← The Grounded Union Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Sam.
- [00:29]
B
Welcome back to season two of the Grounded Union podcast. Today we are talking about why Christian disciplines aren't saving your marriage. Maybe you've prayed, fasted, read your Bible and you're still in a rough place. We're going to talk about that. Our story, how we met, we were in ministry, we were missionaries, we were doing all the stuff and we were still struggling. This is a going to be a Christian perspective, a background for this episode. If you're not a Christian, you're invited to join. We're not really given an altar call or telling you to convert to our faith. And if you already are a Christian, you probably didn't have the same denomination background, you probably don't have the exact same beliefs as we do. And that is completely fine. This is an open conversation. I hope, we hope to illuminate and bring hope on your journey. As you're listening, if you are just listening and you didn't know that we actually have the video version. I'm looking at the camera right now and waving. You can see the video version of this podcast on Spotify and YouTube. So go ahead and check it out. If you're just listening to audio and you want to watch the video and hang out with us visually, a couple quick things. If you're looking for where to start and needing support in your marriage, I do have my men's community app. It's called Grounded Nation. You can check out the show notes below. If you want to try it out, check it out for free and see if it's a good fit for you. I do weekly coaching and courses for men that are looking to get started and implement the things that we do talk about on this podcast, Grounded Nation. For those of you listening, I love you guys. And we also have our Maui three day Marriage Intensive that is our last in person event of the year. It's going to be in October here in Maui, Hawaii. It's limited to 20 couples. As of this recording, quite a few of those spots are already claimed. So if you would like to join us for a three day intensive in Maui this October, you can apply via the show notes and we review each of those applications personally and we'll reach out to you if your application was accepted.
- [01:58]
A
Yeah. So to kick us off, we wanted to share, which maybe you guys already heard, if you joined us in season one, we wanted to share a little bit about our background and how we met and the first couple years of our marriage. And so Brandon and I, funny enough, we grew up two hours apart from each other in Oregon never met, even though we were part of the same church denomination and ended up actually meeting in Ecuador of all places. So Brandon had already been living there, serving in missions. And like we said, we grew up in the Christian church, specifically in the Nazarene Church. So he had been serving overseas with a Nazarene organization. I went on a 4:30 day trip straight out of high school. Fresh little babies meeting together and falling in love. And so we met on the missions field and actually almost instantly fell in love and connected because we had the same core values and vision of actually we thought one day becoming missionaries. And at the time that perspective looked like living overseas somewhere, barely having enough to eat and helping others that barely had enough to eat. And obviously, as you can see, in the 10 years of our marriage, our perspectives env of what bringing the message of hope and love looks like has completely expanded and changed. But we want to dive a little bit deeper into those first couple years of marriage and what our spiritual background kind of looks like.
- [03:16]
B
Yeah, I've heard from, from several of you within my men's community app or people that we've met in person, that your faith experience, so coming to faith in Christ, if that's been your experience, had made a significant impact in your trajectory. So we wanna talk about trajectory and where you're headed right now. For some of you, if you had been in addiction or had growing up in a very broken home and you found a supportive church, you found faith in Christ that brought you out of a very dark place. It may have radically changed your trajectory for a time. And what we want to talk about is how do we sustain the message of love and wisdom that we find in the gospel, that we find from Jesus, that we find in the scriptures? How do we make that more than a seasoned experience of our life, but something that transcends just this 10 years, that it actually lasts a lifetime, that it's passed down into our children, that it actually leads to a healthy, sustainable marriage. Kaitlin and I wanted to go all in. We wanted to give our entire lives to expanding and spreading the love of God, the gospel of Jesus to the world. And so like Caitlin said, out of high school, I was like, God, I'm gonna