people from the outside coming in looking at. “I’ve looked at lots of bridges and this bridge is not welded properly. I’ve looked at lots of marriages, I’ve shepherded a lot of souls or your friends might say, “We’ve walked alongside each other for a long enough time. I know that this tendency that you have.”

This is what assessment should do is it actually ups the ante in terms of the different habits and routines that we’re creating. Inspect, assess, and then repair. So we’ve talked about the weld needs to be done. We’ll go about the work that it takes to actually do the rewelding, so to speak.

Selena: And ideally, you have this communication during the peacetime has, I guess, given you like the credits and the ability to maybe not deal with the situation how you did originally when the trust was broken originally, but now you guys have grown together in your confidence of one another. You’ve grown in the Lord for your love and patience for one another. There’s been sanctification that has happened ideally. And so now instead of, you know, I’m just completely thrown off by what’s happened, I am now more resilient. I am more capable of having the conversation without emotions running as high as they used to before. Right. And so ideally I’m more able to repair I think quickly and with more confidence, I guess.

Ryan: Yeah. We’re going to go through some one another passages here that kind of… they will always frame how we see each other as brother and sister in Christ, also as husband and wife.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: And that also really helps so you can do it more quickly. But the final kind of tangible thing. So inspect, assess, repair, and then maintain. And this primarily looks like making time. Making time to make sure this actually happens because… Somebody used to say people don’t… they don’t respect what you expect until they know that you’re going to inspect it or something like that.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: But if there’s no inspection happening and there’s no rhythms that set the inspection to be a part of your marital life, it’s just a matter of time. It’s just a matter of time until… So you have to make the time to maintain the thing. Again, with the analogy, if you don’t paint the bridge, it’s going to rust. If it rusts long enough, it’s going to break again. It doesn’t matter how good your welds are.

Selena: It’s true. That’s true.

Ryan: So you need to maintain the thing that God has given you and make time, communicate in a healthy way. If you’re struggling with communication, it will be far more difficult. Iron out the communication piece. It’s not something you have to struggle with forever. Guys, if you’re not a natural communicator, you don’t have to always be a bad communicator. You can figure out how to gain the skill.

In fact, that’s what one of the main premises of the book that I wrote for men called How a Husband Speaks. Selina wrote How a Wife Speaks, is that you can gain the skill and you can even master it. And so that’s part of the maintaining of this.

So let’s go through these one another’s, right? So the Bible gives us a list of what we should… how we should treat one another, how we should…

Selena: Yeah. It really just describes true Christian friendship, relationship. I think these are on every relationship level of how we’re required to treat one another. In the name of maintaining trust, the Bible orders us and teaches us and encourages us, and empowers us to be devoted to one another in brotherly love, right?

Ryan: That’s good.

Selena: That’s Romans 12:10. We’re just going to rattle through a bunch of these. And while we do it, because there’s, I don’t know how many… Let’s see. There is 24. We’re going to go through them all. I know you didn’t plan on that Very quickly. But while we do it, listener, viewer, grab one of them. Just grab ahold of one of those and say, this is how I can one another my spouse better. I can be devoted better to my wife or my husband.

Selena: In the name of rebuilding trust.

Ryan: Right. So number one, be devoted to one another. Romans 12:10. Number two, be humble toward one another. See, there’s mine right there. 1 Peter 5:5. Be humble toward one another.

Selena: Mine’s is be kind and compassionate to one another. Ephesians 4:32. I lack compassion sometimes. Be patient with one another. Also mine. Ephesians 4:2. I’m really good at this one though. [laughs]

Ryan: Build up one another. You’re good at building yourself up.

Selena: Encourage one another. No, encourage one another. It’s build up one another.

Ryan: 1 Thessalonians 5:11. That’s that one. The sixth one is confess to one another. James 5:16. Don’t grumble against one another. James 5:9.

Selena: The Lord says, just don’t grumble in general. It’s a sin.

Ryan: It’s true.

Selena: Grumbling against the Lord.

Ryan: Hey-oh. Don’t provoke one another. Galatians 5:26.

Selena: Did you hear that? [Ryan laughs]

Ryan: I was provoking you the other day.

