• Recommended resource:
  • Fierce Marriage 
  • thenewsisgood.com

Selena: So a while back we had someone pretty close to us ask us truly, like, what’s the point of marriage? And it came from a flustered tone of “My marriage kind of… it’s not great. We’re barely hanging on by a thread. We basically haven’t divorced” is what it kind of…

Ryan: Right. Roommates, even sleeping in different beds.

Selena: Different bedrooms, like all of that. This wife asked me, she’s like, “What’s the point of marriage? Like truly, what’s the point?” Like she was having a very vulnerable moment with me. And I was just like, “Yada, yada, yada. Here’s all the things.” And I was trying to not, you know, overwhelm, of course, but I wanted to encourage…

Ryan: She’s a Christian too, by the way.

Selena: And she’s a Christian and she’s very involved in evangelical ministries that are reaching out to people that are on the fringe. So I just was like… as much as I wanted to share… I mean, what would you say to somebody like that? Or a single person? It kind of breaks down into two questions. Like, what’s the point of marriage? And if you’re married and you’re in this like muddy marriage that things are not going well, what do you say to that person? Or if you’re single-

Ryan: What are you fighting for in that?

Selena: Yeah. But if you’re a single person and they’re asking, like, why should I get married? What’s the point?

Ryan: These are, I think, valuable things to consider. And just like you’ve had a friend who you’ve had to have that conversation with, chances are the listeners as well have maybe considered why are they fighting for or they have friends that they’re having to give counsel to or kind of help process through that stuff. So we’re going to actually talk about this topic. What is marriage good for? What are we fighting for?

Selena: Yeah. What’s the point of it all?

Ryan: What’s the point of marriage?

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: And we’ll do that on the other side.

[00:01:39]

Ryan: Before we dive into that, Selena, how are you doing today?

Selena: No. I have to ask you-

Ryan: How are you doing today?

Selena: …how are you doing? Because you always ask me. I’m not going to answer. I’m deferring to you. How are you?

Ryan: I spent my morning reading about the doctrine of the church, which is very interesting. And the sacraments and things like that. Of course, sacraments in Protestant sense, meaning the Lord’s Supper, that would be communion and baptism. So yeah, it was a good morning. I’m feeling pretty good. I’m feeling pretty good.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: I’m hot right now, though.

Selena: The Forge is hot.

Ryan: The flannel was a bad choice.

Selena: Bad choice for the last few days of summer here.

Ryan: As the sun goes, it heats up that side and the side behind us and the roof all day long.

Selena: It was good.

Ryan: Anyway, here we are, sweating it out just for you, our fierce fellows, by the way. Selena mentioned this. If you’re listening to this and you haven’t gone to YouTube to check out what The Forge looks like, you should. We’ve just got some lighting stuff figured out. We’re going to continue to evolve it. We’ve got the camera thing figured out.

Selena: We did. We got it figured out.

Ryan: This is all bootstrapped, ladies and gentlemen. Because of – who? Our fellows.

Selena: Our patreons fellows.

Ryan: Our fellows. The Fierce Fellowship.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: If you want to join that, that’s a huge way that God has seen fit to provide for the Frederick household, and to continue providing for this ministry, go to fiercemarriage.com/partner. You can find out what that means to join the Fierce Fellowship, to become a fellow. For as little as a cup of coffee-

Selena: You can be a gal or a guy fellow. It doesn’t have to just be a fellow.

Ryan: Right, right. What do you call a gal fellow?

Selena: Fella. [laughs] I don’t know. What do you call it?

Ryan: Anyway, it doesn’t matter the amount. It just matters the partnership. That’s what really matters there. So, fiercemarriage.com/partner. Partner.

Selena: Partner.

Ryan: A little bit of an accent going on there.

Okay, so, this may be one of those conversations that you don’t think is super relevant or worth sitting through or listening to.