do, I wanna do anything I want. I will lay my life down. I will die for the gospel. And so I went to Ecuador, I was planting a church, here comes Caitlin on a short term trip. And we quickly fell in love because we knew we were headed in the same direction. That was the thing that drew us to each Other and bonded us even in the uncertainty of our engagement. When Caitlin and I met, I had a girlfriend and I told her I wanted to marry a completely other girl. Like I was just IM her out of my mind and had no emotional stability to actually love and pursue her. The defining factor or the, the, the, the thing that wasn't wavering was that I knew that we would be able to give our lives to doing something significant. And that's where we initially connected on. It was never going to be an argument in our relationship if we were going to go all out and give everything we had to making an impact on the world. And so our vision when we met and when we started dating and for the time first the beginning of our marriage was we're going to go be missionaries in a third world country. We're going to go help rescue women out of sex trafficking. We had plans to start orphanages. And I'm not saying that we will not do these things at a certain time in our, in our life. We are not against these movements and mission endeavors. This is just the vision and the language of the understanding we had for us. And so we put all our eggs in that basket. We were going to get married, be support raised nonprofit workers, which we did do. We were working for the same nonprofit that I was a missionary with. We actually even took a trip to the Philippines with a nonprofit that we were planning. We were going to move to the Philippines to be lifelong missionaries. And something bizarre happened was the harder we pressed in, and specifically the harder I pressed in, Caitlin experienced this too. And in different ways, the harder and the more committed I became to the Christian disciplines which we're going to dive into. So when I, when we talk about Christian disciplines, it comes from a well known book called the Celebration of Discipline. I believe it's called talks about prayer, fasting, studying the scriptures, solitude. None of these things in and of themselves are negative things. What befuddled me, I don't know the right word. What confused me was I was doing all of the disciplines and I had no emotional capacity, I had no maturity to create and sustain a thriving marriage. And I could not find answers in the Bible and pastoral leadership and in a solely spiritual biblical perspective for how I was going to not lose my wife. And I say biblical perspective because we tried to find a specific verse that we could read that would be the antidote for the pain we're in in our relationship. And I could not find it. And we want to talk about the undertones that we find in the church that make it very difficult to sustain intimacy and connection in your relationship and to actually face where the pain exists the most between the two of you right now.
- [06:52]
A
Like Brandon said, we were surprised because we met on the missions field and we then shortly after, within a year of knowing each other, we were actually married. And then we continued on in ministry. Like Brandon said, we actually continued on for many years serving for non profit ministries. And in those nonprofit ministries, there was a lot of core disciplines that we were all to partake in that Brandon and I happily chosen to partake in because at the time, this was the belief system we had. If we partake in these spiritual disciplines, then A plus B equals C. We will then have a healthy life, a healthy marriage, a healthy, vibrant family. That sounds like a really beautiful promise. It does. And again, we're not against any of these disciplines. We're just sharing from our experience that as we daily read our Bible, most people go to church and the pastor's like, hey, you need to read your Bible every single day. And 90% of the congregation goes home and never reads their Bible. And I'm not trying to pat us on our back, but at that time, in that season of our life, we heard that message every single day. And we went home and reread our Bible. We read our Bible every single day for 30 minutes to an hour, both of us. We also have had a prayer practice and a meditation practice every single day. Movement was and still is a core part of our life and at the time was a core staple of the nonprofits that we were serving under. So we read our Bible, we prayed, we practiced solitude and meditation. Brandon and I both fasted, especially if there was something we were wanting to contend for or fight for or experience. It's like, oh, yep, we're gonna do a three day fast, a seven day fast. We'll talk about Brandon's 40 day fast.
- [08:26]
B
I'm getting tired just listening to the list of, the list of things.
