6 Callings God Has For Your Marriage

This week we highlight 6 callings God has for every marriage.

We share personal stories and struggles we have experienced in our own marriage, as well as the importance of these callings and how they impact the marriage relationship and beyond.

The 6 callings we present include

• Prayer
• Love
• Forgiveness
• Trust
• Purity
• and Generosity.

These 6 callings are foundational in order for marriages to experience extraordinary. In each of these categories we share scripture, testimonies, and application. Our hope is that couples would evaluate their marriage to see if they are excelling in these callings or need to grow in them. We hope this episode is encouraging and challenging.

Stay tuned each week where we will be discussing topics hoping to inspire you to cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

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• We're Aaron and Jennifer Smith with Marriage After God.

• Helping you cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

• Today we're going to be talking about God's calling for your marriage. Lots of people think they have a calling or don't know what their calling might be, but we believe that there's six callings that every Christian marriage has and we're here to share 'em with you.

• So Aaron, before we get started, can you just explain a little bit about what does it mean to have a calling, what does it mean when you hear the word I have a calling on my marriage? So that people understand what we're saying.

• So just growing up in the church, we've all heard this idea of our calling and a lot of times it's our individual calling like what's God call, am I a missionary? Am I gonna be starting a church? Am I gonna be a pastor? Am I gonna be a worship leader? And there's always finite things that people might feel called to, but when it comes to our marriage, do we believe our marriage has a calling? And we believe every marriage has a specific calling.

• A specific purpose

• A specific purpose

• That God's going to use them for.

• Yeah based in their unique giftings, talents, position in life that God wants to use in those marriages for his purposes. But, that might be vague for some people and some marriages might be thinking well, what's my purpose? So what we thought we'd do is sit down and share with you six callings that we believe very Christian marriage is called to. These are callings that God has for your marriage today, whether you know what the specific calling is from God and you're in the ministry that God has for your marriage, as a couple. These callings are for every Christian marriage. There's more than this, but we picked out the six that we love the most and that we've kind of walked throughout in our life. And so this gives you a place to start in your marriage and say okay, God already has a calling for us. We don't have to guess or we don't have to pretend we don't know or not know how to figure out where to get that calling. You can actually start today and say oh this is, at least we know these callings that God has for us.

• That's really cool, I'm so excited to jump in. I just wanna encourage you listening, if you, as we go through each six, if you could just take evaluation of your marriage and see if you guys are already fulfilling these callings in your life or if you're not, if these are areas that you're wrestling with or you're struggling with, then hopefully our encouragement today will help you step up in those areas.

• Yeah and you can let us know in the comments what areas you that think you've already been walking in and you're like, oh, and you never saw them as callings. Or you can let us know what areas that you didn't recognize that you needed to be walking in. Let us know in the comments, we like to read through those. So let's get started. We're gonna start, we have six of them. So the first calling that every Christian marriage has is to prayer and this could be together or separate. It should eventually be together, but some of you might not be able to do that. But let me read the verse that goes with this. Philippians four, six through seven. And it says do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Every marriage, every Christian marriage has a calling to pray and that seems easy, it seems like the easy bible answer, but I wanna talk a little bit about this real quick from our own life and I have a question for you. How would you say prayer has played a role in our marriage?

• Well I would say it was significant in saving our marriage, for sure. We started out in our relationship with praying for each other and praying for the purpose that God had for our marriage.

• We prayed like every night during our dating years.

• Yep, and throughout our engagement and then even through our marriage and when we hit that hard spot in our marriage, when we, when we were contemplating divorce and just were both really isolated from each other

• And broken and frustrated, yeah.

• You were really adamant about prayer. So every night you were still praying for us and my heart was a little bit harder towards God and I was really frustrated and wrestling with the issues that we were facing. But you were, you were faithful to prayer.

• Which was hard. For all the husbands watching, my prayers start off very hopeful in the first few years of my marriage and eventually got very angry and bitter. But I still prayed because I had that foundation in my heart and I was like no, this is the only way I can see us getting healing and so I kept praying. You actually got to a point where you kind of stopped praying.

• Yeah we used to pray together every night and then slowly I just kind of faded out and listened to your prayers. Still participated, but didn't

• Right.

