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Walking with Christ is a lifelong journey of refinement—and marriage is often one of the primary ways God shapes us. In this season of our Husband and Wife After God devotional series, we’ve been talking a lot about purpose, unity, reconciliation, and the power of God’s design. Today, we’re leaning into a theme that touches every believer: holiness. More specifically, the sanctification that takes place within our marriages.
Colossians 2:6–7 says, “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith… abounding in thanksgiving.”
Being rooted in Christ is essential—not only for our individual faith, but for the strength and health of our marriage.
When we surrender to Christ, we are saved in a moment. Romans 10:9 reminds us that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
But sanctification—the process of becoming more like Jesus—is continual. It’s daily. It’s lifelong. And God often uses the closest relationships we have, including marriage, to draw out the impurities, attitudes, and habits that He wants to transform.
Like gold tested by fire, our faith is strengthened through trials. “The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests the hearts” (Proverbs 17:3). Marriage becomes the place where God lovingly reveals what needs to be refined.
We’ve walked through our share of refining seasons—sexual intimacy struggles early on, financial stress, friendship wounds, parenting challenges, and even simple personality clashes. None of these were easy. At the time, many of them felt like too much.
But looking back, we can see how God used every single hardship to deepen our roots in Him and strengthen our unity with one another.
Marriage exposes the parts of us we might never see otherwise. Gary Thomas calls your spouse “a mirror,” and we’ve found that to be true. Our spouse reflects both our beauty and our brokenness. When sin surfaces, we have the opportunity to respond with humility, repentance, and love.
Some of the most sanctifying tools God uses include:
Sanctification is about being set apart. In marriage, we are set apart from the world and devoted exclusively to one another—just as we are set apart for Christ.
Romans 6:22 says, “The fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.”
We grow through the daily commitment to love, forgive, serve, repent, and pursue holiness together.
Every trial becomes an invitation:
Lord, what are You trying to grow in me? How can I love better, respond better, and look more like Christ in this moment?
Our encouragement to every couple is simple:
Instead, let your roots go deeper into Christ, and allow Him to use your marriage to make you more holy, more humble, and more like Jesus every day.
Marriage After God Podcast –
embrace the refinement, embrace the sanctification that God is using your marriage to make you more holy, to make you more like His son Jesus, and let it happen. It doesn’t mean make it happen, because we’re really good at that anyway. Enjoy it when the storms have been calmed. But when they come, don’t run away. Instead,
force those roots that we talked about to go even deeper in Him.
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Marriage After God podcast. We’re your hosts. I’m Aaron Smith. And I’m Jennifer. Welcome to the show. This is week seven of the Marriage After God devotional series. So if you’ve been going since the beginning, we’re so glad to have you. If this is your first time, we just want to encourage you go back and start at the beginning. You’re going to love all the episodes leading up. have, what is it, 23 more to go on this 30 week series, but this episode is going to be on being set apart as holy.
sanctification on refinement. so thank you for joining. Before we get started, hit that like button, subscribe to our channel, wherever you like to watch or listen. That way you’re not going to miss any of the episodes. You’ll get all of them. And also, lastly, this series is based on our best-selling husband after God, wife after God, 30-day devotionals. And so if you’d like, you don’t need them, but if you’d like, it would definitely enhance this experience. Go to shop.marriageaftergod.com.
pick up your copies of these and that way you guys can personalize them. You guys will be able to sit down with each other, answer the questions, write them down in the note pages and make it more personal. So we just want to encourage you to do that. Awesome. Well, we hope all of you who are tuning in are really enjoying this marriage devotional series. We’ve tried to create it to be very dynamic with every topic. Even though it’s based on the devotional, adding a little bit more.
to it and yeah, just highlighting some of those important aspects of faith and how it plays a role in our marriage. That was our intention when we wrote Husband and Wife After God. We really wanted to show how a biblical marriage rooted in faithfulness to God and obedience to His Word can really bless and benefit a marriage in every way. It does. So in the first six episodes, we’ve covered God’s purpose for your marriage, how He designed it, our role as companions, how a husband and wife are a gift to each other.
The Power of Reconciliation, which was last episode. And now today. Now today we’re talking about holiness. Holiness being set apart in our marriage. We’re going to talk about the process of how God refines us and how marriage provides the context for him to continue that sanctification in our life. I feel like it kind of comes out in every episode a little bit of just how cool marriage is and how he uses it and how he designed it to really draw us closer to him and yeah, refine us.