- [08:29]
A
We had all these lists of things that we were doing. We went to church every single Sunday. We were a part of a small group, multiple small groups. We actually went to multiple church services. These were all in those beginning years of our marriage. And why we share that is because I'm trying to build up our little, what's it called, your, like, resume? Our resume. This is our spiritual resume. It's like we checked all the boxes, we did all the things. And so years into our marriage, we were both surprised. Like, oh, my gosh, we are completely disconnected. We're on the verge of divorce. We barely know each other, definitely do not love each other. Our marriage is falling apart. Our entire family is falling apart. We had multiple kids at this time. The entire structure of what we had created in our little personal lives was crumbling. Yet we looked at it, and we're like, but we're doing all the things we were told. Couples that pray together, stay together, all these little classic cliche sayings, and it's like, what? We're praying together every single day. What's going on? What is causing this rift? Why, years into this, are we still staring at the face of so much addiction and betrayal and mistrust in our relationship? And even you might be thinking, oh, that's just you guys. No, that's not just us. Why are the divorce rates the same in the church as they are outside of the church? Why are so many people climbing a spiritual ladder, checking all of the disciplines, checking all of the boxes, or feeling guilty because they didn't check these boxes, feeling ashamed because they didn't actually climb the ladder and meet the things? And then they're still staring at the face of their spouse, hiding all of their baggage, all of their lies, all of their lust, all of their trauma, and wondering why they feel worlds apart from the person they're supposed to feel deeply connected in one with.
- [10:15]
B
We're suggesting that there's an approach to your spiritual life that does not need to be separate from your married life, your family life, your work life. And one of the primary characteristics of the Western, of Western Christianity, Evangelical Christians, is we live segmented, fragmented lives. So what that means is we see ourselves as different parts of us. There's the spiritual part of us. There's the practical part of us. Then there's the marriage part of us. There's all these pieces, and they're. They're all different. And we have our little micro personality when we're at church and we put a smile on, we say hi to everybody, we have how we interact with our colleagues, and then we have how we interact with our spouse. And there's so many parts of us, it's confused who we are, where we are, and what we experienced in going after these spiritual disciplines is the actions themselves are not bad. Studying the scriptures to tap into ancient wisdom, the life of Jesus, the mystery of God, the creation of the world, the history of Israel. There's mystery and beauty in the text, but there also can be burden and separation and fear and punishment. Just opening your Bible and reading it does not actually build within you the ability to have relational capacity now you might just say, well, you guys were praying the wrong way. You were reading your Bible incorrectly. Maybe so, maybe so. What we want to suggest is that how you approach your faith is the crucial element, not necessarily checking all of the boxes. Because if you live a life trying to climb the spiritual ladder, be good enough in the eyes of your pastor, your church community, even if it's at a subconscious level, even if you're not, like posting on Facebook. I did my Bible reading today. Although the Bible app does publicly acknowledge you if you have your Bible streak going. These are not the things that get you into heaven. These are not the things that build up your heaven bucks and your rewards for when you die. What became very apparent to us was this didn't necessarily build the foundation for a healthy marriage. It created the potential to tap into a bunch of spiritual realities. And then when we began to rebuild, try to restore, when we were at rock bottom, I turned up the volume on these disciplines. Caitlin caught me lying again about how I was using the Internet because I didn't know how to offload my. My anxiety, my angst about life. And so I. I went to numbing out on social media. When she caught me lying, I was like, well, I don't actually want to look at my sexual history, because in the church, you know, we just rebuke the devil and we ignore him. The sin was dealt with. Jesus forgave me. That is in the depths of the sea. That is gone. And so what I would do is when I was supposed to be looking into my sexual history, I actually did the same things I had always done. I spen prayer. I spent an hour reading my Bible. I ran out of time to look at the things that Caitlin's upset about, that my counselor gave me homework to go take a look at so that we could heal. Why are these things not good enough? I thought this was all I needed to do. And so what happens is we create. It created such a divide in me that I could not engage the here and now. I could only engage the spiritual part of me, which we'll talk about in a minute. This idea of the body being bad and the spirit being good. What confused us was, why is this not creating the transformation that it promised? Why are we still hopeless?