• Didn't pray as much but I will say that your faithfulness in praying every night really helped me to embrace God and come back to him, to turn my heart back to him and to trust him because I knew that you trusted him. So that did play a big role in saving our marriage.

• Yeah and so, prayer's a little ominous for a lot of Christians, which it shouldn't be, but there's no classes on prayer. I know some churches probably have that, but it's not like a, we just assume like oh prayer's supposed to be easy to us. You know, what would you say are some, is prayer just talking to God? Is it like you have the right words and you have, you bring in scripture at the right time in the prayer? Is there any, how does it look in our marriage? What does prayer look like for us?

• Well how I've always viewed it is, it's just our way of communicating with God. So it's basically opening up our hearts and just sharing what's on our, what's on our hearts and what's on our minds and sharing it with God and what's really cool about what I've experienced through praying with you is that not only are we submitting everything to God and asking for his guidance in our relationship, but every once in a while there's a compliment in there about me when you're praying and thanking God for me.

• Well when you hear me pray for you, you actually hear my heart for you.

• Yeah, exactly, I get to hear your heart for me and that affirms me and it affirms my relationship with you so that's been a huge encouragement. But I think that people can get really overwhelmed when they think about prayer and going to God and overthinking it, you know?

• Right.

• Feeling like it has to be done perfectly and it doesn't.

• So you're saying that the couples that are watching now could start today?

• They can start today.

• They can just say okay lord, I don't know what I'm saying to you, but I want help or thank you and it could be as simple as that. Yeah, so we encourage you. So the first calling that every Christian marriage has is to prayer and this means together. So some of you might be married and your spouse, your husband or your wife is not a believer or is where my wife was, in a place where she's kind of angry or bitter or they're angry or bitter. You can still pray without them, for them. And with them and over them. So, don't let a disunity keep you from prayer because you have a unity with Christ and Christ, as our mediator, gives us direct access to the throne of God that we can actually open up our hearts and we can pray directly to God. We don't need a high priest anymore cause we have Christ who is our perfect high priest. So we just wanna encourage you that you can actually start praying today, whether together or individually, start praying today.

• Yeah and if you're doing it individually, which is great, every once in a while, invite your spouse to pray with you or say, hey, I'd love to pray for you, can you give me a list? Can you give me five things that I can really focus on? I know that that's super helpful.

• And I know it'll totally bless them.

• Yeah.

• And I just wanna bring this quote up that our pastor always says to us. Prayer isn't preparation for the battle, prayer is the battle. So we don't look at prayer as like, well that's a supplementary thing that we do for our faith or it's something that we do only when it's really bad. Prayer is the battle and we're in a spiritual warfare every day. Against our own flesh, against the enemies in the world and in the spirit and so prayer, we need to go to battle on our knees in prayer, in praying for the things that we care about in praying for the things that we are concerned about and going to our father and saying lord, we need your mind on this, we need your heart on this, we need your help on this. So prayer is the first calling that every Christian marriage has. Okay, so what's the next calling that every marriage, every Christian marriage has?

• Okay, so the next one is love. I wanna share a scripture, but it's probably not the one you're thinking. Most people go straight to first Corinthians chapter 13, which defines what love is, which is great, but today I'm gonna share Matthew 22, 37 through 40, which says and he said to him, you shall love the lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. So, contrary to how culture will tell us that love is a feeling and love is something that we

• Fall into?

• Fall into. God is saying that love is a command. He commands us to love him and he commands us to love our neighbor, or in this case, in regards to marriage, our spouse.

• Yeah and so, for all the marriages out there, your calling, our calling is to love. Not just love each other cause it says love your neighbor as yourself, that's the second and greatest commandment, cause my wife is my closest neighbor, I'm her closest neighbor, we practice loving our neighbors by loving each other well. And then the second part of this is that as a couple, we love the lord with all of our hearts, minds, soul and strength. So, if you're sitting out there wondering what your calling in life is, this is a amazing calling, is to love each other well and to love God.

• Yeah and I just wanna share that because of the way our culture is, very self-focused, especially in marriage, we can get caught up in thinking that I can't love you right now because you're not loving me. And that can just cause a crazy cycle to happen, I know we've experienced it before.