Selena: Well, I would beg to differ because I think now more than ever, we need to, as Christians, be able to give an account for why we believe what we believe, to give it, not only clearly, but with a tone and motivation of love. Of really showing people the love of Christ and the that there is. Yes, the hope of it.

Ryan: And being able to articulate biblically, not just pragmatically. So, someone could come to you and say, my marriage is really sucking wind right now. Why should I fight for it? And you can say, well, you don’t want to deal with all the financial fallout of a divorce or you might say, what about the kids? Or you might say something else that’s more… you know, how are you going to live? Or just, you know, you should do it because it’s the right thing to do, which is right. But maybe there’s more to be had.

Selena: There way more texture to it.

Ryan: …in terms of that dialogue. So we’re going to do that here today. Let’s just jump right in. You already introed it, but we’re just going to reiterate these kind of two versions of this question.

Selena: Yeah, two scenarios.

Ryan: Why should I get married? So I’m picturing a friend’s cousin that we’ve been dialoguing with. They’re living together. It’s him and his girlfriend, they’re living together. They’ve had a baby. They’ve got another one.

Selena: Yeah, two kids.

Ryan: Two kids. And they don’t see the utility in it.

Selena: Why should you get married? It’s just spending money basically to what? Have a contract acknowledged by who, right?

Ryan: Right. So we’ll talk to that.

Selena: They’re basically married. They’re functionally married.

Ryan: Right. The other scenario is you’ve got a believer, maybe they’re both believers, but they’re in a marriage that’s completely dead. There’s no affection for one another. There’s very little conversation. They’re certainly not having any sort of intimate life.

Selena: It’s just very tiresome and lifeless.

Ryan: Yeah. And maybe the kids are out of the house and so it’s like, now what? I realize I don’t even like this person anymore but I’m supposed to stay married.

Selena: Why?

Ryan: Why? So these are big questions. It’s going to be predicated on some pretty big belief assumptions. So what I should say is how you answer it’s going to be predicated on some pretty big assumptions.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: So if you’re a Christian and you already say, yes, God ordains marriage, what God has brought together, let man not put asunder, that type, Mark 10:9, you might already subscribe to that. If you don’t necessarily, if you’re asking these sorts of questions or someone’s asking, that probably means they don’t have that same level of conviction or knowledge. And so even from there, you’re going to have what I would characterize as primary reasons and secondary reasons for why marriage is good and is worth staying in, is worth pursuing.

Selena: Why it’s valuable.

Ryan: But whether or not… this is going to sound kind of circular, but I’m going to say it and hopefully we’ll talk about it. Whether or not marriage is valuable to you depends on what you value.

Selena: God says marriage is valuable. And if you value the word of God, you are a Christian, you’re a faithful Christian, you know, then you’re going to value marriage ideally in the way that God has purposed it to be valued, to be treated, to be lived out.

Ryan: But if you don’t value the word of God, you don’t value God Himself-

Selena: If you’re not a Christian, right, it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to-

Ryan: Right. Then that-

Selena: It still matters, but you don’t see it as valuable.

Ryan: You don’t see it as that.

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: So it’s going to be an unconvincing argument. Now to that person, I would say, well, repent and believe the gospel.

Selena: Yeah. Start there.

Ryan: Then start there. Yeah. But if you refuse to repent and believe the gospel and still… I’m still going to say marriage is good and I’m still going to say pursue marriage in your relationship for all these kind of pragmatic reasons.

So let’s talk about this primary reason. And I’ll call this the principle. The principled reason. And that’s just this. Selena, you said this, if you value Christ, if you value God, if you value His word, that is the primary reason marriage is good is because God has put it in place for human flourishing and said, it is good, full stop. That is why marriage is good.

We see that in the garden at the cultural mandates is when the two became one flesh. That was the kind of the trigger, the tipping point that God used to say, now go be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. It was in the context of that covenantal marriage between one man and one woman. And so in that it is intrinsically good.

