• Recommended resource:
  • thenewsisgood.com

Ryan: Friendship can never be about itself. It always has to be about something greater.

Selena: The epitome of what a biblical friendship should be amongst Christian women is that we serve the same God, we value the same things, you know, tending to our husbands, tending to our homes and our children.

Ryan: Having the mindset and approaching that relationship be explicitly bent toward building a friendship, not toward having an interaction.

Selena: I have found myself encouraged by other sisters in Christ because when they are pursuing the Lord, there’s a security there, and you can tell it right from the moment you meet them. They are grounded in God’s word. They are secure in who God has created them to be. They know their weaknesses. And they are not too scared to encourage you.

Ryan: What is a Christian friendship?

Selena: The blood is what binds us, right? The blood of Christ is what bonds us together and binds us together. All the B words. Some friendships are for a season. A Christian friend versus a non-Christian friend, there will be some loyalty, some length of time, some walking through trials with one another. The foundation for your friendship is something other than Christ.

Ryan: I think we have, in the church in particular, in our society, we’ve stratified our society by age.

[00:01:11]

Selena: Ryan, tell me all you know about women and wives being friends. Go!

Ryan: Insecurities.

Selena: How dare you.

Ryan: Comparisons. Gossip. Cattiness. I’m thinking of all the bad things. There’s some pretty incredible benefits, as you will, in your sage wisdom, share with us today. We’re talking about women as friends, wives and the friends that they…

Selena: Keep?

Ryan: Keep, yeah. And the sisterhood that you recruit, if you will.

Selena: Yeah, that you should cultivate. I think it affects every part of your life. Women have a tendency, not a tendency, we’re more emotional beings. We desire relationship with one another, with everyone in our lives, right? There’s a desire for relationship. And those relationships will either encourage us in the things of the Lord and the work that He’s given us and the roles and responsibilities, or it will deter us and it will cause our gaze on those things to become tainted and bitter possibly with discontentment, and like you said, cattiness and competition and insecurities. So we’re going to talk about that today on the podcast.

Ryan: Well, actually, yeah, we’re going to talk about it. I’m going to interview my wife today.

Selena: Oh boy.

Ryan: So you’re in for a treat. We’ll see you on the other side.

[00:02:33]

Ryan: And this treat you’re in for, it’s salty and sweet. And oh, what a treat. Selina’s interview. You know, we’ve had our amazing Fierce fellows and some friends of mine say, “You know what? You really need to spin up a production line and get some of that special sauce.”

Selena: I don’t know. I can’t make anything like that. I don’t know.

Ryan: We can get some white labeled, you know… I don’t think that’d be a wise investment of Fierce Marriage. Fierce Marriage Partnership Funds. If you want some special sauce-

Selena: If you’d like to partner with us.

Ryan: Actually, yeah, a large portion of this ministry is funded, thankfully, by the grace of God through our fellows. We have a Fierce Fellowship. You can go to FierceMarriage.com/partner. Thank you. If that’s you, you’re already there, you are a huge part of this. You are complicit in this mission. So thank you for that. If you’d like to partner with us, go to that website.

Or if you just want to be in the know, because we do have… you can actually join as a free patron there. And there’s certain updates that you have access to other ones, like the freebies and things you want, but you’ll still get the updates as well. We put those out.

Okay. So we’re talking about friendships. Selena, I wanted to ask you about friendship because you’ve been requested. You’re going to go speak at a women’s event on this specific topic.

Selena: Women’s event. It’s a tea. Seminar kind of thing.

Ryan: It’s a thing on the calendar that’s happening.

Selena: Okay. Well, it sounds like I’m…

Ryan: It’s not like, you know…

Selena: Not preached on a Sunday, people.

