Faith Archives - Page 2 of 16

Faith and Love

“Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints,” – Ephesians‬ ‭1:15‬ ‭KJV‬‬

Your Life Speaks

This scripture from the Bible has stood out to me because of something that Paul says. While writing this letter to the church at Ephesus, he says that their faith and their love are what he heard about. I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days and I wonder if the same could be said of us.

Your life speaks...what is it saying? #youspeakvolumes #livelife Click To Tweet

Does our faith speak? Does our love speak? They should speak to those around us. Our lives should be filled with faith and love. Everyone wants to make an impact, but how does real impact happen?

Paul said that their faith and their love is what impacted him. The same should be said of our faith and love. One area that our faith and love can be seen is in our marriages.

Faith in Your Marriage

Faith in your marriage can look like persevering through hard times. It’s not always that you have to be on the brink of divorce for you to have faith in your marriage. Faith can look like praying for your marriage in the morning. It can also look like having peace in your day to day. Faith in your marriage can look like believing for a consistent date night. The point is that having faith in and for your marriage is more than waiting until your about to file for divorce.

Love In Your Marriage

How does love in your marriage look? Do you picture it as your favorite rom-com movie? Or does it look like a relationship that you saw as a child?

Love in your marriage is two parts; how you give love and how you receive love. You need to know both. Does love look like handwritten letters or exotic vacations or even sitting on the couch watching your favorite show.

So what does love look like for your marriage and what do you do to maintain it? Love has to continue to grow and develop. It’s a living part of your marriage and has to be treated as such. There are some practical things you can you like praying together, date nights, vacations together and communication are a way to get started.

Building the faith and love in your marriage is what will speak to those around us. Like Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesians ,their faith and love are what spoke to Paul. Your faith and love will also speak.

Discussion Question:

What do you want your faith and love to say?

What Relationships Teach You

What has your relationship taught you? Has your marriage taught you anything new? Are you still studying your spouse or do you try to cram at the last minute when it’s their birthday or your anniversary?

There are times where I find myself always learning a lesson. I’m not saying it in a bad way either. I think that we should be life long learners. More times than not this is just something we say and not something we apply to our lives.

Our relationships are living and breathing. Click To Tweet

Our relationships are living and breathing and we should be learning from them. Here are five lessons that we should be learning.

Facts don’t matter as much as feelings. In a relationship, there are two roads of communicating. The road of facts, and the road of feelings. The stereotype is that men are more factual and that may be, but men are also more emotional than we like to think. Either way, when it comes to communication with our spouse, we have to know which road it appropriate. We can’t be so concerned with the facts that we lose the feeling.

Withdrawal leads to death. No, I’m not talking about physically dying, but the death of the relationship. There are moments in a relationship where our emotions and feelings can run so high that we make decisions that are not good. When we’re not happy or something doesn’t go our way, one of those decisions that we can make is that we can withdraw from the relationship.

Withdrawal from a relationship will lead to being emotional unavailability. It will cripple the relationship. The affection you have, the shared humor, and joy will also leave. It will kill the intimacy and sexual passion.

The lesson here is that we need personal growth. Our growth helps us to deal with our anger or hurt feelings in a way where we do not withdrawal from the relationship. We have to learn to communicate our feelings rather than just act out.

Physical Touch is key. Affection brings us closer together and causes us to stay close. Both you and your partner feel connected to each other when you touch. Not just sexual touch, while that is important. Touching in a non-sexual nature helps improve romance and deepens the romance that you already have. Love thrives the micro-moments of connection and sometimes the best way to create a connection is to reach out and touch your loved one.

Complaining to family and friends doesn’t help. It is easy when you are frustrated with your spouse to turn to family and friends. They will automatically take your side and help you feel validated in your frustration. This actually doesn’t help your relationship. It gives power to these people that should be just reserved just for you and your spouse.

Love is a verb, not just a feeling. If you want your relationship to work, then you have to be intentional in making it work. If you want the love to stay in and through your relationship you have to be willing to say express to your spouse “I’m going to make you a priority in my life. I will pursue and find new ways to make you as happy as I can.” All of this has to do with the attitude in which you approach your relationship.

Discussion Question: What lessons have you learned from your current or previous relationships?

Marriage Beliefs

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. Mignon McLaughlin

Marriage Beliefs

Where do our beliefs about marriage stem from? Most people haven’t thought about this. We might entertain the idea of getting married one day. Or we once we are married we think about what we want our marriage to be. The above quote shows what that person believes about marriage and where their marriage beliefs come from. If you want to know the core of what they believe about marriage just change the topics of conversation and listen to them talk.

What We See

I remember I was on Youtube and a young artist,was being interviewed. The host did just what I described above. They steered the conversation towards marriage and asked this young man what he thought about marriage. His response is what caught my attention. He said that he didn’t believe in the idea of marriage. Not a huge shocker to hear that from someone today. Then he said he didn’t believe in it because he never saw a successful one. He said that there isn’t anyone around him that has stayed married and then if they are they’re not happy. He’s never seen one work. WOW! What a state to live in.

From listening to this young man talk you understand his beliefs about marriage. He doesn’t like it or care for it. His reason, the core of where this comes from for him; he’s never seen a successful one or one where people were happy.

Our beliefs about marriage come from that same place. What we think and believe about marriage come from ideas that were formed when we’re children. So if our parents, aunts and uncles, friends parents argue, talk bad about their spouse or abuse their spouse, we will think that is what marriage is. Our beliefs are in part formed by what we see modeled in front of us.

I wanted to model something different than what my parents had. They were happy but the end was bad and they got divorced. I want and am building something that will last. I want to make sure that my children have a marriage modeled in front of them that is one of a happy, fulfilled and fun marriage.

What are we modeling and what are we seeing?