Selena: Right. God said it before the fall that it is not good for man to be alone with the whole purpose of creating woman. Right?

Ryan: Right. It’s just like, how do you know a sunset’s beautiful? Well, it’s beautiful because it makes the trees orange or makes whatever… no, it’s beautiful because it’s beautiful. It’s good because it’s good. Because I can see the transcendent qualities of beauty in it. And the transcendence quality, meaning over and above. It’s just good because it’s good.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: I also want to make mention of this because then we’ll move on. This is a pretty basic point. Marriage is so valuable in God’s eyes that He opened the Bible with a marriage, consummation of a marriage, and it closes with consummation of a marriage. So at the very beginning, it’s God placing man into creation to fill the earth and subdue it.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: That was always the plan, that marriage was the foundation for that filling and subduing and working the land. That broke, of course, in Genesis 3. And everything from that point has been moving mankind back to that garden, so to speak, to that perfect paradise, that perfect communion with God, that perfect flourishing. A new heaven, a new earth, that’ll actually be realized and we will be there for the wedding ceremony of the groom who is Christ with His bride, which is His church, which of course I’ve been studying a lot today.

Selena: Clearly.

Ryan: So marriage is just intrinsically good. And then there’s all these reasons why in the, I don’t know, the cascading economy of God’s goodness, we see marriage at the top. Good by virtue of what it is, then all these good things cascade out of it. And that’s what I would call the secondary reasons why marriage is good and worth fighting for. Does that all make sense?

Selena: Yeah. I mean, the tendency when you’re answering these questions to even a believer who’s struggling in their marriage is you want to find the good pieces and you want to say, Hey, here, this is what’s worth fighting for. You know, don’t give up. It’s sanctifying you. Well, sanctification is, it doesn’t feel good all the time. It usually never feels good. It’s never something always you enjoy.

But as a believer, as someone who sees through the lens that God’s given us of like the trials that we face, the hardships that we endure, they’re not wasted. They are for our good, ultimately for His glory. And so it’s a refiner’s fire, right? And God is sovereign in this.

I think we’re going to say a few statements that might ruffle some feathers, but it really to the believer who is anchored in Christ, they can see that the trials that we face, right? Jesus says, you will face trials of many kind, but take heart, I’ve overcome the world. Trials are not… those are not to be the focus. The trials are just the path you walk in order to have sin and pride, anything just kind of falling off of you, being broken off of you in order to be made more like Christ.

Ryan: So we spoke at a marriage event earlier this year.

Selena: February.

Ryan: One of the points in the initial talk that we gave, and I think it’s feather-ruffling but in the right ways. And one of the main points that we gave is that there’s no marriage that’s not joined by God. And that might be like, wait, what? Truly. So here’s what we mean by that. What we see in Mark 10, very clearly that Jesus is talking to the Pharisees about kind of the… if I recall the passage right, kind of the exceptions for divorce, because they had found all these different kind of loopholes and they were discarding women, it was horrible, and they were discarding marriage. And He had said, well, what God has brought together, let not man separate or let not man put asunder.

In other words, don’t destroy what God has brought together. Well, He was talking about marriage institutionally. Of course, everybody goes to the whatabouts. “Well, what about Sally who married Joe, and Joe is a huge jerk or Sally’s crazy, and she’s completely flipped a switch a year ago and now no one can reason with her? And she’s…” All kinds of sins manifest themselves years into a relationship. How can the Fredericks say that there’s not a single marriage that was not joined by God?

This has to do with what you were saying, that your belief in how God uses the circumstances of our lives unto His sovereign ends. We don’t always understand the means.

Selena: He has the eternity in perspective. We hardly ever do, I feel like.

Ryan: Yeah, we don’t always understand the means. And it’s dangerous water to get into that situation and say, “If I were God, I would have.”

Selena: Yes.

