• Referenced scripture:
  • Deuteronomy 7:9
  • Psalm 25:10
  • Psalm 145:13
  • Psalm 146:5-7
  • Psalm 146:3-5

• Recommended resource:
  • thenewsisgood.com

Selena: Ryan, we have a lot of people that write into us and they are dealing with broken trust in their marriage. What are some things that you would tell them? What do you hear when they say, “Hey, my husband broke my trust, or my wife, my spouse is just… we’re crushed. We don’t know where to go”?

Ryan: We get that question a lot, like you said.

Selena: A lot.

Ryan: It does depend on the severity of the broken trust. Not all broken trust is equally easy to rebuild. But here’s the good news is you can rebuild trust. The bad news is, is it’s broken. The bad news is, is that rebuilding is not easy and it’s not guaranteed unless you place your utter full, complete faith and trust in God in that process. Both of you do that. Which actually is what we’re going to talk about today.

So today we’re launching a four-week series. Now we’ve done this in the past. I think we covered this topic about three years ago?

Selena: Mm-hmm.

Ryan: Wow.

Selena: Time flies.

Ryan: You know, we’ve matured, the ministry has continued, we’ve learned a few things. Our theology has, I think, gotten more precise. So we’re going to readdress this topic, because frankly, it’s timeless. As long as there’s fallen humans getting married, this issue of trust, breaking and trust rebuilding is always going to be something that I think couples need to be reminded of.

For this episode, we’re going to talk about the first part of the trust conversation. So we’ll see you on the other side.

[00:01:28]

Ryan: Greetings and welcome once again, friends, fierce listeners, and our fierce fellows to the Fierce Marriage podcast. I’m Ryan, this is my lovely wife Selena. It’s a pleasure to have you. Thank you for joining us. Selena, do you remember in the early days of the podcast, we used to do our heart checks?

Selena: Oh yeah.

Ryan: Do you remember what that was?

Selena: It was, what are you reading? What are you hearing? Like what is in your ears? What’s in front of your eyes? And what-

Ryan: You’re so enthusiastic right now.

Selena: Sorry. I was trying to think what is a heart check in. And then what’s something-

Ryan: What’s God’s stirring in your heart basically? Maybe we shouldn’t do that right now.

Selena: That fell flat, sorry. [laughs]

Ryan: It’s okay. But Fierce listener, if you miss those, let us know. Write in fiercemarriage.com/ask. You can write in there. I don’t know. It’s just kind of a good way to warm things up.

Selena: Bring back the heart check.

Ryan: Bring back the heart check. If nothing else, do it in your own marriage. Selena said it, but all you do is each day or once a week, you say, “Hey, what book is in your hand? What voice is in your ear? And what is God’s stirring in your heart through those things?” And by voice, we mean like, Hey, the podcast. Or, you know, a pastor-

Selena: You listen to sermons from your pastor. Yeah.

Ryan: You know, there’s all kinds of resources that could be in your ear or an audiobook.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: I’ve gotten fond of that.

Selena: Just good stuff.

Ryan: I just finished one today. Life in a Negative World by Aaron Renn. It’s a good listen. Good read. So today’s topic, I mean, I mentioned in the intro, we’re doing a series on trust, where we did… Here’s the outline. Today we’re going to look at what trust actually is. I think it’s really important that we get our feet underneath us. Particularly, you don’t want to just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and say that is all kind of whatever works.

Selena: That’s trust. [laughs]

Ryan: We need to have a foundation for what it is. Week two, we’re going to talk about broken trust, namely betrayal. And we would characterize that as kind of triage, right?

Selena: Right.

Ryan: Like you’ve just fallen out of a tree and you’ve got a compound break on your leg, bones sticking out.

Selena: What is the first thing you do? What do you do?

Ryan: You roll into the emergency room. How do you stop the bleeding? Week three is repairing the trust. So the bleeding stopped, the trauma is over, but the fallout remains

Selena: You’re still kind of in the hospital getting that treatment. And then the fourth week is… we called it maintaining trust, but I changed it to building trust because it can be building and rebuilding. It’s kind of those peacetime, what we call peacetime activity and rhythm. So what are you doing in your marriage? Whether it’s building your friendship and spending more time together, being engaged, you know, reading the Bible together, doing just more eternal spiritual type things together too. And also having fun as friends. That builds a lot of trust. [Ryan laughs] But maintaining those peacetime activities. It’s not just like, well, we’re fighting and then we’re not fighting. It could be, yeah, we’re going through conflict, but then not only… then the other time when you’re not going through conflict, it’s not that we’re just not going through conflict, but we can actually love one another. We can hang out and enjoy each other’s company. We can build each other up, talk about, you know, what book is in our hand and voices in our ear and those kinds of things. So it’s those peacetime activities. Are we being intentional about those?