Ryan: It’s not super duper Big Eva conference in Nashville, Tennessee. If that’s what you’re wondering, it’s not that, but it is a local women’s tea. Anyway, I want to show you this video because I think it’s funny. I don’t recall if it’s got any foul language in it. It’s a family guy clip. But to me, it just encapsulates this thing. So I’m going to show this to you. I want to get your reaction to it because I don’t think you’ve ever seen it.

[00:04:30]

Come on, Chris. Girls are terrible. They’re always backstabbing and giving each other phony compliments.

Oh, wow. You are definitely not afraid of dessert. You know, I wish I were secure enough to throw on any old thing and call it an outfit.

Come on. You have so much body confidence. I mean, who wouldn’t with those strong legs? So muscular. I’m jealous of how thick with strength they are.

Hey, I like your tie. Thanks.

[00:04:54]

Ryan: I think it’s so funny because I’m thinking of a certain… Any guy friend that I have, the friendship is so just like, “How are you doing?” “Good.” “Good to see you.” “All right. See you later.” There’s no like, “I wonder what he meant by that. What did he mean?”

Selena: And not all friendships are like that. I mean, I think that speaks to the… Clearly, that’s a…

Ryan: Hey, I like your tie.

Selena: That’s playing on the lowest level of friendship.

Ryan: Of course.

Selena: But I mean…

Ryan: Not all friendships are like that.

Selena: No. And especially among Christian women, they should not be like that.

Ryan: Amen.

Selena: Absolutely not.

Ryan: Amen. More on that in a bit. And we’re not going to focus in on the negative aspects of friendships because that’s, I think, maybe the hook we went with. So yeah, you are giving this talk and I think I asked a few people in to talk about it on the podcast to help wives and even help husbands who are listening in on how they can maybe kind of be more in tune with the types of…

Selena: The company their wives are keeping?

Ryan: Yeah. And how they can assist in helping their wives cultivate strong sisterhood. So yeah, today we’re just going to briefly, I think, unpack what the Bible has to say about friendship, about sisterhood. Are there any examples in Scripture that would come to your mind? So let me start with that.

In all of the studies you’ve been doing over the past few weeks, which biblical example of friendship struck you the most?

Selena: Well, to back up a little bit, I was looking for these examples or looking for just Scripture that explicitly talked about female friendship, female relationships. And really there’s not anything in the Bible that says women should be friends like this. Women should be… right? And clearly that might be kind of funny, like you’re thinking about it in those terms.

But the Bible does give us tons of information and commands and instruction on how to love each other well and how to live alongside one another, to strive for peace with one another, to bear with one another in trials. I think the unique piece of a Christian friendship or a Christian sisterhood is that Christ is our center. He is the bond, the blood, if you will, that bonds us, right? So as Christians, we operate with a different playbook in terms of our friendship.

So the examples I think that I pulled out or that I saw in my research, there’s many examples of various women. We had Mary and Elizabeth, Ruth and Naomi.

Ryan: Eunice and Lois.

Selena: Yeah, Lois and Eunice are Timothy’s mother and grandmother. I think to answer your question, the one that probably struck me the most in terms of friendship and devotion… I mean, Ruth and Naomi has always just hit it out of the park. She’s a Moabite and she loses her husband who’s Naomi’s son. They’ve lost all the men in their life, all the providers, they’ve died essentially.

Ryan: Which is a far more weighty thing back then.

Selena: Right. I think it’s weighty now.

Ryan: It’s still weighty now, yeah. But that was like you’re doomed.

Selena: Yeah. That was you’re destined to be desolate the rest of your life if you survive any of the rest of your days. So we see a beautiful picture of redemption in that. But I think their relationship goes beyond friendship, obviously, because they are mother and daughter, not by blood. But Ruth says to Naomi, “Let your people be my people, let your God be my God.” And so she is saying, let this God that you serve be our God together. And that is binding.

And that I think is… it reflects the epitome of what a biblical friendship should be amongst Christian women, is that we serve the same God, we value the same things, tending to our husbands, tending to our homes and our children. And so if these are the things that we value, if we value the same things, if we are going towards the same horizon, then ideally we’re going to be able to encourage one another in those things.