• Yeah and so in the beginning of our marriage, because I wasn't living up to the high expectations you had for me, you would just withhold all of your love.

• Yeah, so I would get really frustrated because

• You would tell me

• Yeah, I had all these expectations of romantic love and these grand gestures of you showing me love.

• Right.

• And I relied on you to initiate all of that and when you didn't do it, I didn't wanna do it.

• And you wouldn't initiate it, because you were expecting like that's what my husband does, he's gonna pursue me and he's gonna do all the loving and I'm sitting over there thinking my wife's not even pursuing me, why would I give her love? Now, we were both wrong because we both were commanded to love each other. I was commanded more specifically from Ephesians 5:23 on how I'm supposed to love you, but we're supposed to walk in love the way the bible tells us to.

• Right.

• So we were totally dropping the ball on that calling in our life and it's only been the last three, four years that we've been learning to actually walk in that calling for us.

• In that command.

• And what happens when you start walking in that calling, just with each other, as most areas of marriage, in a Christian marriage, you know we start loving each other more biblically and more authentically and we start pursuing each other more. So what happens is we have extra in us to

• Love others.

• So then we can actually, instead of you just always, constantly thinking I'm not getting what I need, you have more than enough and you actually have the energy, I have the energy and the love available to be able to sit and love our other neighbors.

• Right.

• Our friends, our family, and so that's where that calling gets even wider.

• Yeah.

• Is showing that love to the world.

• There was a turning point in our marriage where I feel like we really began to understand God's command on love, but also, the way that he set the example for unconditional love.

• Right.

• And I wanted you to share a little bit about your vision of being with Jesus in the garden. Just a really brief version.

• So, just really briefly, when we are at our breaking point in our marriage, I felt the lord bring me a vision of Jesus being in the Garden of Gethsemane before he goes to the cross and I remember God showing me Jesus weeping and as it were, great tears of blood cause he was so anguished over what he was about to go through and I'm, you know, we've all heard the story. We know exactly what it's about and we understand it, but I feel like God showed me a new perspective on it and he was saying, cause in the garden, Jesus three times said lord, let this cup pass from me, the cup of wrath, essentially, is what he's saying.

• He knew what he was about to do and he knew who he was doing it for.

• Yeah, who was he doing it for? His bride. And so, essentially what he was saying, is lord, I don't wanna die for my bride because this is too painful.

• Especially knowing that part of his bride would reject him or not

• Or spit on him

• Want him, yeah.

• Or turn away from him and instead of what he wanted, in his flesh, cause his flesh was saying I don't wanna do this. His spirit submitted to the lord in his will for, he said not my will be done, but your will be done.

• And he did it.

• And so he went to the cross anyway for a broken and filthy bride, an adulteress bride, knowing that that was what god's will for him was and that's how he was gonna love us.

• So here you are, already married to me, you know, three years in.

• Yeah and I feel like I had a choice, but the choice was this, was in my flesh I was saying lord, I can't do this and God was saying sure you can, cause Jesus did it.

• Not your will, but mine.

• Not your will be done, but my will be done. So, God's will is that I would love my wife anyway. If my wife never gave me what I feel like I deserve or what she's supposed to give me, I should be able to love her still, through the holy spirit.

• We were in church, it was, had just gotten out, so people were scurrying all over the place and we were just standing in the middle of the sanctuary and you were crying, telling me all of this and

• I had something in my eye

• Yeah, sure

• I wasn't crying.

• But right there, we just, we committed to walking as Jesus walked in unconditional love for each other.

• If nothing ever changed.

• Yep.

• In our physical issues that we were having.

• Yeah.

• And you know what changed?

• Our hearts

• Everything. Our hearts changed and our hearts melted. You know, the bible calls our hearts stone and he takes our hearts of stone and he turns them to hearts of flesh and I feel like that's what he did in that moment was turn my heart from a heart of stone and your heart from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh. That's the power of the calling of love in our life.

• Exactly and our obedience to this command is not relying upon what other people are doing, especially your spouse, so our encouragement to you guys today is to love anyways and to love unconditionally and to let

• It's your calling.