Then fifth week we are going to-

Ryan: I think [inaudible 00:04:53] this one. Go ahead.

Selena: We’re going to leave it open to you guys. So you can begin to ask questions. It’s going to be a Q&A about trust. And so you guys can go ahead at the end of this, we’ll tell you how to write in and ask questions. I guess go to fiercemarriage.com/ask.

Ryan: A-S-K. Yeah. Might as well. Because throughout this, if something pops up, just maybe jot it down on a notepad or on your notes… on your phone somehow, text it to a friend. [both laughs] Sometimes Selena texts me things all the time. She’s like, “Ignore it.”

Selena: Ignore. I’m not the only one. You used to text me all your Hebrew notes and things, like Greek notes. And I was just like, “What? This is literally Greek to me.”

Ryan: It saves me a lot of time from having… anyway.

Selena: Exactly. Exactly.

Ryan: Okay, fine. If that works for you, go for it. So that’s the roadmap for the next few weeks. We haven’t done a series in a while, so please do let us know what your questions are. Like Selena said, fiercemarriage.com/ask. But also let us know if this is a format that I think you appreciate. Maybe we can do a series, you know-

Selena: On different topics.

Ryan: …episodes and then do another series on a topic. We broke out of that rhythm a few years back, but… The goal for today, as I mentioned earlier, is to biblically define trust. Here’s what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to create a definition in our own mind and in our own hearts and our own marriage, frankly, that is just a hodgepodge of a little bit of what I think, a little bit of what God said, a little bit of what the world says, a little bit of what my wife says, a little bit of what my kids think, what the TV teaches me. We don’t want to do that.

We want to say, okay, we’re going to set ourselves on this firm foundation squarely, squarely on what God says trust is. We have a term that… I think this is something we’ve developed, but we call it cruciform trust. Cruciform trust. So maybe that’s the new vocab for this week, if you will. It’s the shape of a cross, right? So there’s a vertical component to trust, and that’s the primary component in this case. And then there’s a horizontal component as well. And we’ll describe what those are. But that will be kind of our framework within which we talk about trust.

Selena: Yeah. And it’s important, again, like he said, to define trust biblically, because in order to know what it is and the foundation that we’re standing on, we also know what it is not, right? It is not just our thoughts all mod podged together. S

I want to open up with a quote from Got Questions. It says, “The words translated “trust” in the Bible literally mean a bold, confident, sure security or action based on that security. Trust is not exactly the same as faith, which is the gift of God. Ephesians 2:8-9 is where we see this. Rather, trusting is what we do because of the faith we have been given. Trusting is believing in the promises of God in all circumstances, even in those where the evidence seems to be the contrary. Hebrews 11 talks about faith, which is accepting and believing the truth that God reveals about Himself supremely in the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, the practical consequence of faith in God is trust, which we prove by living out our full acceptance of God’s promises day by day.”

This struck me because I did not think to take trust and faith and kind of peel them apart. You almost use them synonymously in a conversation, right?

Ryan: Sure.

Selena: And it’s good, again, to understand our foundation clearly. When we understand what trust is, what it isn’t, what faith is in light of trust, and what faith isn’t, right, then we can better clearly understand our foundation and stand, I think, more firm on that.

Ryan: It’s interesting. So we, as Christians, are called not to be skeptics. I mean that in kind of the philosophical worldview sense, but we’re called to be Bereans. Meaning that we ask questions in good faith, trusting that we’ll find an answer from a reliable source that even if we don’t make complete sense of it, the source is the validator of the trust, of the faith.

I bring this up because I think it bears its weight on this conversation, but also… I’m on Twitter, X rather, and I have fun on X because I mostly just read and I kind of interact. I’m not prolific on there, but I like once in a while to get some reps in via debates with people who disagree with me. And this can be on all sorts of topics, whatever the Zeitgeist topic of the week is. It seems to be there’s these week-long cycles in the media and Twitter.

Selena: They’re all strategic, aren’t they?