And to make waves in this world, you know, when we’re doing it well. We’re going to start by reading Colossians 2, 6, and 7, and I just want to share with you guys that the scriptures that we’ve been sharing through the podcast episode series, there’s way more in the devotionals. And so at the beginning of each chapter, each day,
You’ll see a set of scriptures that you can read through and we just wanted to encourage you guys to really dive in and that’s one of the benefits of having the books that you mentioned. Go get a copy so that you can ⁓ just have even more to look through and yeah, just be encouraged by. So this first verse is Colossians 2, 6-7. says, Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
We’re going be talking about being set apart, being made holy, this thing called sanctification. And why does this matter to our marriages? ⁓ Believers, when we commit our lives to following Christ and obeying His word, ⁓ if we aren’t believing what He said, and if we aren’t living according to His ways, we need to back up. that’s a red flag. Well, it’s got to be the foundation for everything. It’s got to be foundation.
So we need to reevaluate our relationship with Christ and maybe even recommit ourselves. This is why we do this podcast. We don’t do this podcast just to have good marriages. That’s a good thing. a good marriage is It’s a benefit. It’s definitely a benefit. But our biggest heart is that everyone’s walking as they should with Christ. And there seasons that we go through as believers where we’re probably really strong and we feel really intimate and close with God.
And then there’s other seasons that we go through and things hit us and come our way that challenge our faith or we struggle. And then there’s other seasons where we have chosen to be distant. We have chosen to be far and we need to be pulled back in. We need to choose to walk faithfully with Christ and to be in the Word and be in prayer. so anyone listening right now, you could be in any one of those seasons. And we’re just wanting you to know that we’re here for you. And we want to encourage you to
do what’s necessary to remain close to God. We’ve always felt that our call and our ministry in this world is to encourage believers. Yeah. And so that’s what we’re doing. it’s hard. We know life is hard. We know there’s trials. We know there’s tribulation. We know that there’s things like doubt ⁓ or sin when we are hiding sin and we are severed in our intimacy with God and so, So to start this off because we’re going to be talking about holiness, the first thing I want to ask is
If you have not responded to Christ, if you have heard this message and you’re like, I don’t know where I stand, we want to ask you to receive him today. The Bible tells us that today is the day of salvation, that you can humble yourself before God and call out to him and confess to him. That’s Romans 10.9. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. The beginning of this, all of the things that we’re talking about starts with surrendering to Christ, receiving the free gift he offers on the cross.
that we could be saved simply by believing in the work that he did and not believing in our own work because no amount of work we do is enough. It’ll never be enough. No matter good work, no matter good thoughts, no matter anything you do, can do it. we just want to encourage you to, if you haven’t done this, confess Christ, turn to him, believe in him. Yeah, that’s great.
⁓ Going back to Colossians 2-7, I know you said that there’s nothing that we can do when it comes to salvation in Christ except for belief and confession. ⁓ It does say to be rooted and built up in Him and the requirement there is just what you’re saying is to draw close to Him and to read His Word, to examine it and to evaluate, I living this life according to my own flesh or according to His Word? And so we need to be… It’s so good for our…
souls in our flesh and our hearts to be in the Word and to daily surrender ourselves to Him and to understand what it says and then to obey it. Our life will reap the benefits, our marriages will reap the benefits, our kids will, ⁓ our community.
I love that you’re pointing that out because ⁓ it’s not works that save us, it’s Christ that saves us. But while we’re saved, there’s things that we can do as believers to be strengthened in him. I want to focus on this word in this verse. It says rooted in Christ. ⁓ When we rooted, so like a tree has roots that dig down. When we extend our roots, we become stronger, we can grow taller, we can last longer. This is the point of
roots is that the tree is healthy. Yeah, like if wind comes, if storms come, if anything comes to push it over, can stand tall. And in actuality, and this is going to what we’re talking about in being refined. And so starting, you know, you’re a believer, but there’s a process that takes place. So in the moment of salvation, you’re made right with God. But then there’s a lifetime of sanctification, of being refined as Christ makes us more like himself.
and that the Holy Spirit works in us. And so just like a tree needs wind. What’s that big building? There’s this big beautiful building in Kentucky. Oh no, Tennessee, I’m sorry. And inside of it are trees and there’s no wind that hit them. so sometimes- it’s called like the Gaylord. Yeah, I think it is. It’s a big dome and there’s a big garden inside. It’s beautiful actually. But the trees on the inside, sometimes they just fall over because there’s no root system strong enough.
In the wild, trees, they get droughts, they get times where there’s not enough water, they get wind that push them back and forth, and all of those stresses, all of those things cause the roots to go far wider and deeper. And that’s what happens to the believer. When we’re rooted in Christ, we have our roots in Him. The hardships in life, the things that come at us causes those roots to go deeper if we’re rooted in Christ.