Selena: You were. The other day? Like five minutes before we started this. Do not provoke one another. Do not slander one another. James 4:11. Encourage one another daily. Hebrews 13:3. Have concern for one another. Have fellowship with one another. 1 John 1:7. Forgive one another. Again, we see forgiveness. Honor one another.

Ryan: Gotta say the verse references.

Selena: Romans 5:10.

Ryan: That’s honor one another. Forgive one another is Ephesians 4:32.

Selena: Among others.

Ryan: Live in harmony with one another. Romans 12:16. Live in peace with one another. 1 Thessalonians 5:13. Contentiousness is a thing.

Selena: We have a contentious daughter right now.

Ryan: Well, yes.

Selena: We’ve acknowledged it in her.

Ryan: She’s not.

Selena: She’s sweetly contentious.

Ryan: She’s always got a retort, as many children do at times. But there’s a culture that this creates.

Selena: Yes, in a marriage.

Ryan: That’s why the Bible says it’s better for a man to live on the corner of the roof of his house than in the house with a contentious wife. Because why? She’s a drippy faucet. She will drive the man mad. Right?

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: So that’s the opposite of what this is saying. This is saying live in peace with one another. There’s a way-

Selena: In harmony with one another.

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I can go on and on. I won’t. Love one another. John 13:34. I’ll do a few more, then you can finish this out.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: Love one another deeply. 1 Peter 1:22. Offer hospitality to one another. 1 Peter 4:9. How can you offer hospitality to your spouse?

Selena: How?

Ryan: Do we think about that?

Selena: I do.

Ryan: You, the other day… I just felt so loved because I was in my office working. It was a summer morning, which means that breakfast was later than usual and I hadn’t had anything. And you just brought in… Either it was breakfast or lunch. I can’t remember. I thought it was breakfast.

Selena: I brought you food.

Ryan: You brought me food. You were showing me hospitality. You were offering me hospitality. And I felt loved by that.

Selena: You should. In your own house. You absolutely should. [laughs] I’ll finish these up. So pray for one another. James 5:16. We talk a lot about prayer for one another and how important that is. And especially in building trust. Gosh. Serving one another. Galatians 5:13. Spur one another on. Hebrews 10:24. Warning against judging one another. Romans 13:14. Never a good spot to start when you’re judging one another.

There’s assessment, like we talked about. But judgment is something different. I would say judgment is harsh and comes from a place of pride and self-righteousness. I just think that needs to be put there. Okay. And last one, submit to one another. Ephesians 5:21. How does a husband submit?

Ryan: This is a term used by-

Selena: Ephesians 5 will tell you.

Ryan: Yeah, Ephesians 5 will tell you. That was actually referring to not necessarily the husband-wife dynamic but the believer-to-believer dynamic before the Lord. That’s not to misconstrue submissiveness of a wife as a wife versus the headship of a husband as a husband. Now, as believers, we submit to one another in Christ. But that’s not the analog to submitting in a wifely way.

Selena: But there is a submission… not but. And there is a submission between a husband and wife that is in how we love one another. Like I submit myself. Is that submission or sacrificial? Sacrificial, that’s the word.

Ryan: Both and, yeah.

Selena: Both and. Like you give up yourself and you submit yourself to Christ in the name of loving me. And I submit myself in different ways, though. Again, these are roles versus-

Ryan: Also, I look at you, my wife, and I say, you are a daughter of God. I must acknowledge that. You were God’s daughter before you’re my wife. That part of who you are will always inform how I treat you as a wife. Because I’m accountable to God in two ways. Probably more than that.

Selena: At least two. So we pray that this is helpful kind of going through this list of one another’s. Just do a Google search if you really want to dive into some of these a lot deeper. But it’s all in the name of trust. Forgiving one another requires trust. It also builds trust.

Like God is so good in how He has designed our relationships to operate. And He’s so faithful when we love one another deeply, when we serve one another deeply, when we are not judging one another, that we’re submitting, that we’re fellowshipping with one another on a regular basis, we’re being known by each other, right?