• Yeah, it's your calling.

• Yeah, so let's move on to the third calling. We have three more after this, so the third calling that every Christian marriage has is to forgive, this is a hard one. I'm gonna read the scriptures, Colossians 3:13, there's lots of scriptures on forgiveness. I'm not even gonna read the harder ones, I'm just gonna read this one.

• Okay.

• So first Colossians 3:13 says this. Bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. So just like that last command, to love, forgiveness is a command. Forgiveness is not an option for the believer, especially in marriage, we don't get to choose, we don't get to choose not to forgive. We don't get to say well, my wife wronged me so badly that I don't have to forgive her. Well, it's actually a command to forgive and I always tell myself, cause when we were going through what we were going through, I felt like I didn't have to forgive you. And there was a lot of things that I did that you just held onto and you were like I can't forgive you for that.

• I didn't want to forgive you

• You didn't want to forgive me and you know what the lord showed me, showed us? Who are we to hold forgiveness against anyone? For what god forgave me of and the patience the god had with me, how dare I withhold forgiveness from anyone, especially my bride, who is one with me. So technically, if I withhold forgiveness from my bride, I'm withholding forgiveness from myself because she is me and I am her. But we did this, it was so destructive. It was not a oneness, it was complete disorder and just think about this. The calling in your life to forgive your spouse. You have nothing else in you to withhold against your spouse that you did not do to Christ himself. That when Christ died on the cross, he forgave all sin just like that. The thing that he was praying that he could have the cup passed from him, he did anyway. He drank that cup, every last drop of it. The cup of the wrath that we deserved and so that doesn't mean we don't repent. It doesn't mean that things that happen to us don't actually hurt us and that it doesn't take time to learn to trust again and that it doesn't take time to figure out how to walk with each other and get back into oneness and unity. But that does not mean we get to not forgive. So, if you're wondering what your calling is in your marriage as a marriage, it's forgiveness; towards each other and towards others. So I have a question. Has it been easy for you to forgive me?

-Not in the beginning. There's definitely been times where forgiveness was too painful to accept in my heart.

• I just thought of something. What was it that you were afraid it would mean if you forgave me? Remember, there was something you used to say

• Do we wanna say what specifically we're talking about?

• No.

• Okay.

• There was something, there was a reason you withheld forgiveness and you were afraid of me not changing.

• Yeah.

• You were afraid if you forgave me

• Then you would just have the freedom to do it again

• Right. And so, you would just, you would withhold that forgiveness because you used it as a tool to control the situation.

• Well, I wanted you to hurt like I was hurting.

• Exactly.

• And so I thought, if I withheld forgiveness then you would feel the pain of not being reconciled.

• Right, so you were breaking this command in your heart because you thought that you had the right to because of what I did, but in reality we don't, right?

• No, we don't.

• We don't have the right to withhold forgiveness from anyone. There's another verse that's terrifying and we'll put it in the comments, in the description below, but it essentially says if you don't forgive,

• Your father won't forgive you.

• And that is terrifying.

• Yeah.

• So this third calling for every Christian marriage is to walk in forgiveness.

• And to encourage you, what I've experienced with us is the more you practice forgiveness and your heart is motivated toward reconciliation, the easier it becomes because you have this bigger picture of what it means to forgive and why it's so valuable for oneness in marriage.

• Right. So why don't we move on to the fourth calling that every Christian marriage has.

• So the fourth one is trust and I feel like it goes hand in hand with forgiveness because in order to trust again, you have to be able to forgive and reconcile and experience oneness and intimacy again. But, I know that for a lot of marriages, trust is a big issue and it's really hard once you've been sinned against or hurt, to extend that trust and rebuild it again.

• Yeah and so I would encourage one thing, is this is not a calling to just blindly trust. When I would wrong you in things that I was walking in, right? And I broke your trust. Your calling wasn't to just be like, well, I'm just gonna trust you again. Your calling was to forgive me and your calling was to reconcile with me and to walk with me as we grow towards oneness again and heal, right? But, what were you supposed to trust in, in that season?

• So the whole time, no matter what, I was supposed to trust God.