I also love that picture because roots are a means to nutrients. Pulling nutrients in. Yeah. And you guys know this, you listening, like when we feel dried up and starving, it’s because we haven’t nourished ourselves. Like we need- We’re not rooted. We’re not rooted. And I’m talking spiritually, like we need to be rooted in Christ so that we feel peace, we feel confidence, we feel security, we feel loved, we feel all the things that we need to-
fulfilled so that we can then extend ourselves out to others. And I think that this is a really good picture for the needs that a human being has to be rooted in Christ. where we get our nutrients. What happens when just you like horticulture? Do you like plants? You buy bare root plants all the time? when you’re moving up rooting a plant, because we’ll plant something somewhere and be like, actually, I don’t like it there. Let’s move it over here. What do you have to make sure is taking happening with the roots?
Well, one thing is I amend the soil that where it’s going into and just making sure that it has everything that needs. If I’m, you have to be really careful of roots that you’re transplanting because yeah. And then ⁓ if, if I’m taking something out of a pot, I have to kind of break it up a little bit and then make sure they can move. But the point is, that if you just lift that up and those roots get damaged, if they get dry, plant’s dead. There is no bringing it back. And so.
Just like a tree needs drought, wind to grow taller and stronger, it needs these things, but it still needs the nutrients, needs the ground secure around it. All of this picture shows what it means to be rooted in Christ. But I want to talk about the stresses, the drought, the wind that causes those roots to go deeper, that causes those roots to go wider. And God has a similar refining process, strengthening process.
for us, just like trees have it. 1 Peter 1.7 it says, So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Yeah, before we talk about those stresses, ⁓ gold is another process that this imagery lends itself to, this understanding of refinement ⁓ in that
It needs to be heated under stress or those extreme temperatures, all those impurities to rise to the surface and then be removed. that’s repeated, you know, until the gold is pure. I’m sure you guys have heard this analogy. ⁓ And then Proverbs 17.3 says, the crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold and the Lord tests the hearts. So he provides the stress, like he allows the things around us to ⁓
be a means to draw out a crucible, the impurities and the ways that we need him. Sometimes our marriages are that crucible. Totally. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about is, is in this life, God has a purpose. He wants to use us, but he also wants to change us. He wants to transform us into the likeness of a son. And he does that through many means. Why don’t you share personally just some of the stresses or the things that our marriage has been through?
Um, some of those fires that we’ve been through, mean, we’ll, and we will go through more, but you know, we’ve had in the early days, sexual intimacy issues. Like that was a, that was a big deal. was hard for us. would say at different seasons throughout actually. Yeah. It wasn’t just fixed one time. Like it’s been a, it’s been a lifelong journey with each other of learning that part of our marriage and finding fulfillment in it and not becoming bitter and angry. Um, but that was a.
Early on if you know our story and we’ve talked about it a lot, was something that God used. We look back and we’re like, oh God was using that to get a hold of our hearts in many different ways. In the midst of it, we felt like crumbling. felt like too hot of a flame. Well sometimes, yeah, feels like overwhelming. Financial struggles. These are the kinds of things that also why marriages get divorced. Why they break up. They deal with these very normal struggles. These very normal refinement processes.
Financial stories, not having enough, like having a goal in mind and not being able to get to it or not being on the same page in the way that your actions prove what you’ve talked about. Yeah. Like budgeting and just yeah, security and finances. ⁓ Friendship struggles, ⁓ parent struggles. I feel like that was a big one. Betrayals. Those hurt. And there’s a lot of people listening right now that probably are in the midst of this or still deal with these types of struggles that they hurt so deeply.
But they’re not – these things that take place are going to happen. It’s not like God’s like, haha, I’m going to do this to you. No, these things are going to happen because there’s sin in the world. But when we’re rooted in Christ, these things become means of refinement. That it pushes us to Christ, that we need to go deeper into him and be like, I need restoration. I need healing from these things. I need help in my mental and my heart and my emotional and my spiritual.
Yeah, when we think about, you know the roles of the triune God. So there’s God who’s the creator and our father. then there’s Jesus who came as fully God, fully man and provided the atonement we needed to be reconciled to God. Then there’s the work of the Holy Spirit and one of the jobs of the Holy Spirit is to sanctify the believer. And that’s why we’re talking about this today. You had mentioned being set apart from the world. We’re set apart
⁓ So being set apart is what holiness is and so the Holy Spirit has work in us when He convicts us and He draws to remembrance what the Scriptures has said and convicts our hearts of sin and righteousness and judgment. draws us to repentance first to God and then in marriage if we’ve offended each other or we need to confess where we’re at with each other, yeah. And like you said being set apart, that’s what
That’s what sanctification is, holiness. To be holy means to be set apart. You’re not just mixed in with everything else. You are different and set apart and ⁓ put in a special place. That’s the idea of being made holy. And the Holy Spirit sanctifying us is doing this, is making us holy, transforming us into the image of His Son, to be like God. Not that we can be God, but He’s definitely drawing us in that direction and wants us to be like Him.