- [13:19]
A
Because, to summarize, what Brandon's saying is, we found out years into our marriage that the foundation of our union was completely cracked. There was holes. There was huge rifts. Even though we had been going about it the exact way we were taught in the church to go about it. To create a healthy union. So we're surprised by this when we hit all these bumps in the roads and we keep like we talk about every episode. We keep going through the same cycle of hiding, lying, betrayal, getting caught, saying sorry, reading books, going to church, doing all the things, saying, I'll never do it again. And we just keep saying spinning and spinning and spinning. And then the more I looked around in the church, I'm like, whoa, everyone else is just spinning on this same loop. Why are there so many? Have we ever stopped and wondered why there's so many support groups in the church for men struggling with lust? Why is there not heaps and heaps and heaps of men standing from the stage saying, hey, I don't objectify women anymore. Hey, I live a life where I'm fully attracted to my spouse only and absolutely nobody else. Hey, I've never relapsed in decades. Hey, I'm waving this free freedom flag. Come and follow me. Why don't we hear that message much? Why do we always hear from the small groups, from the pulpit, from the microphones? Hey, man, this is a man's battle. You're gonna battle this every single day of your life. You're always gonna be bound, you're always gonna be tempted, you're always gonna be attracted. There's always gonna be lure, there's always gonna be this sin nature you have to battle. You're always gonna be attracted to other women. You're always gonna be fighting the urge to look at pornography and masturbate. That's the freedom message that we have. I'm starting to look around and everyone's spinning around me on the same toxic circle in the church. And I cannot find anybody that's not spinning, that's waving a freedom flag, saying, hey, I know the way out of this. I know the way to the other side. Here, let me walk you through it. So then, of course, we just amp up what we've always been doing, okay? We'll just pray harder. We'll just pray harder together. Brandon went on a 40 day fast. Okay? We've been fasting for three to seven days. All right? I can't get free from lust. Let's. That's up the ante. I'm going to fast for 40 days. We're going to read our Bible even more. We're going to go to church even more. We're going to go to conferences, we're going to go to workshops, we're going to read all the spiritual books. We're going to do all the spiritual things. And we're just going to turn it up even louder. And what ended up happening for Brandon and for our marriage is it created duality. It created almost two personalities. Here's good spiritual Brandon, who does all these good spiritual boxes. And then here's dark shadow Brandon, who's with him, behind him at all times, that's got this temptation and this lure. And some people might even see this as people might describe this as, here's Brandon and then here's his sin nature. Here's the devil. Here's a devil on his shoulder, lurking behind him. Whatever the word is that you want to call it, it created this experience where Brandon just kept stuffing that shadow behind him, trying to see if he kept doing the spiritual practices, if it would make the shadow disappear. And the shadow actually never disappeared because the shadow needed to be faced. We needed to turn the lights on so that we could see everything that was in the room.
- [16:25]
B
Yeah.
- [16:26]
A
Not turn the lights off, close the door and hope we never have to face that again.
- [16:31]
B
Yeah. It's like running as fast as you can away from something instead of facing it. You're saying, I'm. It creates this cycle where you pray to get stronger, but you never feel strong, you never feel powerful. So you pray more. And then you come back and you confess your sins to God and you're like, I'm not strong enough. I'm not strong enough. Something bizarre happened. 