Ryan: It’s all a psyop. Anyway, I got into one with a couple of atheists actually recently and I won’t get into the details of the debate, but I came to the conclusion as I was trying to kind of show this atheist that he has a belief system, but he just fails to recognize it. And atheists said, “The big thing is that we lack belief. It’s not that we believe in no God, it’s just that we lack a belief in God, just like you lack a belief in the giant spaghetti monster type of thing.”

I tried to explain to him that you say that, but you don’t live that way. You’re borrowing every day from a worldview that you deny. So the conclusion I came to is that atheism is essentially a self-centered cosmology. It’s self-centered, meaning that if they can’t make sense of it, they won’t trust it. If I don’t have the evidence and the evidence doesn’t check the boxes in my mind, I can’t trust it.

I said, “You’re utterly self-centered. You’re the arbiter of your own. You’re the arbiter of the evidence. But how can you trust your own mind? It’s circular, right? You can’t trust the evidence that you interpreted with your mind because how do you know your mind’s trustworthy? Well, you know because you have evidence. Well, how do you know? Because you’re using your mind. So it’s very circular.

Every system of knowledge is very circular. So this is where trust comes in. Sorry, I had to get that little sidebar in. Christians look at God and say, Okay, there’s parts of God that I cannot understand. But I can see that God is good and I can see the evidence and I can take the evidence as evidence for Him and trust that he’s a trustworthy God. And it’s that foundation of trust that you now build your questions upon, it’s what you build your foundation for faith upon, it’s what you build your life upon.

That’s what trust is. That’s what faith is. It’s looking and saying… I know we use this analogy. I forget where it was.

Selena: The branch.

Ryan: The branch.

Selena: I think it was C.S. Lewis.

Ryan: No.

Selena: No.

Ryan: I was talking to somebody. Was it on the podcast?

Selena: Maybe. I don’t know.

Ryan: Anyway. Oh no, I was talking to the baseball guys because I do chapel for the AAA guys. And I was like, True faith in action is not just seeing a rope hanging over a river of lava that would say, you swing on it, it’ll save your life. But faith in action, so James talks about in James 2, is you actually grab the rope and put your weight in it, and then you take a swing, as opposed to knowledge that is unsaving or belief that is unsaving, which is just knowing that the rope or thinking the rope is saving you.

So how does this all come back around to marriage? You look at me like, Ryan, where are you going with this?

Selena: No. Follow you blindly.

Ryan: We have to understand that we trust the object of our trust determines the level of our trust. And because God… we have trust, we understand trust. The fact that the sun rose today, the fact that your heart beat again, the fact that you have air in your lungs, the fact that our atoms have not completely scattered and exploded, that is all testifying to the trustworthiness of our God. And He has so interwoven the rhythms that he has given us in time and space that we can… we take them so for granted what trust is.

So when you think about the foundation of our trust, it is not just that we can trust God Himself, that is it, but it’s that God Himself is the foundation of all trust because He’s the reason that we can wake up in the morning and set our feet on solid ground and not be thrown off into space because He says the nature should rule this way and… it should run this way rather. So that’s what I’m just trying to get to is that-

Selena: We can take for granted I think the amount of consistency that we have in our lives because of God’s sovereignty, His lordship, His godliness.

Ryan: It says, Through Him and for Him all things are created and are held together. That is truly the foundation of trust is that we have a faithful, trustworthy God. And that’s why it’s a good virtue to pursue in marriage.

Selena: He’s trustworthy because of these things. He’s also trustworthy because He is God. Right?

Ryan: Yeah. The definition that we read says it’s a bold, confident, sure security or action based on that security. So what’s the opposite of trust then? Right.

Selena: Well, if you think of somebody who has, you know, a firm belief in a truth, they rely on something. The opposite of that would be that if they don’t trust and they may be very cautious or unsure, they’re not going to act boldly or out of security. They’re probably going to ask a lot of questions.

So if you’re the person that doesn’t trust, you’re going to look at that rope and you’re going to question everything about it. Right? You’re not going to have any forms like, Okay, I see the rope, but what is that tied to? And then how is that secure? And how do I know? There’s going to be this just demand, I think, for evidence, despite anything else. So it’s a lack of faith, I think. So true trust requires faith, and not having trust means you will not have faith either.

Ryan: Well, that’s just it. Again, to use that analogy of swinging across a river of lava, what reason would you have to trust that rope? You have to know on some level the properties of a rope, the properties of a branch, the property… and maybe someone told you, Hey, when you see that rope, swing on it. So it’s always going to be rooted in some fundamental aspect of that thing.