We are also, and should be able to lovingly say, “Hey, sister, I’m noticing some things in you. Are you struggling with some stuff? Is there things going on at home? How are the kids?” You know, lovingly kind of calling out some of the struggles that you’re seeing in a sister and hopefully that sister would be soft enough and ready and grateful that someone acknowledged, you know, gosh, yes, I am struggling. Things are hard and here’s the story, dah, dah.

Ryan: I know we kind of started off the episode thinking about maybe the caricatures of your more, you know, dysfunctional aspects of, and you can say maybe the same things about a lot of masculine friendships too in some ways. But what would you say are the things that typically are going to derail an otherwise healthy friendship in Christian circles?

Selena: In Christian circles, I mean, gossip, insecurities, discontentment, I don’t want to say competition, but insecurities that… you know, our motivation, our heart motivation for why we want to be friends with someone is a big deal. We look for affirmation in that, I think.

Ryan: I was looking up a quote by C.S. Lewis. Of course, he’s very articulate. But he says a lot of amazing things, but I particularly appreciate his characterization of friendship. And you just nailed it in that friendship can never be about itself. It always has to be about something greater.

That’s what I hear you… And as we’ve processed through this, many of our mornings, coffee times, oftentimes one of us is down sooner than later. If you’re down before me downstairs, coffee, you’re working on this, you’re studying, so I get to hear what you’re working on. And that’s one of the themes is, they need to have a shared mission, a shared vision for what is real. I want to share this quote by C.S. Lewis. This comes from The Four Loves. It’s long, but I think it’s worth it.

It says, “The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends.” At the outset, if the point of the friendship is the friendship itself, or the point of the friendship is that we just happen to be in the same space, he’s saying that it needs to be about something else besides just itself.

Selena: Right. And it presses you to ask the question, why are we friends? Are we friends because our kids go to the same school? Not a bad thing. But that friendship is probably going to be limited compared to someone who you have a shared faith with, that you pursue the Lord together.

Ryan: Sure. So the quote goes on. “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question ‘Do you see the same truth?’ would be ‘I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,’ no Friendship can arise – though Affection of course may.”

So to make sense of that, he’s saying that you might be affectionate toward one another, but your friendship will always be lacking if it’s never about something greater.

He goes on. “There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.

So he’s saying what you’re saying. If we’re about maybe the kids’ soccer game, well, our friendship can have…

Selena: We can have fun together. We can cheer for our kids together. But if that is the terminus, the end all be all, then that’s as far as our friendship’s going to go.

Whereas the Bible gives us roles. The husband has the role. A wife has a role. We’ve done millions of pod, not millions, a lot of other episodes on those. You can go look those up. Again, C.S. Lewis echoes what scripture says. To seek out a friend and go have coffee with them is a very modern theme. When you look back in the Bible times, like Mary and Elizabeth, I don’t know, maybe they went and had coffee somewhere, but they were about the work of their households. They were about the work the Lord. Even with Phoebe and Priscilla and Lydia, they were about the work of the ministry.

And so you see them on mission, doing the work of the Lord within their homes, outside of their homes, in the church. Here is where Titus 2 lays out how women are to interact. And it’s from those interactions that you will see the blessing of friendship begin to flourish within these types of relationships

I just want to read Titus 2 really quickly. It says, “Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”

So this is not just older women with gray hair. There’s always somebody older than you. There’s somebody also looking up to you in terms of women, right?

Ryan: To me, that brings up a big, important thing to be talked about in the church, and it’s friendships that are maybe decades apart age-wise. I think in the church in particular, and in our society, we’ve stratified our society by age. You see it in youth ministry, you see it in… You’ve got the nursery, you’ve got kids ministry, you’ve got youth ministry, you’ve got young adults, you’ve got college age, you’ve got singles, you’ve got marrieds. It’s always stratified by age and stage.