2019, when this all was going down, when our marriage was breaking apart. I had just stepped up to take the position as a children's director at our growing church. And then I stepped down within a month because that's when our marriage was imploding. And then we were in Oregon. We had moved from Idaho to Oregon and to be with family, and we were not in ministry. And then Covid, all that fun stuff happened and everything was closed down. Nothing was happening. We weren't attending church, and we were just working on us. And I remember a few months into that, waking up one day and realizing, wait a second, I forgot to be tempted. I'll say that again. I forgot to be tempted. Without this continual messaging of the devil being this powerful force, me needing to pray and build up my strength, build up my faith for me to be in this intergalactic, interstellar battle with the devil and trying to partner with Jesus, trying not to sin. I actually forgot that that was taking place because in my day to day experience, rebuilding my marriage, rebuilding my emotions, I realized that there wasn't a temptation. There was no temptation. The temptation that the rubber band got cut, the tension was gone, the pressure was gone to perform. There was just an. It was an invitation to explore all the parts of me instead of being like, wait a second, I don't have to grit my teeth to get through this. I don't have to commit to another four hours of prayer to get breakthrough. The bottom line of what we're sharing is the gospel isn't the excuse to ignore our pain. It's the invitation to face it. So the gospel is not there, so that you have an explanation for why you still do naughty things, for why you still lie to your spouse, for why you still mistreat people, for why you are somehow still connected to your uncle, the devil. The gospel is the good news that Jesus came to replace you, give you his spirit, his relationship with the Father, and empower you to face all the pain, all the mess that is still present in your life, and redeem it and restore it so that it looks like heaven. Now that's the good news of the gospel. It's not that we ignore our pain. It's the invitation to face it, to heal and integrate every single part of us. If your prayer and Bible reading is. Is an effort to you run away from your pain, to ignore the issues in your marriage and not face what's going on in the here and now, then it's a disservice to you. And all it's doing is creating a deeper divide in you. You're gonna have to come around and face it at one point or another. You can't just continue reading more, praying more, and fasting more. At some point, your wife needs to know the porn you looked at. At some point you got to come clean about the things you were lying about. At some point, you got to face what you needed as a child and you didn't get from your parents. Those are the conversations that bring about mature sons and daughters. It's not reciting Old Testament passages so that you feel like you check. They're not two separate things. They're one. They're one process. And we've become so accustomed to putting band aids over our problems instead of facing them head on with the reality and the awareness of Christ in us, never apart from us.
- [19:29]
A
And Brandon spent many years trying to hide behind his Bible like he was saying. And I think there are a lot of people that spend a lot of their life trying to hide behind their Bible and their disciplines, trying to hide behind the narratives. If you read the comment sections on some of our videos, there's A lot of Christians in there that want to hide behind the narratives of, well, that's just our sin nature. Well, that's just temptation. Well, I'll never be perfect. And I'm curious why we use the Bible as a band aid to keep us stuck in the loop of temptation and our sin nature. Why do we put so much focus and emphasis on temptation and absolutely little to no emphasis on the whole entire fact of the Bible, which is that Christ died and gave us new life, gave us us resurrection life, unified us to Him. We have the mind of Christ. We don't have a mind that's dissociating and fighting against ourselves. We're not at war with ourselves anymore. We've actually been made complete whole. All of this is rooted in love because of the gift of what Jesus did on the cross. Why do we focus so much on sin nature and so little on the gift of hope and love that was purchased for us on the cross? Why are we hiding behind. We don't. As a Christian church, most people in the church don't actually want to take a look at the shadows. So instead they'll just hide behind this narrative of, oh, you know what? That's just my sin nature. And you know what? If you want to keep going with that narrative, you can. You can always have a sin nature. You can always have temptation. You can always feel like you're living in lack. You can always feel like you're running away from the devil. You can always feel like bad things are going to happen to you. I'm laughing because what was that guy's story where he was like walking, walking out and a big chunk of ice fell on us?
- [21:16]
B
Yeah, he was. Opened his car door. This family we were staying with, we were speaking at church one time and he was like, lord, I hear you now. There's a big giant plow.