Ryan: “God didn’t do it the way I thought, therefore, God made a mistake or God is wrong or somehow God is not loving, sovereign, and good in whatever the circumstances.” So this is why we’re saying, you know, if you’re in a marriage, why is it worth fighting for? Well, because perhaps the purpose of the marriage is not for you to be happy, ultimately. Perhaps the purpose in your marriage is for that to come at a later date. But for now, the purpose is for you to work through this and to learn to understand who Christ is, to learn how to extend love and forgiveness, to learn how to experience love, to learn how to be forgiven.

Selena: Yes. And to have hope and to be grateful in the process.

Ryan: Yes. Yes. So if we’re looking at a couple eye to eye and they’re struggling and they’re asking us, where’s the hope, we’ll say, well, it’s in Christ. We talked about this last week. It’s in Christ. But it’s not just this intangible abstract. It’s this hope that one day this will all be made good. In other words, it will all make sense. It will all be rung out for the glory of God.

And if you are oriented toward wanting God’s glory more than anything else, that will be a salve to your wound. That will help you get through that point. That’s all rooted in this grand idea that marriage is instituted by God, called good by Him, clearly valued by Him. Which, by the way, to go back to that primary reason you talked about it being good because God said it’s good. We see God valuing it and how He’s built marriage into the metanarrative of scripture. In other words, the overall story of scripture is marriage on one end, marriage on the other.

Selena: Right. And covenant.

Ryan: But yes. And then covenant all in between. Well, how does God relate to His people?

Selena: Covenantally.

Ryan: Always covenantally. It’s always covenantally. And so-

Selena: There’s always this assurance. There’s always this hope. There’s always this promise. There’s always a like “He will never leave. He will never forsake us. He is always with us no matter the trials that we face.” And I think too many times we as Christians can fall into traps that marriage is supposed to make us happy, children are supposed to make us happy. All the things that we have or we’ve gotten, purchased, made, whatever, those should make us happy. Well, no. I mean, blessings are good things, but there’s more to a blessing than just you being happy.

There’s blessing… I think we underestimate that word. I think there’s so much richness to be had to it that the blessing of my pride being chipped away at because my child is humbling me, that’s a blessing. I may not want to call it that because there’s not as much happiness and joy in it for me right in the moment. But looking back, it’s like, yes, that is that is a blessing. My child is a blessing to me because they are making me more like Christ.

Ryan: What does scripture say? It says, count it what?

Selena: Count it all joy when you face moments of weakness.

Ryan: Truly, I want to make sure we hear that. Count it all joy.

Selena: How can you count it all joy?

Ryan: All of it.

Selena: All of it.

Ryan: And what is joy? It’s that deep and abiding trust that precipitates in our hearts.

Selena: The fruit of the spirit.

Ryan: A contentment and an understanding that God is God and we are not. And that’s how it should be. And we just need to be faithful and trust Him to bring the fruit. So we spent a good bit of time talking about this big idea of why marriage is good and why it’s worth fighting for and why you should enter into it if you’re not in it, why you should pursue it.

Now, caveat here is marriage is not a promise. You mentioned this in the prep beforehand.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: It’s not a promise in the sense that not everyone is guaranteed a marriage and not every Christian is guaranteed even an easy, I’ll say, marriage. I was gonna say good marriage. Maybe that’s true as well. Those aren’t guarantees. But we can say without hesitation that marriage itself is good the way God designed it. It’s worthy of fighting for. It’s worthy of pursuit. But also, I want to look at now the secondary reasons why marriage is good. I want to do that.

I want to read actually go deep tracks here. One of our early books that we wrote, that sounds weird to say, it’s called Fierce Marriage. Actually, if you’ve never checked that out. That’s kind of, I’ll say-

Selena: It’s our marriage manifesto.

Ryan: Marriage Manifesto as of about six years ago. We would write things differently now. But the principles are all there. So in this part, it says… I’ll just read a good swath of this. Again, you can check out the book. It’s called Fierce Marriage. This is Chapter 10. So it’s at the end.