Now, we have God telling us, “I am trustworthy.” So are we going to take Him at His word? Well, we have to if we’re going to trust Him.

Selena: Right. I mean, Deuteronomy 7:9, this is a verse that support… We have a few verses here telling us that God is faithful and true. We say those things, but looking in the Bible, we are given evidence of those things, right? It says, “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love Him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.”

Ryan: Psalm 25:10. We’ll just add some more verses here. “All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness for those who keep His covenant and His testimonies.” That’s the idea behind faithfulness is the fact that He does what He says He’s going to do. He’s trustworthy.

Selena: Yeah. And you see faithfulness constantly following the word covenant or even preceding the word covenant. So can you be faithful without a covenant? Like if we’re friends, we have sort of this ideal… like I have friends and it’s kind of an unspoken… not a covenant, but this understanding and agreement that like, well, because we are friends, I’m going to be faithful to you and a friend. And a faithful, godly friend is someone who doesn’t gossip behind your back, someone who’s not just going to plan something else when they know you have invited them over or something like that. So there’s kind of these agreements that are in place.

When it says that the Lord is steadfast, He keeps His covenants, it always points back to Him keeping His covenants, showing that He is faithful.

Ryan: Because we have a covenantal God and that’s the means by which He governs His creation. He has a creation covenant.

Selena: We have reason to trust Him. I was going to say we don’t not have reason. [laughs] We have-

Ryan: It gets down to the mechanism by which the trust is established. And that’s the covenantal. We’re gonna talk about when the covenant is broken, like we’re not there yet, we’re just talking about what is this foundation. Well, you nailed it. Can you have trust, can you have faithfulness without covenant?

This is the beauty of… there’s a category and there’s a way of, I guess, approaching scripture, and it’s a covenantal theology. It’s not a new thing. It’s part of the Reformation. It’s part of Puritan thinking. The idea that God always relates, He always relates to His creation through covenant.

So, not to go back on another big sidebar, but I was also on X again, somebody was talking about… someone accused… you know, he said, “You believe in a God who drowned everybody. Every man, woman, and child, and every baby in every mother’s womb. So how dare you have any moral grounds to stand on?”

And somebody responded, No, He didn’t. He mercifully allowed eight people to live. Despite what? Someone said, Oh, so he killed everyone else. No. There was a covenant with mankind. That covenant was utterly eviscerated by mankind. They were evil in increasingly wicked ways, more and more. God had every right-

Selena: And so God regretted that He had made man.

Ryan: Based on this covenant.

Selena: He was ready to blot them all out.

Ryan: And He could have just been justified in it and it wouldn’t have been contradictory to His love or compassion or mercy at all. But instead, He had mercy on them. And so the only way that a Christian can say He had mercy instead of He was a cruel God is because you see that He relates to us through His covenants and that we broke… we’re the covenant breakers.

Selena: We are always the covenant breakers.

Ryan: And He’s the covenant keeper and He overdoes the keeping. He keeps it on our behalf and that’s the gospel. We’re going to read two more verses here. Psalm 145:13 says, “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations. The Lord is faithful in all His words and kind in all his works.”

Selena: Psalm 146, we’ll start in verse 5. “Blessed is he whose help is in the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever. Go to verse 7. “Who executes justice for the oppressed and who gives food to the hungry.”

Ryan: You see how it’s all harkened back, it all points back to the God of Jacob. Well, what does he have with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? He had a covenant.

Selena: Right. And interestingly enough, further up in the Psalm, he talks about what not to put your trust in. I mean, the title is “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.” And then it goes into blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob.

So the Bible clearly states who we are to trust in, why we should trust him. It also states who we should not trust. And ourselves being a part of that, not trusting our own emotions, which we’ll get there in another moment, but I think talking about, do we trust his words. So we talked about: Do we trust God? Do we understand that He is trustworthy? And why is that important?

Well, we talked about how He is a faithful and true God, how He gives… we’re now talking about how He gives us His word that is true. Do we believe that it’s true? I think that’s one of the biggest things we struggle with. Even as someone who’s always been in the church, always known and been around the Word of God, it says, For the Word of God is living, in Hebrews 4, an active, sharp, and intuitive sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints of marrow, and discerning thoughts and tensions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account.

Ryan: So you raised the question as, okay, so we’re doing the cruciform shape, we’re looking at the vertical component, our trusting God, God being the creator, us being the creature, are we able to place our trust in God?