in our holiness. And the Holy Spirit is doing that. And He uses our marriage to do it. He uses your spouse to do He our kids to do it. He uses our neighbors to do it. He uses our jobs to do it. And like we said, if you’re rooted in Christ, if your roots are in Him, you’re not going to just fall over. He’s going to sustain you so that you can be transformed. But what you will be forced to do is go deeper. You’ll be forced to hold on to the foundation more, the earth, which is Christ.
the thing that the substrate that we’re in, which is Him, and we’re going to want to grip it more and get more of Him and get and wrap more around Him. And that’s what He wants from us is to do that with Him is to abide in Him in that way. You’re talking about sanctification. So I just want to read this verse, Romans 6 22. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end eternal.
So this work of sanctification is a ⁓ journey and experience that we as believers will experience until eternal life. I know that I’ve asked you this question, like, why can’t I just be changed in an instant? Which we are when we believe in Christ because we are changed and we’re made new. But this work of sanctification is continual. And it’s because we are sinners and we continue to sin. We continue to make those choices that…
⁓ go against God’s Word. And even though this verse talks about being set free from sin, yes, we are set free. We’re no longer bound. We aren’t in a cage. We aren’t forced to sin. We’re just making those choices out of foolishness. But ⁓ I love this. The fruit that you get leads to sanctification and it’s an eternal life. Yes, although we’re saved by grace, we’re still in the flesh, which battles the spirit. The Bible tells us this, that our flesh battles the spirit and the spirit battles the flesh.
The one that we abide with is going to win. that’s why Christ is constantly, the Holy Spirit is constantly reminding us, keep in step with me, keep in step with me because I am in Christ, I follow Christ. And so we’re supposed to do that. And so you said being changed in an instant, like, why can’t I just be changed right now? What’s beautiful is we actually will. It says in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, we will be transformed. That our mortal bodies will be put off and we will put on immortality.
The problem is we’re still in this fleshly body that has fleshly cravings and desires, which is why there’s this constant battle with the Spirit. But God and Holy Spirit and Christ, they’re helping us keep in step with Him, transform it, sanctifying us, refining us, drawing to the surface the parts of us that God’s like, want to change that. I want to work on that. I to cut that out of there. What’s important about our response when he
draws those impurities to the surface and we recognize our sin. What should our response be? Repentance? It’s saying, I don’t want that. I want what Christ wants. Being changed, being transformed, ⁓ having the humility to allow God to mold us. Saying, make me Lord into what you want. Change me. Take the things that are not of you as David would say. Seek in me and see if there be any wicked way in me. Like find it. Take it. I don’t want it.
I love so much the picture of marriage and how God designed it to reflect what he’s doing and like every aspect of what he’s doing. So this idea of sanctification plays a role in marriage when when you got married, you were set apart. You’re no longer available to the world. You are exclusively your spouses. And so there’s this moment that takes place where you’re set apart. But then there’s the journey of marriage and there’s that everyday ⁓ continual commitment.
to being exclusive to your spouse and learning how to be married. So it’s choosing unity over selfishness. It’s choosing, ⁓ you know, to put the interest of others above your own and all these ways of learning how to be married, learning how to grow in your own role as a husband or a wife. ⁓ And that is a process of transformation. Like who I am today as a wife is much different than who I was as a wife on day one. So I love that. Yeah. So just like the spiritual, spiritual sanctification, ⁓
is both immediate and continual. So like when you come to Christ, know, so if you just, you know, ask Christ into your heart and you believed in him in this episode, because we just talked about it, you’re immediately sanctified. You’re set apart. You’re made holy. You’re filled with the Holy Spirit, which is amazing. But it’s also a continual event that lasts the entire life of a believer. Like every day, God’s drawing us. God’s working in us, changing us, that the Holy Spirit is
transforming us from the inside out. It’s a perpetual pursuit of allowing his Holy Spirit to work in us and to respond likewise in marriage. It’s a perpetual pursuit of loving one another and choosing each other over everything. So when you got married, you were immediately made one. Like you that covenant, like you are one new thing. But it’s also and it’s it’s media, but it’s also a perpetual pursuit.
So not only on that moment when you said, I do, where you made one with your spouse. It’s literally every day saying, I do. But then it’s an everyday event of we’re going to continue. Last episode was about reconciliation to fight for that unity that we’re continuing to be united and continuing to be set apart for each other. So it happened on day one and it’s happening every day since. That’s salvation made right on day one.
