Making Yeshua the center and highest priority of your marriage may be the key to saving it, even if it’s not in trouble — yet.

How often do newlyweds excitedly affirm that God will be the heart and focus of their marriage only to find that excitement all but extinguished in short time. Sometimes it’s trials; sometimes it’s temptation; other times it’s just sheer boredom but what once seemed an essential commitment becomes a lost idea.

Part of the reason is that people honestly have no idea what it means to have a God-focused marriage. Nor do they understand the incredible freedom that accompanies it. The couple may be committed Believers, but their marriage becomes stagnant.

What then does it look like to have a grounded marriage?

God-Centered Marriage Means Knowing Him Intimately

You cannot make God a priority in your marriage if you do not know who He is personally. We live in a society that is increasingly unloving and committed. This creates exciting witnessing opportunities for our marriages if they are gospel grounded. However, it also means that we cannot count on culture being our aide. Bible, prayer, and worship have never had as little value in our society as they seem to have today. But these elements are essential if we desire to have a genuine relationship with Yeshua/Jesus.

We cannot know God outside of how He has revealed Himself to us through his word. We cannot communicate with Him outside of His Holy Spirit in relationship. We cannot experience full communion with Him apart from the Body of Christ. If we are to keep God at the center of our marriage, we must know who He is and that is only possible through regular reading Scripture, prayer, and worship.

I cannot have God as the priority of my marriage if I will not have Him as the priority of my life.

Knowing His Spirit

Knowing God means knowing his fellowship through His Holy Spirit. Christ has sent his Spirit to be inside of his remnant and to dwell in their hearts (1 Cor.3:16). This incredible fellowship never ceases to be. Not even when the born-again are sinning, and playing like enemies to the Lord, does His Holy Spirit leave us. A partial fulfillment of the promise of God is that he will never leave us nor forsake us (Deut. 31:6; Heb. 13:5). Though there may be times when we grieve His Spirit (Eph. 4:30), or God removes his countenance from us and we feel as if we are alone, the believer, in fact, always has access to Him. His Holy Spirit brings comfort (John 14:26), peace (John 14:27), and conviction (John 16:8). And when we do not know how to pray as we ought, He intercedes for us with groans too deep for words (Romans 8:26).

This means we can be free from the fear of loneliness because we are never actually alone. We no longer have to avoid conflict in order to preserve a faux fellowship/ relationship. But neither are we driven to conflict in order to create a false sense of intimacy. We are able to give our spouses the freedom to be wherever they are emotionally without the fear that their hurt, fear, and sadness (even joy!) may lead to our being alone. It means that we have an eternal advocate who knows our fears and pain.

Therefore, we are free from having to defend ourselves (He’s the Great Defender) we can take those things to the throne of grace, giving them to God, even when we don’t have the words. It means we are free from the drive to self-comfort because the divine Comforter is always in our reach. It also means that our spouses may be the means of God’s conviction of our sin. We are free to hear those places where we have hurt and scared our spouses, to learn from it, to ask forgiveness for it, and not to repeat that mistake again, even if we are relatively certain we will.

No Safer Place

Prioritizing Yeshua in our marriages means knowing Him in our hearts and reflecting Him in our actions. And loving Him always through any storm of life that tries to take away one of the greatest blessings Yeshua has given you.

Yeshua is the center of my marriage with all of the bumps and scraps along the way.