It says, “Do we fight for healthy marriages so we can enjoy an easier existence? Do we exercise our “marriage muscles”, quote-unquote, in hopes of living a longer, healthier married life? Happiness is indeed a potential result of healthy marriage, but it’s only part of the picture. And though those prospects are good, the larger picture is so much more exciting.”

So in this portion of the book, we’ve gone through all the aspects of marriage, the foundations of marriage. We’ve gone through sex, money, communication, fighting. We’ve shared our story when I had to have open heart surgery, all that crazy stuff that happened when we were just newly married.

Selena: Yeah.

Ryan: If you’ve never heard that story, spoiler alert.

Selena: Yeah, he lived.

Ryan: I lived. I’m not a ghost sitting here with you. But so this is the end, this kind of the commissioning piece. So the hope is that you’ve given, we’ve given the reader all of the knowledge, so to speak, and now we hope to mobilize and say, now go and live this out. So the passage continues. It says, “You are commissioned, called to perpetuate the gospel through your marriage. To know and share Christ is your greatest call in your marriage. Your marriage is most magnificent purpose. You’re probably reading this book for the betterment of your marriage here and now. But I implore you to lift your eyes also to there and then. All glory and [pressure?] belongs to Christ, but by God’s grace, you can participate in His work on earth and experience greater joy, knowing the role your marriage plays in discipling future generations, building the local church, and reaching the community where you live.”

And just a few more sentences real quick. “Christ’s work in you always extends outward through you. The fruit of gospel-centered marriage cascades into every facet of human existence. Within the marriage covenant, children flourish. By families, the church is strengthened. And through the church, communities are reached with the good news of Jesus Christ. Just as Christ is the foundation of every thriving marriage and family, thriving marriages and families are the foundation of every flourishing society.”

So you start to see some of the pragmatic kind of tier two overflows of the goodness that God has baked into marriage.

Selena: Absolutely.

Ryan: And so let’s just break those apart and talk about them briefly here. So the first one mentioned was families and children flourish.

Selena: Right. So you’re talking about this cousin, this friend of a cousin, cousin’s friend, something like that. Anyways, they’re not married, but they have kids. And this is kind of society’s just standard MO, right? That you just start having kids, whether you’re technically married or not. I don’t want to say it’s the common grace, but it’s like if there’s a mother and a father figure in that child’s life and participating, that’s better than just having one.

Ryan: I’d call that common grace.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: Yeah.

Selena: So there’s a level of flourishing that can happen, you know, if parents are trying to be just good people, quote-unquote.

Ryan: Across the board.

Selena: It’s just statistics show that.

Ryan: It is 100% better for a child to have a mother and a father in the home. It’s one of the strongest indicators of that, of that child flourishing into adulthood is whether or not that they had a healthy home.

Selena: Well, and I would say, I mean, I think there’s kind of this perspective too, that is, you know, the longer I’m married, the more boring marriage gets, right? Like I already know everything about you basically. We’re just fighting age. We’re fighting health going downhill, you know?

Ryan: Keep to yourself, Frederick. [laughs]

Selena: Okay. Well, I think that’s a lie that we assume we know what’s ahead, right? We don’t.

Ryan: That’s good.

Selena: The purpose of marriage is to glorify God in that and in the unknown. When one of us gets sick or one of us has something that happens and we have to start caring for one another, that’s going to change the dynamic of your marriage. It’s not always going to be, you know… and thank you God for peace time of just the day in and day out. There’s people today that would kill for that, that are in hospitals, that are… you know?

So there’s more to this than you can see. So I guess I would just say, let’s set our pride down, probably speaking to myself mostly, set our pride down. Let’s humbly look ahead and say, okay, Lord, you have a purpose for this every season, every stage of our lives, and for the length of our marriage. So I’m going to trust you in that. I see the flourishing around me with my kids. I see families flourishing around me in church, which is encouraging to me, because maybe there’s moments where we don’t feel like we’re flourishing, but you know, just like a tree in winter, there’s growth happening even when you don’t see it.