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: Yes. How do we know we can do that? You’re asking that question. Well, we know because He’s told us. Well, how has He told us? Well, I mentioned the covenant with creation. He’s revealed Himself in some sense in His creation. Romans 1. Hebrews talks about that as well. But He’s also given us His word. And so you’re raising the question, can we trust His word? Because a lot of people say, yeah, I trust God but I don’t trust maybe the translation that we have, or I don’t trust your interpretation of that passage.

Selena: Yeah. They pick and choose what they want to trust God in, depending on the hard situation that they might find themselves in, because they don’t really have faith to trust that God is good. It’s hard to have trust and faith in God. When things in your marriage are going wrong on all levels, it’s hard to say, “And still God is good. And yet God is good.” It might be hard for you if your faith is being built, if your heart is being refined. But for some of us and for those of you out here who have gone through hard things and said, Yeah, it is still well with my soul, it is still well with my soul, even though I went through this hard thing, even though I will probably not be the same person, God is good. It is well with my soul and nothing else can be compromised from that.

That leads us to-

Ryan: I wanna add to that. I want to add to that.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: Sorry. I don’t know what to do. Because I feel like it’s in the hard times when you actually have a faith. It’s when your faith is put to the test. That’s why we’re told, rejoice when you face trials of many kinds. Why? Because it produces faith. It’s the hard times that produce the faith. So when you have the object of your trust, you need to know when to actually put your weight on that rope.

Selena: I would say always, but yes.

Ryan: Yes. But especially when you doubt it. Because that’s actually the faith in action.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: Because if you don’t doubt it, yeah, you have faith, but it’s-

Selena: If there’s no lava flowing underneath you, then it’s just like your-

Ryan: Your stakes are low.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: It’s easy to trust God when the stakes are low. Again, relating the foundation for even understanding trust, that we can have trust, but how, you can see how we’re starting to realize, so now how can I trust God with my marriage covenant when it’s hard? Now, he’s a worthwhile, trustworthy God.

Selena: Our pastor talked about a few weeks ago, the affliction brothers of trial, trouble, and tribulation. You know, you’re going through a difficult time, maybe not standing there banging on the door of heaven saying why, God? Why? But rather welcoming them in and saying, Lord, what is your purpose for me in this trial? What is your purpose for our marriage in this trouble, in this tribulation that we are experiencing? What is your purpose for me? Because ultimately it’s for His glory and for your good and for the sanctity of your covenant.

So instead of, you know, doing like our kids do when they’re so angry and they’re just banging on the doors and having a tantrum, we raise our eyes to heaven and we say, Okay, Lord, and we hold our hands out and we submit. And we say, “I trust you. Tell me, what is the purpose? Show us what is the purpose for us in this hard season.”

Ryan: And you can only say that that’s the right thing to do because we have God’s word telling us to do that in those seasons.

Selena: Yes. Amen.

Ryan: So we’re establishing the basis from which we live out our trusting.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: And it has to be something outside of us. The opposite of trust is what the Bible teaches about the human heart. The heart is deceitful, not to be trusted.

Selena: Not to be trusted. Feelings and emotions, not to be trusted.

Ryan: We cannot trust our hearts. Now, when we were saved, the Holy Spirit indwells us and we begin to have discernment and understand and walk in step with the spirit. But that’s different. We’re trusting the Spirit in us, as opposed to our human fleshly hearts. That’s where we have to be able to look at a standard outside of ourselves, align it with what the Spirit is testifying to within us, and then step forward in faith and put your weight in that rope.

So in sum, okay, so we’re establishing our basis for trust, and it’s God Himself, His character, His very nature, what He’s called us unto — the trustworthiness of His word. We understand the objective. A necessity for believers to place their trust in God. For humans, if they have any hope, they need to place their hope in God, not in themselves.

You had mentioned this: trust precedes love. And what do you mean by that? Well, how can you love God if you don’t trust God? And you could say, why? We just talked about valuing His word. Well, lots of people that don’t value the word of God will say, Yeah, I love God because God… God loves me and He loves everything that I do. And He grieves with me in every way.

Selena: It’s emotionally based. Yeah.

Ryan: Was that love? Is it love? How can you love who you don’t know? And how can you know God without trusting God, without taking Him at His word and saying, “God, even though I don’t see you blazing in my face right now, I can still look at the face of my child and know that she was made in your image. I can look at a tree without seeing your glory, burn it up, and say, that tree is something that you made because you’re a creative, wonderful, powerful God.