- [21:23]
A
As if God only speaks to us through really negative traumatic experience. Like, as if we can only learn from negative pain. Of course we do learn from pain. Of course we do learn from negative experiences. And as Christians in the church, we have this entire message of. Of suffering. We have this entire message of pain and suffering to teach us a lesson instead of this entire message of he already suffered for us, he already paid the price for us. We have everything we need right now. We are living in the abundance of Christ. We are walking in freedom because he already gave that to us. Why are we trying to re. Why are we trying to go through what he already went through? We're inflicting on ourselves suffering so that we can learn a lesson when he already inflicted the suffering upon himself and gave us new life, new abundance, freedom. That is the reality that we woke up to one day of. Oh my gosh, we can keep going with this. We can keep feeling like we gotta be tempted, we can keep feeling this and then, yeah, that'll be great because we can keep going just like we did in the first five years where Brandon keeps relapsing, Brandon keeps lying, Brandon keeps hiding, Brandon keeps saying, I'm gonna read my Bible more, I'm gonna fast more, I'm gonna wait, I'll show you. And I knew he was giving it a genuine effort. A lot of women reach out. Like, my husband's been saying this for years and years and years. And it's like, you know what? Your husband's been probably trying. I'm going to put this in quotes as hard as he can under the current belief systems and narratives that he has. And there's only so far you can go. When you have these belief systems, you can't actually step into full freedom if you believe. And if you want to chain yourself up to the belief system that you will always be tempted, that you will always have this sin nature that you're fighting against, that you will always have lust, lust and allure and attraction. If you want to cuff yourself up to that, you're not going to be able to get to the other side. If you want to uncuff yourself from those belief systems and you want to step in the freedom, hope and love of Christ, you can make it to the other side where there's ultimate freedom. To me, the bells started ringing. It's like, whoa, this actually makes complete sense. What we were living in before didn't make any sense to me. It doesn't line up. We, like use a phrase, play it all the way through. When we play it all the way through, it doesn't even make any sense. There's little to no logic there for me. And when I played all the way through of, isn't Christ the ultimate example of love and freedom? And if that's what he died to give me, why would my life not reflect that? And I'm here to say, five years into this journey, I believe that my life, our union, what we've created, our family reflects that. I said this on the first season and it always makes me teary eyed, but when we go outside, when we walk around, people notice our energy, our love, our connection between the two of us and between us, us and our four kids. Why? Because we are the resemblance of hope and love and connection. We are glowing with freedom. How many people step into a church and all we see is sick people, poor people, marriages crumbling, people with divorce rates the same as everybody else, men in addiction, women in addiction, people that are overweight and falling apart. And yet here we are, walking in this new way of thinking and there's a glow, there's a freedom, there's a hope, there's a love, there's a health and a vibrancy when you want to step into the true abundance of the message of Christ.
- [24:48]
B
What must I do then, Caitlin, to be. To have this? That's the first question that we've been trained to think. What must I do to get what you're talking about? How do I get all the goody things you've got that's good for you, but what about me? This is the cruelty of religion is because we shared our resume. You guys might. Our spiritual resume. You guys might be thinking, well, you guys are getting the rewards from all of your hard fought battles, from all your fasts, from all your prayer, from all your Bible reading. That's why your marriage is good. Now, as we said, we already debunked that we did the things that you must do that we've been told to do that would give you a good marriage when we didn't have it. So how do you give what we got from a spiritual context? You let love in. This is actually not about attaining anything. That's what we're talking about, we're speaking up about is if you make this about attaining something you don't have, you never will have it. The starting point is love for God's love, the world that he gave and then he gave you the very life and sustenance that you needed to sustain life and love in your. In your life. Find evidence for that. You are not trying to get somewhere that you are not. My children didn't wake up having to work to be our children. They are in our love to earn. Our love to earn help for me, to be proud of them. It actually, it's kind of gross language to say, hey, I'm so proud of that thing you made. It's like, like, yes, your kids need to hear pause affirmation, but like they'd rather me ask what was your favorite part about making that. Oh, I see that you, you drew this blue line. Tell me about that. They just want to know that we're close to them. So if you want to know how to get this good side of spirituality, it's actually just radical acceptance of the reality of Christ in you. The hope of glory. It's letting