Selena: And I will say that I don’t think there’s…

Ryan: I want to finish the thought.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: So in a picture like the horizontal stratification of church, well, what we see in Titus and what we see in Scripture is a vertical division, and that you’ve got women befriending women and ministering to women. You’ve got men befriending men and ministering to men. And yes, there’s marriages that, of course, are not exclusively women or men. It’s men and women getting married. But it’s never this age-stratified thing, except for when it’s older women minister to younger women, older men disciple younger men.

Selena: Right. And I will say that a friend of mine talked about this at their church, that is… I think that it’s okay to have events for singles or here and there.

Ryan: Absolutely, yeah.

Selena: Events for young people to hang out at. But to have a consistent division among the ages and stages of people in life, you really miss out on, I think, the blessing of the various generations giving to one another. So if I’m a young mom and I’m, oh, well, I got to go pursue a friendship with another young mom who has three other kids or four other kids under the age of five, are we ever going to have or finish a conversation? Probably not. And that’s okay. That’s the season of life you’re in.

But what about the widow sitting over there in church who I know doesn’t live with anyone? What if I invited her over? I know she raised two kids, at least. I’ve seen her talk about them. What if I invited her over for tea? Maybe me as a mother needs to let go of the insecurities of how my children are behaving or what the house looks like and just invite somebody into my space, my home, and see what this sage might give me. And I don’t mean that invite her over to see what I can get, but she probably could use some youth in her life to bring her joy.

And so the messiness of children is not going to be ideally… this is the ideal situation. It’s like, wow, she’s hanging out with my kids. She’s helping with their food. And I am getting poured into on so many levels, but hopefully our life and stage is pouring into her as well, that she’s benefiting from being around loud, joyful children.

Ryan: And I would say having the mindset and approaching that relationship be explicitly bent toward building a friendship, not toward having an interaction.

Selena: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: So think about this. Say someone’s middle-aged, 35 years old. Can you befriend a 36-year-old? Yes. Can you befriend a 37-year-old? Yes. 38, 39, 40? Getting a little out there. Okay. 41, 42? Okay. 45-year-old, can you befriend that person? You can hang out with them. But can you befriend a 55-year-old, a 65-year-old? Biblically, we see examples of that type of… like Ruth and Naomi. I mean, they were relatives, yes, but they were friends. And there was a co… an interdependence. I was going to say co-dependence. There was an interdependence, clearly, that they were depending on one another in a lot of ways, life and death.

So I just think we need to maybe rethink this sometimes as Christians and say, the 65-year-old woman and her husband, not necessarily just a widow, and say, we want them to be friends. I’m thinking of our neighbors who live in our backyard.

Selena: Yeah, 70s and 80s. They come over all the time. They’re like an adopted grandparents and they give the kids sugar.

Ryan: Yeah. And I love to hear those stories. I love to share.

Selena: Jan helps me with my garden. She gives me strawberry plants. We’re just so grateful to see the life that they’ve lived and the legacy that they’ve built. And I think that’s just-

Ryan: And the joy they bring to our kids.

Selena: Absolutely.

Ryan: They’re a blessing on top of blessing to be had when we don’t divide. Again, it tied us to the interactions with women. Again, this is our core. We are the body of Christ. We are called to love one another, to bear with one another. These are the primary things we’re called to teach one another, to disciple each other.

Within the context of this is where our friendships are built or should be built. I’m not saying you can’t be friends with an unbeliever. I’m not saying your friend who goes to a different church can’t be a close friend. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that the things that are making you guys friends, the common ground that you share, is it in Christ, and is it in the things of Christ and building His kingdom and fulfilling the roles and duties that He’s given you.

Ryan: Yeah. That’s good. As I was reading through it, it leans, I won’t say heavily, but it leans into Hebrews 10. Hebrews 10, starting in verse 24. “Let us consider how to stir up one another in love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.”