And then God sanctifying you through the Holy Spirit ever since. Yeah. And the things that we experience in marriage, like we had talked about some of those hardships that we’ve endured throughout our marriage. And anyone listening can probably think of a quick list of things that you have endured through marriage. Those are opportunities and ⁓ it’s context for what God can do through those things. you let him, marriage becomes a powerful tool for refinement.
He’s using the heat of your two individual natures to draw to the surface. And circumstances, yeah. The sin in our life. In the situation of gold, it’s called dross. The impurities that shouldn’t be there get drawn to the surface and the Holy Spirit, when you let them, scrapes it off gently. And then you, ⁓ like today we’re better than we were five years ago. When I say better, I don’t mean more sinless, but yes, in various ways we sin less.
and we wrong each other less and we’re quicker to forgive, quicker to reconcile, more in love today than we were last year, the year before that. It’s something that we’re moving toward constantly. so. ⁓ Gary Thomas, we’ve shared about him before. He wrote an amazing book called Sacred Marriage. And if you have time, we highly encourage you guys to read it. Great book. He talks about how your spouse is like a mirror. And I love his analogy because it gives you an honest reflection of yourself, but
separately your sin. And when I think back to the beginning of our marriage, I shared this last episode too, but I had this perception of myself and then I get married and I’m like, wait a minute, why is all of this happening? Something’s wrong with you. Something’s wrong with you because I’m not okay. But really it was me being confronted with my own sin and sin in my heart that was coming out because we’re now two becoming one.
and it happened immediately, but then it’s process of me understanding what that actually means. so your spouse becomes a reflection of the sin in your life because if I sin and I hurt you, I see it. And that is painful. I’m probably going to show it to you. Yeah, you’re going to be hurt or offended or angry or whatever. so when we say that marriage is a tool or the context of how God can drop these impurities in us, it’s because
we have a human being as a part of our unity that is showing us how our sin hurts and being confronted by it. And so then we get the chance to respond. Are we going to be humble and say, ⁓ my gosh, I’m so sorry? Or are we going to be prideful and say, well, you shouldn’t be hurt right now? You know what I mean? We have the opportunity. And I think that the encouragement here is that we would walk in humility. And the only way we know how to do that is if we are in God’s word and understand.
that Christ himself walked in humility for us. Talking about the mirror analogy, I think a lot of people listening and even you and I would not maybe say that we’re self-righteous. But self-righteousness is a natural state for most people, for all people except for Christ. ⁓ Because we have ⁓ a very hard time having a true assessment of ourselves.
Like you said, like I thought I was pretty good and I it was okay. And you know, when I sin, I will often, I will lessen the weight of that sin. But when you sin, I’ll be like, yeah, that’s big and heavy and you shouldn’t do that. Minimizing and maximizing. Who did what? It’s essentially self-righteousness. My evaluation of myself, I’m going to elevate myself and I’m going to lower you. And it’s usually other people that give us a better assessment of who we are.
best person is going to be your spouse. And we don’t like that. We don’t like when our spouse gives us their assessment of us because it doesn’t match my assessment. When you say this about me, that’s not how I see myself. And it’s something that God uses to to burn away that self-righteousness. And we know it’s not easy. I’m just thinking as you’re talking, I’m like, there’s been times where those confrontations have come and I’ve expressed to you or you’ve expressed to me that honest evaluation and our response is quite defensive.
And so I think that it’s a matter of just ⁓ allowing each other that safe space of sharing, hey, you really hurt me when you did this or hey, when you’re acting like that, you know, and really paying attention and allowing ourselves to, allowing our spouse to have that input in our lives and share that feedback with us without pride getting in the way, without frustrations stirring in us. We can be good listeners and we can allow that to play a role in
then what do we do? We go back to God, hey, in our prayer life, God, my spouse said this, is that really how I am? Because if we ignore that, it’s just going to build up in bitterness or have, you know, those deep roots of offense and hurt versus using it to refine us. So essentially what we’re getting at is look at your marriage for what it is. Not only is it your partner in life, your lover, but also someone who God is going to use to refine.
and to make you more holy and more set apart. Often this takes a lot. I mean, it takes your whole life. But the biggest chunk of it is in the first handful of years. This is why a lot of marriages don’t make it past three, five, seven years. Because you get confronted with so many things in your flesh so quickly in those handful of years. us, it was very quickly. That’s what I was going say. Because we started out our marriage. We compressed our first.
three years into four months. Erin and were missionaries. We’ve shared our story on here before but we started out our marriage as missionaries in Africa and in Zambia particularly and yeah, we lived in a tent for the first… It was a four-man tent is what they call it. It’s supposed to fit four people but when it says four people, that means four people shoulder to shoulder laying down. So when we would sleep in there, it barely fit us and then we would have to all of our stuff and we’d have to put it outside the because it didn’t fit in there with us.