Ryan: It’s kind of like if you go on a… you’ve ever been to a really beautiful national park, right? I’m thinking of Bryce Canyon or Arches, or we have Mount Rainier National Park where we live. And you say, “Oh man, you, you got to go to Mount Rainier and check it out. It’s incredible. It’s worth the drive. It’s worth it.” And someone says, “Ah, it’s probably not that great.” I’m pretty sure like when I get there, the clouds are going to be out or it’s going to be crowded.” You don’t know, you don’t know. If you’re going to go and experience the beautiful thing, you have to take someone’s word for it.

Selena: And you have to make the effort.

Ryan: And you have to make the effort and you have to journey and actually go somewhere. And yeah, you know what? It might be a little overcast, but there’s still beauty to be had.

Selena: There might be a lot of people around. Just take a breath and be patient.

Ryan: So yeah. So I’m going to blow through these secondary things because I really want to get to the tertiary ones of the third tier, which Selena doesn’t know about these but you’ll know as soon as I pick it up because I’m going off the script here.

So families flourish, children flourish. Yes, it’s good. Intrinsically, therefore this happens. Churches are strengthened. If you’re part of a church and that church is healthy, there’s going to be a lot of families there and it’s going to value families. There’s going to be a lot of crying babies and a lot of singing families.

Stronger churches mean what? That society is going to be stronger too. Well, how does that work? Does that necessarily follow? Well, people say that politics is downstream of culture and you might’ve heard this, culture is downstream from the pulpit. And in that, if our pastors are preaching impotent sermons, they’re not preaching the full gospel, they’re not calling out sin in real-time among men and women, that’s going to trickle down and it’s going to have an effect, you know, generations later. So as churches flourish, societies are going to flourish.

Now, what are these third-tier blessings? Well, it’s the things you talked about. Marriage is fun. Like all the really obvious things. And usually, people start at that.

Selena: They start there. Yeah.

Ryan: So people will date in college and they will… we’ve been together for a year or two, uh, we should probably get married because we’re in our early 20s and we need to start our lives now and I guess you’re the one.

Selena: I guess you’re the one.

Ryan: By the way, you know, you’ll say, “I feel like I love you. So let’s get married because we want all the good things of marriage. We want to have kids. We want to build a life together. We want to enjoy life together.” That’s awesome. Now, can you do that without marriage? You can enjoy relationships-

Selena: To a certain extent.

Ryan: …outside of marriage, it’ll never be as deep as within a covenantal marriage that’s rooted in biblical love. We always say as part of the foundations, marriage is built on the foundation of the gospel and the pillars are covenantal love for life. And so there’s a commitment there. There’s this covenantal approach toward like when you sin against each other, we just walk away, we work it out.

Selena: Rules of engagement there.

Ryan: So there’s all kinds of really tangible things. You know, we share all kinds of memories together. We share life together. We share our children together. We share a house together. We laugh. When I’m feeling lonely, I’m not alone in that. I can come talk to my wife and vice versa.

Selena: Great. And you can cry together when friends are walking through hardships or you’re dealing with loss, like you said, you’re never alone. There’s always someone to go to and to cry with and to grieve with or to laugh with, to be embarrassed by or with. No, I’m kidding.

Ryan: Sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: And then thinking of biblical categories, you are not without a head in your household, right? So if we are not married, I have not stepped into the role of head. I have no right to play house with you if we do not share a covenant. And so if you’re in a dating relationship, you’re walking around headless, but acting like you have one. And I’m walking around pretending to be a head, but all the while not, I’m a disembodied head in that sense.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: There’s no momentum to be had. Also a husband, I get to have you as my helper. I would not be the man I am if it weren’t for you, unequivocally.