I want you to speak personally. How has this idea, this passage, borne its weight on your life as a woman seeking to be a friend, seeking to have friends that are rooted in Christ? Meaning that how have you stirred up one another? How have you been stirred? And in some ways, how has friendship in the church challenged you?

Selena: That’s a lot of questions.

Ryan: Sorry.

Selena: No. I think some of the most tangible ways I’ve been stirred up to love my family well or to serve them with a more joyful heart, I’ve observed from other women in their homes, sitting around the dinner table. That has been one of the most influential ways I have been taught motherhood, been taught what it means to be a wife, what it means to be hospitable.

Ryan: You can’t be stirred if you’re not in the proximity of one another.

Selena: Exactly. You can’t bear with one another, you can’t encourage one another if there’s no another. I have found myself encouraged by other sisters in Christ because when they are pursuing the Lord, there’s a security there. You can tell it right from the moment you meet them. They are grounded in God’s word. They are secure in who God has created them to be. They know their weaknesses. They are not too scared to encourage you and to grow.

What else is there in friendship but to stir one another up and on to good works that the Lord has for you and to look forward to the day that we will be in the presence of God together? Are you talking about friendship into eternity? Oh.

Ryan: Oh, yeah. I didn’t think about that. But what do we talk about? You can say that.

Selena: Oh, friendship is one of those things that will continue into eternity.

Ryan: Right.

Selena: We will recognize one another, the Bible says. And I’m assuming we will have moments of remembering the friendship that we had before we were in God’s full presence transforming change.

Ryan: The time that you spend investing in making your house perfect or making your lifestyle what it should be, that time cannot go on. That investment will end at some point. The time you spend investing into your friendships will pay eternal dividends.

We don’t do it just to always get, but just know that that is how God designed friendships. They persist because… Just the thought… I was sitting on the plane coming back from Colorado this last weekend and I sat next to this Filipino man. We didn’t talk at all, but I saw he was reading a book clearly about Christ. He had two books. He had Sacred Marriage and he had Jesus Is, which is a Judas Myth book.

So I at least knew I was approximating, okay, this guy’s a Christian and like a Protestant. And I thought to myself, I will be in glory with this man. I didn’t say a word to him because I was tired and he wasn’t in the mood, I could tell. But yeah, these are people you’re going to spend eternity with. Praise God.

So I wanted to ask this unless you had something you wanted to add.

Selena: No, where are you going? I’m thinking to address conflict.

Ryan: Okay, well you can address as you answer this question.

Selena: Okay.

Ryan: What is a Christian friendship? What is a Christian friendship? How is it distinctive from any other friendship?

Selena: I think we said at the outset the blood is what binds us. The blood of Christ is what bonds us together and binds us together. All the B words. And therefore, if we’re in Christ, we’re new creations, we are not the same person as we were before. That old person is gone, the new has come.

So what is an old person? What is the distinctives of a non-Christian friendship would be, you know, our friendship is based on something outside of Christ. Whether that be a hobby, whether that be our kids play sports together, whatever. The foundation for your friendship is something other than Christ.

Maybe you have friends at work. I remember having many coworkers and then I remember all the drama that went with the many coworkers.

Ryan: And where do you build that drama?

Selena: Right. You can’t go anywhere, really. It’s just like, okay, well, we were friends, and now we’re not friends, and I totally hate you, right? You can’t go anywhere because there’s no bond of Christ that says we have to work this out, and we need to get through this conflict. And by God’s grace, we can. Will the friendship change? Possibly. There might be an alteration of friendship. It might not go back to where it was. But I think that God is sovereign in that.

Some friendships are for a season. And I think that the blessings are to be had by both. But a Christian friend versus a non-Christian friend, there will be some loyalty, some length of time, some, you know, walking through trials with one another. Not necessarily against each other in conflict, but, like, you know, what if her husband is diagnosed with cancer? Or what if one of her kids passes away? I mean, we’ve had friends who’ve lost babies. We can still stand together and be friends and cry with them and still share this bond that is Christ, that we know that this is not the end. We have an eternal hope. And so that changes everything about how we interact with one another and how we view one another and how we view the friendship.