We’ll say it was close quarters. was very uncomfortable. was always dirty and hot. And you know, we were just pushed beyond our limits a little bit for being newlyweds, but I don’t regret what we endured. Although in the moment it was, it was difficult and challenging. ⁓ the reason we say that all that time was compressed is because a lot of marriages, they get married, they have their honeymoon, maybe a week, maybe less, maybe a little bit more, but then, then they go to normal life. And you, in reality you spend.
handful of hours a day with each other. And that’s why it takes so many years to like get confronted with so many things where in four months we were spending every hour with each other in a little tent in hard circumstances, hungry often, dirty, working, seeing spiritual things taking place and we were being confronted very quickly with tons of selfishness. I think what I learned during that season ⁓
especially like in hindsight, just looking back and evaluating it is that we learned that we ourselves had a lot of room to grow in understanding how to be married. And also that when a marriage is seeking to do something for the kingdom of God, I mean, the enemy does not like it. And so we felt that that fire come against us as well. And that was really hard to persevere through. But I think that
when we understand that God is for us and he is for our marriage, that we rely on his truth, not our own, to sustain us. And that goes back to being rooted in Christ. So time is one way God – the more time you spend with your spouse, the longer you’re with them, the more you’re going to be confronted with these things. Another thing that has been really refining for us and if you’re in the same place, you know exactly how refining it could be, becoming parents.
Yes. It’s another way God uses our marriage and our coming together in unity and brings us children which are a blessing. But it’s also such an awesome tool. That whole verse about him testing us. Yes. It’s like, oh, I thought I was doing great. Now I realize how selfish I still am. How easily offended I could be and how impatient I can be and all these things. I was talking to Edith this morning about love.
and just the definition that the Bible gives us of love and I’m like, man, having children, yes, I love them but you’re challenged in what it means to love every second of the day. Are you going to be patient when – like what just happened recently? It happens and you get a bunch of detergent dumped in your car. Things happen but you get tested in your patience and I get reminded that I still need Jesus because it’s hard being patient in those moments.
Another context or tool that God uses to test our hearts is through community or friendship, the people in our life, the people that are around us and just our response to them, ⁓ cause and reaction and relationship. Things happen, things are going to happen. Jesus said this, that we’re gonna encounter tribulation in this world, but in Him we can have peace. So although it can be painful to endure through these relational circumstances, through marriage, parenting and friends, ⁓ it’s worth it.
It’s worth it to experience and go through and allow the hardships of it to transform us if we’re surrendering to it all in Christ. If we’re walking around in pride and we’re thinking that we’re wonderful human beings, which maybe we are wonderful, but we’re definitely not perfect. Well, if we keep fighting it and we say things like, I don’t deserve what’s happening right now or this is not for everyone else is the problem. That’s not healthy and that’s not going to help you thrive and…
really understand this process of holiness that God is walking us through. So the main thing that we’re trying to get at is embrace the refinement, embrace the sanctification that God is using your marriage to make you more holy, to make you more like His son Jesus, and let it happen. It doesn’t mean make it happen, because we’re really good at that anyway. Enjoy it when the storms have been calmed. But when they come, don’t run away. Instead,
force those roots that we talked about to go even deeper in Him. So, okay, Christ, what do I need to learn? What needs changed? What needs refined in me? Well, hopefully it was a good reminder for all of you today or something new for you who took on Aaron’s ⁓ insistent ⁓ urgency to be a believer in Christ. But just to be reminded that we are constantly being sanctified and set apart for Him and in Him.
We end every episode with a quote from our book, Marriage After God. And so we just wanted to share this. marriage after God is one that declares all that the Lord has spoken, we will do, which is from Exodus 19. A marriage after God is not only interested in serving God through extraordinary work, a marriage after God is interested in living out a biblical marriage. Amen. Amen. Questions. So we, at the end of our episodes, we’re doing questions and these questions are coming from our devotionals, husband after God and wife after God.