This is the inspection. This is the assessment. This is the fix it, repair it, and then maintain it by going through these again. The Bible never tires of giving us… we will never conquer and ace everything that the Bible requires of us. Right? And so there’s always a lesson to be [inaudible] here.

Ryan: And we thank God for Christ.

Selena: And thank God for Christ.

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. So this concludes, I think, our series on betrayal, trust, rebuilding trust, maintaining trust. With the exception of in two weeks, we’re going to be doing a Q&A on betrayal and trust. If you have questions, to get those questions to us, go to fiercemarriage.com slash ask. That’s A-S-K. And you can call in. You can leave a voicemail. You can text in. You can also write in via a web form that we have set up there.

And we’re going to try to go through those questions. Be succinct if you can. The shorter, the better. Although these are usually complex situations that are being brought to the table. So we’re going to try to find ones we can answer directly, but also themes that will hopefully be helpful.

And so you have two weeks to get those questions in. And we’re going to probably spend a little bit more time. That’ll be a longer episode, I would imagine, going through those and hopefully bringing some biblical thinking and wisdom to them.

That being said, all this trust… everything’s possible because we have a God who’s trustworthy. And marriage is not something that we instantiated ourselves, right? It’s not something that mankind created. Marriage exists and is good because we have a God who created it, who said marriage is good, who said covenant is good. And by the way, you’re going to relate to each other covenantally because I, God speaking, related to my people covenantally.

What I mean by that is that we are bound by the covenants of God, whether you’re a believer or not, okay? With the covenant that God had with creation. When we stepped outside of his law, creation fell. We are under Adam’s headship until we are under Christ’s federal headship. And so the gospel is getting outside… excuse me. The gospel means getting away from being under Adam’s headship and being instead under Christ’s headship. And that’s what it means to become a Christian, placing your faith in Christ. I hope this isn’t too theologically dense.

Selena: I think it’s good. I think we’re sharing the gospel with good people.

Ryan: So all of this makes sense. All of this is possible because we have a God who is real. And if God is real and He says things and He has commands, then we need to be made right with God. Christ came so that mankind would be made right with God, those who are in Christ would be made right with God.

So if you don’t know Jesus, we want you to know Jesus. To that end, we say, talk to a friend, say, Show me who Jesus is. Can we read the Bible together? Find a church that preaches out of the Bible. Easier said than done, frankly, truly these days. Find a church that actually values God’s word and it’s submitted under it. It doesn’t lord itself over God’s word, but it’s under God’s word. And if you have trouble finding those things, we have a website that could help. It’s thenewsisgood.com.

Let’s pray. Father, thank You for trust. Thank You that we can trust You. Thank You that You’ve given us Your faithfulness and You’ve proven it time and time again that we might trust in Your word and that we think about the one another passages that You’ve given us, that we are to love and honor and respect and submit to one another and to love one another deeply with sacrificial love.

Lord, we can trust that those aren’t empty words. Those words will bear fruit in our lives. I pray that that would be the case for the couples and the individuals listening to this, watching this. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: All right. Thank you so much for joining us. You are looking, if you’re watching, into the fierce forge is what I think we’re gonna call this.

Selena: The forge.

Ryan: The forge. That’s where lots of iron will be sharpened one day. We have a little bit more space this way. I’m hoping to do like a men’s thing. Like that’d be cool. Ladies thing. Maybe we have to build out that side of it still. There’s no pretty furniture over there.

Selena: Ladders.

Ryan: [She rock?] and a ladder. So yeah, Lord willing, we’ll continue to bring the content your way. One of the main ways we’re able to do that is through our fellowship… A lot of Fs. The fierce fellowship. We’re the Fredericks. But if you want to partner with us, if the Lord is leading you to do that, we’re humbled and honored that that might be the case. So go to fiercemarriage.com/partner. You’ll find instructions on how to do that there. Otherwise, Lord willing, we’ll be here again many weeks, week in, week out. All right. All right.

So this episode of the Fierce Marriage Podcast, the first one ever in the forge is—

Selena: In the can.

Ryan: See you again, Lord willing, in about seven days. So until next time—

Selena: Stay fierce.