Selena: I would not be the woman.

Ryan: Yeah. And we would not be where we are. I always joke I would be dead in the gutter somewhere if it weren’t for Selena. I would have no… I would just be, you know… I’d probably… I don’t know what would happen. How can I know? But I would not be the man I am without you. And God has seen fit to give you to me as a helper fit for me. And any husband can say that of his own wife. What a wonderful thing! What a wonderful thing!

And then finally, sex.

Selena: I was going to say, are you going to not say.

Ryan: Truly.

Selena: It just gets better and better.

Ryan: It gets better and better. I think back to when we were just newly married and it was good. It was great. I didn’t know how much better it could be.

Selena: Right.

Ryan: And I’m not saying it’s better because like we’ve learned more tricks. I’m not saying it’s better because, you know-

Selena: It’s better because there’s more… It’s because we know each other more deeply and we have so many more shared experiences. We have babies, we’ve gone through… you’ve seen some things that only both of you have experienced without anyone else.

Ryan: So whatever good it was, that has just been intensified. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, it’s just all gotten better. And that only happens with time and covenantal commitment in biblical marriage.

So hopefully we’ve helped you. If someone says to you, what’s the point or what am I even fighting for? What I don’t want to say is that just decide and now all of a sudden it’s going to be all these good things we’ve talked about. It will take work. Covenant is strong enough though, that’s the encouragement, to let love be worked out if you’re willing to stay in the covenant and obey Christ.

Selena: Have hope. Have hope in that and be grateful for your circumstances. I know that sounds insensitive and unfeeling, but-

Ryan: Count it all joy.

Selena: Count it all joy.

Ryan: When you face trials of what?

Selena: Many kinds.

Ryan: Not just a single kind. Not just the kind I like or don’t mind so much. No, it’s the trials of many kinds. And there’s truth in those words, there’s hope in those words, if we trust them.

Speaking of truth, hope, and trust, we always end our episodes with just a reminder of what the gospel is. The gospel is this. It’s the good news that the perfect God who required perfection from us and we rebelled against God and we are outside of Christ. We are objects of God’s wrath is what the Bible says. But He didn’t leave us there. He sent His only son to live a perfect, sinless life and die the sinner’s death, an unjust death before a corrupt magistrate. And He didn’t stay dead. He conquered death. He was resurrected. And in His resurrection, we can be raised to new life.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: Amen. That’s the good news of the gospel. What is the condition of it? Believe. Repent and believe. It doesn’t cost you behavior. It doesn’t cost you tithes. It doesn’t cost you anything. All it costs you is your trust and reliance on Christ. And in that, He even is the one that brings that about, right? What a beautiful, wonderful God we serve. We pray that you follow Him.

If you don’t know who He is, go talk to a friend and say, Hey, show me who Jesus is. Can we read the Bible together? Try to find a church that preaches out of the Bible. If you don’t have either of those things readily available, go to this website. It might help. It’s thenewsisgood.com.

Let’s pray. Lord, thank You for the gift of marriage. Thank You that you’ve clearly placed value in marriage. You’ve shown us how you value it and how You’ve laid it out in scripture, and You’ve shown us how covenant works by being a covenantal God. So I thank You for that. I pray for the couples who are maybe asking these questions: Why should we stay married? Or why should I even mess around with getting married? I pray that this would have brought clarity to them and conviction to them, that it brings joy and obedience in their hearts. And I pray for them as they might minister to other people in their lives. Couples who maybe not, they’re not asking these questions, but they know those who are, to help them to minister faithfully. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: Amen. Amen. As a quick reminder, welcome to The Forge, Fierce Fellows. Thank you. Go to fiercemarriage.com/partner if you want to consider joining the Fierce Fellowship. And with that said, this episode of Fierce Marriage is—

Selena: In the can.

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

Selena: Stay Fierce.