And so what transformations are you currently experiencing as a Christian or a spouse? I love this one. I love this question. You can find it in the devotionals. And I think that it’s good for all of us, not just Erin and I answering, but for you listening ⁓ to take honest evaluations of where we’ve been, where we’re at. And so this is a good question. ⁓ Now to dodge the question. I think currently I am ⁓
I kind of want to go towards parenting because you brought that up, but you had mentioned patience. And I think that being a homeschool mom of a handful of kids, patience is required of me every day. And I think that I am learning how to be a patient mom, but also how to press in as a mom and how to engage with my kids in a personal way to each of them. Like they’re not just all one big clump going through school and life together, that they’re individuals and that they
will all one day have an individual relationship with Christ and that you and I, get to participate in leading them to understand that. And so, yeah, I feel like there’s been this transformation in my mindset as a parent and the purpose that we have in our children’s lives. I think for me, I’ve been… There was a question that I asked when we went to a worship night the other day and I was wondering if we are…
actively showing our adoration and the love of God in our home. I know that sounds weird. We love God. We teach our kids the Bible. We love to remind them of what the truth is in the word. But so much of life can be so sometimes mechanical. like, yeah, we’re doing the right things. Trying to check that off box. And then I just was thinking, was like, man, but how often are we just do our kids see how much we love God or how much God loves them? And so
Something I was like just wanting to pray about and ask God to keep continue to show me like help me show My love for you in our home and my adoration for you Another one I was just thinking of as you were talking because I wanted to relate to marriage since it’s a marriage podcast I feel like I’ve grown in the last year in a transforming way when it comes to Bring things to you before answering. So like I know that’s kind of vague but
if there is a question that pops up, an event that’s coming up, instead of just responding to my girlfriends as ⁓ a, I’m in, I’m gonna do this, coming to you and submitting it to you and saying, hey, what do you think about this? Hey, what are your thoughts? can I, not that, I’m not saying that I need your permission because I know I’m an adult, but we are one. And so I think that I’ve grown in my understanding of how to ⁓ just present things to you and be on the same page.
before answering others and letting our answer be ours and not just mine. I would say it’s less about getting permission. It’s more about wanting to be on the same page. Yeah. And having a respect there of you even knowing about the plans that I’m making or the things that I’m committing to. I like that. Last question. How can you respond to your spouse differently knowing that the trials you face together have the potential to produce transformation in your marriage?
How I would answer this is that for a long time I was very resistant to hardships, trials, conflict, things that come in every- likes them. I know. I feel so uncomfortable. to be able to respond differently to your spouse, has to be an accepting of it and a perspective shift of like, okay, there’s this really hard thing, but instead of taking it personal or-
saying woe is me. Fighting against it. Fighting against those feelings to say, but what is here that we can learn from? I have a friend that’s really good at this, going through a hard thing and it’s like their first response is, well, I know God has something in it for me and that’s my question to him. What is it? And I’m like, I want to be more like you. Can I just agree with you on that one? That’s my answer. I agree with I you said disagree with you. I’m like, wait, what? Just agree. I think that’s true. Is being able to see the hardships in life, the trials in life.
As the Bible says, rejoice, you know, in the trials, like these things, the tribulations that will come and say, okay, Lord, what do you have for me in this? What are you trying to change in me? What perspective shifts do I need to have? ⁓ What rejoicing needs to take place? Cool. I don’t know why just thought about jiu-jitsu because I just kind of started back up after having the baby. Because it’s on your mind. It’s on my mind. But I was just thinking about how when you go and you roll, you get usually bruised.
But those bruises don’t keep you from going back. If you haven’t noticed on my face, this is Jiu-Jitsu. He’s got like a scratch on his forehead and stuff. But those things aren’t going to keep you from going again and learning new technique. Nope. You’re going to jump back Well, it depends on how bad the injury is. But I see what you’re saying. The bumps and bruises of life shouldn’t stop us. Those things are meant to make us stronger.
Okay, so here’s the call to action, the encouragement this week that we want you guys to work on. You know, we all have a wedding ring or so, you know, some people tattoo or have different versions of this, but we want to encourage you guys to let your wedding ring or your ring finger ⁓ be a reminder to you of your unending relationship with your spouse and your love for them and also your relationship with Christ.
And let it be a reminder to pray for your spouse, for yourself too. Um, if there’s needs to be a perspective shift there or an encouragement in your way of thinking, um, every time you look down at your hand this week, just, just be reminded of who your spouse is and that you guys are one. that continual process of going around and around being sanctified, the gold being refined over and over and over again, heated as the imperatives come to the surface. So let me pray for us as we close.
Lord, thank you so much for giving us your Holy Spirit that when we believe in your Son Jesus, when we ⁓ put our faith in his work on the cross, Lord, that ⁓ you forgive us and that we’re saved in that moment. That you give us your Spirit to work in us, to transform us, to change us, to become more like Jesus. And I just pray, Lord, that in our marriages, we’d allow you to work in us. That when we bump up against our spouse, that our sin bumps against their sin, Lord, that you would
use our marriage to draw that stuff out and to sanctify us and to set us apart in this life, in this world and God, that we would teach this to our children, that they too can see the hardships, the struggles, the relational issues as opportunities to be refined and transformed. And so I just pray for all of those listening, Lord, that you’d give them peace and also just remind them in all these hard situations in their marriages that their spouse is not their enemy.
and God, that you desire to use their spouse and their marriage to refine them and to make them more holy and more set apart. And in doing this, as we surrender, as we abide in Christ, as we dig those roots deep and around Christ, Lord, that we can stand stronger and taller and grow. And so we thank you for that. In Jesus’ name, amen. Amen. Thank you so much for joining us on week seven of the Marriage After God devotional series. We look forward to having you next episode.