go and a reception of a reality that is already here. It's not the mental and spiritual ascent through rigorous practice to get somewhere that you aren't. It's the receiving of something that already is. So. So effort cannot be put into it. You know, there's so many spots in the New Testament where it talks about, you know, if this had to be about the works of the law, then Christ died for nothing. If this meant that you had to do XYZ to attain xyz, then what did Christ do? So if you want to do something really offensive, let the gospel be true. Let it be true. Let it be that good that you actually, you can't even lift a finger to say, God, look, I'm good now. He calls you good. He calls you clean. Start your life that way. Now, here's the tricky part. Part, a lot of people use this as an excuse to sin. I can't even use the words like that to ignore the impact of their actions presently. What does that mean? We aren't saying, tell your wife, look, Brandon and Caitlin said, I'm forgiven, I'm loved. We don't need to talk about the hard stuff. Again, the gospel is the invitation to face the hard stuff head on. Because if you protect and you keep secret things from your spouse that is causing pain to you and causing pain to them, you're saying that that thing is worth protecting more than your spouse. So this isn't just forgiven. I'm in love, I have love. God loves me. I don't need to talk about hard stuff. I don't need to talk about the ways I've been dishonest. That's the very empowerment to say, oh my gosh, all these things that I've been doing that I've said, that define me. I'm ready to face them head on. I'm ready to get crystal clear on my actions, the impact of my actions, because I no longer associate or align with those. So that's the reality of the gospel, is that you can face your pain, you can face your brokenness, because you don't have to climb your way out of the pit. He already climbed down to get you, and you're just, you're waking up to that goodness. There is no separation between you and God. There is no chasm that you're trying to bridge the gap between. You're not ascending a ladder. He climbed down, he came into your steps. He came into Flesh. He redeemed the flesh through the cross. And he brought. He gave you his spirit so that you could have the same relationship with the Father that he has. So what does that look like practically? It looks like facing everything that's between you and your wife and saying, wow, let's clean that up. Let's clear it up. We don't need to make. We don't need to make excuses for why we don't want to face it. Let's just face it and enjoy our relationship again.
- [28:32]
A
A lot of changes are as simple as switching your awareness. So if you want to have an awareness of lack of suffering, of temptation, of sin, of sin, nature of the pull to that demonic devil, all of that dark energy, if you want to have an awareness of all of that, you can. And what you think is what you create. So if you let your mind be. Be always aware of this belief system, then you better believe that you're going to create that in your life. You're going to create a life that matches up with that, a life that is full of temptation and sin and trials and tribulations. All of that is going to align because that's what you think, that's what you're aware of, and therefore, that is what you create. If you want to switch your awareness to the gift of the cross, cross, the abundance of Christ, the freedom that lives within you already. If you want to switch your awareness to that, then guess what? What you think about is what you create. You are going to create a life of freedom. What Brandon's describing is a coming home within yourself. How does this have to do with Christ? He died and gave you the gift of life and you've been running from it. You've been running from the embodiment of your yourself, of your own soul. You've separated yourself from who you are because you don't want to face those things anymore. And so you've hoped to just clip those parts of you and send them away. And they're following you around like a dark shadow that we've labeled as temptation. It's not temptation. It's not the devil. It's not your sin nature. It's the shadow parts of you that need to be integrated and welcomed in, looked at and then sent away fully. It's coming home within yourself so that you can see clearly, so that you can see who you are, what you've chosen to do, what's happened to you, what hasn't happened to you. You can become aware. And as soon as you become aware and you're not trying to just dismiss or dissociate or send away. When you have an awareness of what is real and when you have an awareness of the gift of abundance and freedom, you can then choose, oh, I am choosing to heal, to integrate, to develop, and to move into abundance and freedom and hope and connection and love. There's an incongruency between people, Christians who say that they embody a message of hope and love, yet have relationships that do not embody a message of hope and love. Yeah, I want to see a movement of people who embody a message of hope and love. And every relationship that they're in embodies that same hope and love. And that has been the goal and the emphasis of our union is how do we create a union that is fully alive, vibrant, connected, intimate intimacy. Into me, you see a union that has been made one, a union that now offers hope to the world, a message of true freedom. That's what happens when you come home and into your body and you have an awareness of love and freedom.