Ryan: I love the term Christian sisterhood, Christian brotherhood because it really does make-

Selena: You’re the body of Christ.

Ryan: …true that we’re bound to one another by the blood. Just like our daughters are bound to one another by their…

Selena: For better for worse. No.

Ryan: Nothing can make them not sisters. Nothing can make your Christian brother your Christian sister, not your brother or sister.

Ryan: I would add to what you said, your fine points was… I would add to that this. There’s a certain level of commitment to one another because of the binding power of the blood of Christ. Yes, I’m going to forgive you, but I’m going to persist in this. I’m going to prioritize this-

Selena: I don’t get to walk away and be done.

Ryan: No without reconciling and having true, genuine forgiveness.

Selena: Forgiveness and repentance.

Ryan: Now, you don’t maybe have to spend as much time together. We’re not saying you have to, because you only have so much time.

Selena: Friendship’s my alternate.

Ryan: So anyway, that’s really good. That’s really good. Now, final line of questioning or final conversation point is how do friendships, particularly wives with other wives, wives with other women, how does that contribute to a healthy, stronger marriage?

Selena: I don’t think that every Christian marriage is just automatically strong. It’s not automatically unified. We, we have our issues that we deal with. And I think that it is the strength, the strength of each of the sisters to be able to help with the weaknesses of each other as well.

So whatever trial I might be facing in my marriage, maybe the husband has decided he doesn’t want to lead the household anymore and has just acquiesced and the wife is praying and pleading that he would take his role as head. Well, for that sister, there’s another sister who has walked that same path. There’s encouragement to be had ideally within the church.

Now, if some other sister is saying, “Yeah, you know what? Just take the lead and forget your husband. Because clearly he doesn’t deserve you,” I mean, if there’s a sister in Christ saying that there better be another sister over here correcting that sister, because clearly that’s not the narrative scripture.

In all of that, I think just having those Christian sisters to remind you of scripture, to encourage you in your marriage and knowing that, you know, we all have issues and things that we’re going to have to deal with.

But as a sister in Christ, I know that I can go to her and talk to her about it. I know that I can be transparent. I can be humble. I can be teachable. I can also be very vulnerable because again, I know that we share this bond. I trust she’s not going to go gossip, you know, to all the other church ladies.

Ryan: Well, and you’re going to go together to the well that is Christ and His word. And you’re going to draw from that well together and partake of that living water together and let that be the thing that bonds you and changes you and solidifies the things that you’re saying. You’re going to the well of her advice or her experience.

Selena: Absolutely.

Ryan: You’re going to the well of God’s word. And of course, your experience is interlaced into that. We have our own way of speaking of God’s truth.

Selena: Yeah. No, God uses our story.

Ryan: That turns into a form of advice. Anyway, there’s much more that can be said. And of course, you’ve done so much research here. Thank you, lovely wife, for sharing with us.

I love the concept of, and the topic I’ll say of Christian friendship, because, like I said, this guy that I sat next to on the plane, I have more in common with him, I could say, than I do with my own brother in some cases, sadly. I won’t share that whole story here, but I wish it were different.

And many could say the same thing is that the blood of Christ is thicker, it runs truer and it is stronger and it certainly lasts forever. And so when you start talking about friendships that are based on Christ, you’re talking about eternal things.

And so as we close up this episode, if you’re longing for that depth of friendship, I’m just going to tell you, like, I don’t know that it can be found. I know it can’t be found outside of the blood of Christ because nothing else is true and nothing else has the same, the same power or the same outcome as the blood of Christ. And when we say the blood of Christ.