• With what?

• With my heart and with you; that he was working in your life

• Right.

• and that he was there to help us.

• And that was actually hard for you cause the first four and a half years of our marriage, you didn't trust God.

• No, it was definitely a learning curve.

• So it was impossible for you to trust me. I mean, I didn't give her a reason to trust me, but you didn't trust God, you didn't trust me, you didn't even trust your own emotions.

• I think that's why I felt so lonely and I felt so, I just felt so alone in what we were facing as a couple because I felt like I wasn't connected with you and then I felt disconnected from God, so there was a lot of mistrust and not having that really hindered my ability to experience intimacy with both of you.

• And trusting God with your spouse puts you on the right path of the spirit of God helping you trust again; because as you see God work in your spouse as you pray, and as you forgive, you start seeing the transformations and you say okay Lord, I can trust you. I can trust my spouse with you, I can trust me with you and I can trust my marriage with you and so I'm just gonna walk in the things that you've asked me to because I trust you, father.

• And a foundational verse for trust and especially trusting God is Proverbs three, five through six, trust in the lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths and I had to lean on this verse especially in regards to our marriage because I felt like I had all this understanding of what I should do as a wife and how I should respond to my husband, but I couldn't lean on my own understanding. Every time I was faced with this verse, I had to remind myself I can't do that, I need to be able to trust God.

• And your understanding kept you from being able to trust me.

• Yeah.

• And kept you from trusting God

• And kept me from reconciling with you

• Right

• Because my understanding lacked

• The spirit of God.

• The spirit of God, it really did. It was selfish, it was very selfish. I was trying to preserve myself and protect myself instead of reengaging with you and trusting that God was gonna lead us to a better place.

• Going into the word of God and into prayer and actually battling for me and being my helper because you were just thinking like no, I've been hurt so I'm not gonna try.

• Yeah. There's this picture that I see when I think about trust in a marriage relationship and I hope that this encourages you guys. But it's this idea of all the walls in a person's heart that we built up over time, every brick that is placed to build that wall will keep your spouse out of your heart and the whole idea of oneness is to, to understand each other and to know each other intimately and you can't do that unless you bring those walls down, so this picture of taking these bricks down from these walls in your heart and building a bridge to close that gap and to allow connectedness, bring you guys together.

• Which could take a lifetime to break those walls down, but, through the holy spirit, could happen over night.

• True.

• So we just, we encourage you guys in your marriage to take up that calling of trust and trusting God with your spouse and your marriage and seeking his word on how you should live and how you should be and how you should act towards each other and towards outsiders and walk in that and you'll see what will happen. You'll see what we have experienced is freedom.

• Yep.

• Freedom from the bondages of our own desires, our own misunderstandings, our own

• Sin?

• Sin. Which bring us to the fifth calling for your marriage and it is purity. In Hebrews 13, verse four, it says let marriages be held in honor among all and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. I did not do this. I totally broke unity with my wife often, I had dealt with pornography my entire life, I thought marriage would fix it and it didn't, of course, I'm sure a lot of you out there that are watching this could understand this. But I walked actually worse in it during the first few years of our marriage and that, by itself, broke unity, spiritually unprotected you and us, brought in all sorts of filth into our home, brought in filth into my mind, made me see my wife in a broken way. It encouraged you to have lack of trust with me, rightfully. It made it hard for you to forgive me, rightfully.

• It made me not want to be with you physically.

• It made you not want to pray with me, so all of the other things that we've been talking about that are callings in our life, my daily decisions hindered from making it easy and possible for us to do. That doesn't mean that they're not callings still for us, but my own impurity, my own walking in filth, my porn addiction

• Hindered all those other callings.