Trust precedes love, trust requires faith, and faith requires… I use this word, epistemic humility. In other words, we need to be humble about what we know and what we don’t know we don’t know. And so we have to have faith looking at… like we just talked about in God’s word, and trust that God is who He says He is.

Trust coincides with obedience. You mentioned that. The heart is deceitful. Well, when it comes down to it, rubber meets the road, I follow God, not my heart. Faith, trust requires obedience. We trust God because He is trustworthy.

So we’ve covered this vertical piece to the cross, cruciform trust. What’s the horizontal piece? Well, that’s trusting each other. How are we supposed to trust each other? What is the basis of our trust? Remember, we just established the basis of trust in general.

Well, the basis of our trust cannot be you. It cannot be me. It has to be us looking at God together and saying, We have signed this covenant. Remember, covenant and trust kind of go hand in hand. We have entered this covenant together, it matters to God, therefore, it matters to us. And we’re going to value it in the same way.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: So, we’re going to spend the next few weeks unpacking exactly how to navigate that when that trust has been broken, when you or your spouse, they’ve failed to hold up their end of the covenant. How do you reestablish that connection and that trust? It’s not going to be easy if you’ve had broken trust. It’s not going to be easy for us because it’s a hard topic.

Very charged messages get written in. So we’re gonna try to deal with that boldly, but with grace and…

Selena: Charity.

Ryan: Charity. There we go. So as a nice kind of cherry on top of this, right, you can see maybe where we’re going with this, is if you don’t have trust in God, and you’re saying, “God, I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t ultimately trust you, I don’t ultimately trust Your word, because… here’s what you’re doing if you’re saying that, is that you’re placing yourself as the authority over God’s word and saying, “You’re testing the authority and saying, nope, not good enough. Therefore, you’re the primary authority in your own life. You are acting as God in your life.

So if you don’t place your full faith and trust in God, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the covenantal character of God, the covenantal character of your marriage. And so we always like to end these episodes this way. And this fits really well. We want you to place your trust in God. We want you to understand that there is lava and it will kill you. And you can’t cross it on your own. And there’s hope on the other side. But you know what, friend, you need to grab the rope. You need to put your place… you can place your faith, your trust in that rope.

And how do you know the rope is trustworthy? Well, frankly, we trust that it’s trustworthy. None of us have swung on the rope yet. When we die, we’ll know. We’ll know if the rope is trustworthy. And that’s what it means to place your faith in Christ. You live with that hope in death.

So if you don’t know who Jesus is, you don’t know what the gospel means, talk to a friend who’s a Christian, ask them, Hey, can you tell me about the gospel? Can we read the Bible together? I’m sure they would do that with you. Find a church that preaches out of the Bible. If you have a hard time finding either of those things, we have a website that will help. It’s thenewsisgood.com.

We want you to trust Jesus because friends, we’ve trusted Him and He’s changed our lives. And I can’t tell you the joy that He’s given us. Hopefully, you see it come through.

Let’s pray. God, thank You for Your Word. Thank You that we can trust You. You are a good God. You are a trustworthy God. And You have proven Yourself time and time again that You keep Your Word, You are God of Your covenants. You have promised to keep those who place their trust in You, to shelter us in the shadow of Your wings. So, Lord, we place our full trust in You.

I pray that You’d help couples who are struggling with trust. I pray You’d help them first and foremost, place their trust in You, Lord, because they’re gonna need to cling to You. They’re gonna need to cling to You as they wrestle through dealing with trust issues in the horizontal piece, with their spouse, with others in their lives. Lord, I pray that they would just more deeply place their trust in You. Lord, it’s by Your spirit we pray, and it’s in the name of Your son. Amen.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: Amen. Amen. Okay. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to join the Fierce Fellowship, we’d be honored. We’re trusting the Lord to provide for us. That’s one of the main ways He’s chosen to provide for us. And it’s through folks who listen, who watch, who’ve said, “Man, this content has helped me. I want to keep it going strong.” Hope it helps others. Share it with your friends.

But if you want to join us on a deeper level, you can go to fiercemarriage.com/partner. That’s a big part of our ministry. Of course, you’re welcome to just listen and get whatever you can from it free of charge. But we pray that it blesses you either way. So this episode of the Fierce Marriage Podcast is—

Selena: In the can.

Ryan: We’ll see you again in about seven days, Lord willing. Until next time—

Selena: Stay fierce.