And when we say the blood of Christ, you might be thinking, what does that even mean? What we mean is that we have Jesus Christ who is God, truly God, truly man. God became the flesh, and that is the person of Jesus Christ that walked the earth about two thousand years ago.

He lived a perfect life, grew up as a child, lived a perfect life. He was killed unjustly. He died a sinner’s death that we should have died. Now He didn’t go because He didn’t have power to save Himself. He went out of obedience so that He might save those who belong to God, the sheep it says. The Bible says that He calls His sheep, His sheep know His name. The shepherd does not lose a single one. Every single one of His sheep finds its way because He brings them in.

So Jesus did that on the cross. He died. His blood was spilled. That’s what we mean. He didn’t stay dead. He actually conquered death. On the third day He arose from the grave and unto our salvation. So how do we now partake of that salvation? You place your faith in Christ. Of course, that is a one-time thing, meaning that we say, Lord, you are Lord. I am not. You are king. I am not. I’m trusting you for my salvation, not my own works. I’m trusting you.

That’s a one-time thing. But then it’s an ongoing part of the Christian life. Repent, believe. Repent, believe. Repent, believe. That is the work of the Christian is to believe. And so that’s the call we have for you here.

If you’re not a Christian, maybe you thought you were a Christian and realizing, man, you never really heard the gospel, here’s the call. You’re a sinner. You need grace. The grace is only available to you in Christ, and the only way you can have the grace is you say, “I believe,” and you trust Him with all of that. We pray that you do that.

If you want to do that, go to thenewsisgood.com. There’s some paths forward there for you, namely finding your way into a good biblical church. There’s a church finder there. If you have a friend who is a Christian, we encourage you to talk to them. Say, “I heard this podcast, and they brought this up, and I realized I needed to talk to you. Can we talk?” I’m sure they’d be happy to do it.

Open the Bible, read through it, and just start walking with Jesus. And the beautiful thing is the Holy Spirit is the second Christ saves you, you’re not alone. The Holy Spirit indwells you, brings the truth of His word to light, to life in your heart, and enables you to walk in righteousness and to walk in obedience and to have all the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, friendship, righteousness. All those things are available to you. So we pray that for you.

Let’s pray. Lord in heaven, thank you for friendship. Thank you for my wife. Thank you for the wives and the husbands listening to this. I pray that this would encourage them. I pray that it would also challenge them with the challenges needed. Lord, you know every single, heart and mind who’s listening to this. Lord, you are with them. I pray that they would feel you, working in their hearts and their minds viscerally, and I pray that it wouldn’t just end with maybe a warm fuzzy feeling, but it would end with acting in faith and obedience to the goodness of their family and to your eternal glory in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Selena: Amen.

Ryan: Amen. Quick reminder, Fierce Marriage, Fierce Families, Fierce Parenting, all of that is supported by the fellows, our Fierce Fellowship. I keep saying it, but, friends, we’re getting closer. The forge, which is where we are right now, is undergoing some changes. Right now the changes are all up here. And we’ve got some new content coming your way, some things that I’m very excited about in terms of new podcast-y type things, just to try and maybe hone in the community in very various specific ways. That’s coming.

But, it’s only possible… I’ll say the lord has been gracious in making it possible in part through our Fierce Fellows. Go to fiercemarriage.com/partner. If the lord leads you, we would love to know you, get to know you in there, and to have your support and complicity in this mission.

Next week, we’re talking about… do you wanna say it?

Selena: No. You can go ahead.

Ryan: We got a question, and it’s been thematic, and we’re gonna talk about it. It’s what if your husband, or if you are a husband, you have a lower sex drive. And what happens when your marriage kind of as you grow together and the years go by and suddenly you’re realizing that he’s not initiating quite as much. What’s going on there? And what’s that husband and what’s that couple to do? What’s that wife to do? We’re gonna talk about that next week. So make sure you, check out that episode when it comes out.

Now, this episode of the Fierce Marriage podcast is—

Selena: In the can.

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

Selena: Stay fierce.