• Hindered all of those other callings, which, when we're walking in that sort of sin, and I know there's a lot of marriages watching this that are dealing with that, either both or one of the spouses is dealing with pornography on a daily basis and is walking in this unrepenting sin and it literally is gonna not just bring death to your home, because the bible tells us that our sins will find us out and sin leads to death when it's full grown. And we were, we had spiritual death in our marriage; praise God that he was patient with us and kind to us and extended grace and mercy and I just always think about his patience cause of how long I was walking in that and how he didn't just destroy us cause he totally could've. And it almost did destroy our marriage. But purity and walking in all these other things make our marriages into a ministry. But when we're not walking in purity, we have zero authority. I had no authority to lead my wife, I had no authority to lead myself, I couldn't sit with another brother in Christ and say hey, let me encourage you, let me walk you through this because I was completely walking in unrepenting sin. I thought I was repenting but the fact that I just kept going back to it without having an actual change in my heart, without having an actual understanding of what I was saying yes to. I was completely destroying our marriage and that is a calling for your marriage, as much as it's a calling for our marriage. This isn't unique to some marriages, your marriage is called to purity; husband and wife. So I'm talking about my own impurity that I struggled with pornography on the internet. What areas of purity did you struggle with that you didn't recognize in the time? And, to be honest, I wasn't even able to bring up to you because of my own sin. But I was able to bring up to you after I started walking in purity.

• Well the first thing I wanna just share, very vulnerably, is that I also had my own struggle with pornography for a season and I'm sharing that because I know that there's wives listening and it can be so hard to confront and admit that you're wrestling with this and once you, once you confess that sin and repent of it, you will find so much freedom and so, you need to deal with it, but one of the other major impurities in my life was hiding the fact that I had a problem with food and using it whenever I was emotional, whenever I felt down or defeated, whenever I had a craving. I was so selfish with my, with my desires for it and used it as a crutch anytime we were facing discord or disunity. I went to sugar, you know, anything that would make me feel better and I knew that I was living in an unhealthy way and I kept that from you because I didn't want you to point the finger at me or challenge me or keep me accountable in any way.

• And you thought I didn't have a right to anyway cause of the way I was walking.

• Yeah, when you did try and step in and encourage me to be healthy, I wouldn't let you.

• You'd use my sin as an excuse for your own.

• Right. Yeah, so that was this crazy cycle in itself of not being able to walk in the freedom that Christ gave both of us because we were stuck in

• Impurity.

• Impurity.

• Yeah, so the fifth calling for your marriage is to walk in purity and if you are struggling or, I don't even wanna say struggling, if you're in these problems, these sins, addiction to pornography, eating habits, things that you haven't submitted to the lord and you're holding on to and saying this is mine, you need to repent today and walk in the freedom that Galatians 5:1 tells us we have. For freedom, Christ has set you free. Stand firm, therefore and do not submit again to the yolk of slavery. If you have the holy spirit living in you, you have the power to walk in freedom and purity.

• And as you're evaluating your life, I would also suggest that maybe it's not pornography, maybe it's not food, but maybe it's music, maybe it's what you're reading, maybe it's the, the

• Maybe you love romance novels and you're just, you dwell on those and you read them often and

• Maybe it's other types of websites that you're viewing online or maybe it's a bad shopping habit. There are so many different ways that we can live impure lives and God calls us to a higher standard than that and it's for the protection of our hearts, for the protection of our marriages, for the protection of our families that we live pure lives.

• And in doing so, it makes our marriages be able to walk in the higher calling that our marriages have, which is ministering to the world, which is doing the will of the father and when we aren't walking pure, we just, we're missing it. We cannot do that, it's the plank eye effect. The bible doesn't say not to go take the spec out of your brother's eye, it says you can't see the spec in their eye clearly because we have a plank in our own. So, the idea is that we need to remove that plank, we need to be walking in purity, we need to repent of our sin and accept the freedom that Christ has given us and the authority and power that he's put in us. So, let's move on to the last one

• The last one.

• And this is a fun one for us but it's also a hard one.

• It was a hard one for me, for sure.

• And this isn't an extensive list of all the callings that every Christian marriage has, but these are the six that we chose for this podcast, this video, and so what's the sixth one? So the sixth one is generosity and I'm gonna read second Corinthians nine, six through seven. And it says the point is this, whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

• So what'd you have to say about that in our marriage?

• Well, I wanna be honest with them and say that in the beginning of our marriage, I fought generosity and I didn't, I didn't realize that I was fighting it. I didn't know that I wasn't a generous person.

• Yeah when I said I wanted to start giving to our church or to some non-profits, what was your answer?