- [31:46]
B
Now, what you might be thinking, okay, I can see some of what you're talking about. I can see some of the narratives from, from the, maybe the church you've been in. Now, what, do you go rebuke your pastor? Do you go start questioning everything you can? You have to deal. You get to deal with the repercussions of that. I would ask yourself this one question as your filter to take in your current spiritual condition, your current spiritual beliefs. Is, is. Is this rooted in present hope? So what I mean by that is, is the way you approach the gospel, the way it's practiced within your spiritual community, whether that's a church, home group, people you're around, is the way we talk about Christ and the reality of Christ reserved for when we die and go to heaven one day, or are you hearing messages of present hope that impact the here and now because Christ didn't say, hey, I'm gonna. I'm gonna come die for you. It's gonna be hell on earth.
- [32:36]
A
Earth.
- [32:37]
B
The devil's going to reign, and then I'll come zap you up later. And there's a lot of people that. That's how they translate it, that's fine, if that's what you believe Christ died for. If that's, if that's the gift of eternal life for you and that's all you want, that's fine, you can turn off the podcast. But for those of you that are like, look, I want a little bit more, God's not offended with you if you want a little bit more. And so I want you to think about when you're. When you're at church, when you're reading your Bible, if you're praying. Am I rooted in a present hope? Is this message, Are the things I'm hearing rooted in reality in the here and now? Or is it just a mental concept, a construct of religion that says you can get. It's not, not you, not now. My friend Chris always says, not you, not now. Is the message saying, this isn't for you yet? You can't have the gift of eternal life yet. Well, then what are we? How much do we get and who gets to decide? We're an all or nothing type of people. So either you are fully free or you're fully bound. Either the devil has full reign over your thoughts, actions and behaviors and you have no responsibility, or Christ cured the human condition and brought his spirit to you so that you could get the same benefits Christ has. And so is this rooted in a present hope? One of the things that will shock you as you go down this process of, we'll call it spiritual development, which I don't think spiritual development is any different than emotional development. They're all intertwined and it's this concept of how intertwined everything is. There's not one moment that's separate from another. God's not out there. That when we see God as a separate entity, the very we talk about, you know, put God first, put your family second, put your work third, put your friends fourth. All these ideas, there are these mental constructs to think about. Okay, where. How do we order out God? How do we order out all the things I need to do? What if God was in every moment? It says that Christ is before all things and in him all things hold together. What if no moment could even have its existence outside of him? That's the good news, is that there's not actually some things where God is in them, some things where God is not in them, some things where you're powerful, some things where you're weak. It's actually you're powerful right now 24, 7 7. If that's the starting point, how do you want to face life? How do you want to go after your. Are you empowered to face your pain or not? How do you want to validate your wife's pain? How do you want to go after the things that are driving you too apart? What mentality is actually going to get you there? That's why we talk about this is this. It's actually cruel to say here. If we gave you on this podcast, a lot of you, I know a lot of you would take action if I said, hey, here's what I did. I fasted for 40 days. I read the New Testament every day for 30 days. Days or for that 40 days and at the end of it, Christ saved me. Go do what I did. Well, what if you're a mom nursing two children and you can't fast and you can't do it? I would just be giving you another set of Old Testament law, New Testament law that I made up so that you can be free. The gospel is it's not something you do to get saved. It's that you have been given eternal life. Now go redeem all of creation. Go be like your Father in heaven. Go see as you do. See the Father doing. Go in abundant love. We hope this episode inspired you with hope as you engage your Christian faith or what the world faith you are from. We gave a Christian perspective on today's episode why the Christian disciplines could not be saving your marriage. And maybe Christ already did. And now it's time to do the real work to do the present day work of redeeming your relationship. If you need any additional support, whether that's through my Men's Community app or a grounded intimacy program, for those of you working through addiction, you can check out the show notes and we would love to work with you further. Please subscribe to the channel and leave a review so that we can reach more couples. We look forward to seeing you next week.
- [36:18]
A
Sat.