• So, I thought that by giving of my time was enough, I really believed that.

• I remember you'd tell me, you'd be like, why do we have to give our money? We give our time, cause we volunteered a lot at the different churches we were a part of.

• We also didn't have very high paying jobs and what we did have went to our living situation

• And debt, we were getting out of debt at the time.

• And I just, I never felt like we had enough and so to give away the little bit that we had was really frustrating to me and I didn't understand why it was of importance.

• Especially when we didn't have the things that a lot of our friends and married couples had.

• Yeah.

• We didn't have our own home, we only had one car, we didn't have

• When we did have an apartment, I remember going down to the thrift store to get a can opener or whatever little thing we needed

• And we were doing all that for the purpose of getting out of debt, but in our mode of getting out of debt, I believed what the scripture said about generosity and giving and so we wanted to walk in obedience to that. So even though we were trying to get out of debt, we were like, we're also gonna give to what God's doing.

• And I will say that this is a huge testimony to God's way of submission because as your wife, I submitted to you in this call of generosity and it actually changed me, it changed my heart, it changed my perspective and my view. At first, it was really challenging for me and I complained and I do feel bad about that still, but, over time, I saw, I saw this verse come to life that when you, you sow bountifully, you reap bountifully. And I saw it even in our own marriage.

• Yeah.

• The times that you were generous with me whether it was with your time or your resources or with gifts, I would want, I would feel something in my heart to want to do it back, so

• Yeah.

• I even saw that come alive in our own marriage, but also out in our other relationships.

• And this calling for your marriage, being generous, there's not a dollar amount on this. This is not a like, you have to give this amount of money all the time. The new testament, specifically, is very clear that God wants all of it. He wants to know that our hands are open and that whatever he puts in, he can also take out. And so this isn't a prosperity gospel of like if you put money in the basket, money's gonna come right back out to you. Sometimes that happens, but in many ways, the blessing that we've gotten from walking in generosity, just in every aspect of our life, is having a healthy perspective on money. We don't crave money. We don't crave more money

• Or things.

• We don't seek wealth, I mean even things, yeah, we see things as useful objects, we don't see them as things that are gonna fulfill us. We, man, the amount of things that God's been able to do just through our little bit of generosity in other marriage's lives, in other people's lives and around the world has been a huge testimony to God's goodness in our life and so what happens is God blesses us, cause we're all blessed, everyone's blessed right? Just Jesus Christ alone, he's the best gift anyone's ever been given, but even just in our day to day life, the things that we have, recognizing that they're not ours, that they're used for his kingdom, so, in your marriage the calling of generosity, are you being generous with your home? Are you being generous with your cars, with you finances, with your time? Are you walking in a marriage and a level of generosity where you just trust God and say okay lord, we're open to what you have for us and we're gonna do it, we don't know what that looks like, means, but we're gonna say, lord this is your money, how do you want us to use it? Do you have someone that needs help in the church that you want us to bless? You know, is it $5 to help someone with a meal? Is it $20 for gas for someone? Is it $100 to a missionary? It could be anything.

• And when you submit your heart to God in prayer and you tell him I'm yours and everything I have is yours, you will hear him speak to you as far as that tugging on your heart to give in those divine moments where someone else is in need, he'll show you.

• Yeah and he does it all the time and that's where our hearts are at. Okay lord, what do you have next for us? We actually start the year off every year, God, how do you want us this year, financially?

• Yeah, it is a pat of our goal setting.

• Yeah, so we hope you enjoyed these six callings that the lord has for your marriage. We try walking these callings ourselves and we hope that by you walking in these and chasing after these biblical concepts and callings for your marriage that you'll be led towards God's greater calling for your marriage, whatever that may be and that your eyes would be open and that your heart would be open into receiving what he has for you, as individuals in your marriage and as a unit, as a whole. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the subscribe button and also hit the bell next to the subscribe button so you get notifications when we post new videos.

• Also, leave a comment if there are other callings that God has for Christian marriages. We'd love to be encouraged by that and see more.

• See ya later. Did you enjoy today's show? Find many more encouraging stories and resources at marriageaftergod.com and let us help you cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

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