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Walking with Christ is a lifelong journey of refinement—and marriage is often one of the primary ways God shapes us. In this season of our Husband and Wife After God devotional series, we’ve been talking a lot about purpose, unity, reconciliation, and the power of God’s design. Today, we’re leaning into a theme that touches every believer: holiness. More specifically, the sanctification that takes place within our marriages.
Colossians 2:6–7 says, “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith… abounding in thanksgiving.”
Being rooted in Christ is essential—not only for our individual faith, but for the strength and health of our marriage.
When we surrender to Christ, we are saved in a moment. Romans 10:9 reminds us that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
But sanctification—the process of becoming more like Jesus—is continual. It’s daily. It’s lifelong. And God often uses the closest relationships we have, including marriage, to draw out the impurities, attitudes, and habits that He wants to transform.
Like gold tested by fire, our faith is strengthened through trials. “The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests the hearts” (Proverbs 17:3). Marriage becomes the place where God lovingly reveals what needs to be refined.
We’ve walked through our share of refining seasons—sexual intimacy struggles early on, financial stress, friendship wounds, parenting challenges, and even simple personality clashes. None of these were easy. At the time, many of them felt like too much.
But looking back, we can see how God used every single hardship to deepen our roots in Him and strengthen our unity with one another.
Marriage exposes the parts of us we might never see otherwise. Gary Thomas calls your spouse “a mirror,” and we’ve found that to be true. Our spouse reflects both our beauty and our brokenness. When sin surfaces, we have the opportunity to respond with humility, repentance, and love.
Some of the most sanctifying tools God uses include:
- Trials and conflict that bring sin to the surface.
- Parenting, which reveals our impatience, pride, and selfishness.
- Friendships and community, which test our ability to forgive and lean on grace.
- Everyday interactions, where we practice choosing unity over self-interest.
Set Apart—For God and for Each Other
Sanctification is about being set apart. In marriage, we are set apart from the world and devoted exclusively to one another—just as we are set apart for Christ.
Romans 6:22 says, “The fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.”
We grow through the daily commitment to love, forgive, serve, repent, and pursue holiness together.
Every trial becomes an invitation:
Lord, what are You trying to grow in me? How can I love better, respond better, and look more like Christ in this moment?
Our encouragement to every couple is simple:
- Don’t run from the refining.
- Don’t fear the moments that reveal your sin.
- Don’t see your spouse as the enemy.
Instead, let your roots go deeper into Christ, and allow Him to use your marriage to make you more holy, more humble, and more like Jesus every day.
READ TRANSCRIPT
Marriage After God Podcast –
embrace the refinement, embrace the sanctification that God is using your marriage to make you more holy, to make you more like His son Jesus, and let it happen. It doesn’t mean make it happen, because we’re really good at that anyway. Enjoy it when the storms have been calmed. But when they come, don’t run away. Instead,
force those roots that we talked about to go even deeper in Him.
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Marriage After God podcast. We’re your hosts. I’m Aaron Smith. And I’m Jennifer. Welcome to the show. This is week seven of the Marriage After God devotional series. So if you’ve been going since the beginning, we’re so glad to have you. If this is your first time, we just want to encourage you go back and start at the beginning. You’re going to love all the episodes leading up. have, what is it, 23 more to go on this 30 week series, but this episode is going to be on being set apart as holy.
sanctification on refinement. so thank you for joining. Before we get started, hit that like button, subscribe to our channel, wherever you like to watch or listen. That way you’re not going to miss any of the episodes. You’ll get all of them. And also, lastly, this series is based on our best-selling husband after God, wife after God, 30-day devotionals. And so if you’d like, you don’t need them, but if you’d like, it would definitely enhance this experience. Go to shop.marriageaftergod.com.
pick up your copies of these and that way you guys can personalize them. You guys will be able to sit down with each other, answer the questions, write them down in the note pages and make it more personal. So we just want to encourage you to do that. Awesome. Well, we hope all of you who are tuning in are really enjoying this marriage devotional series. We’ve tried to create it to be very dynamic with every topic. Even though it’s based on the devotional, adding a little bit more.
to it and yeah, just highlighting some of those important aspects of faith and how it plays a role in our marriage. That was our intention when we wrote Husband and Wife After God. We really wanted to show how a biblical marriage rooted in faithfulness to God and obedience to His Word can really bless and benefit a marriage in every way. It does. So in the first six episodes, we’ve covered God’s purpose for your marriage, how He designed it, our role as companions, how a husband and wife are a gift to each other.
The Power of Reconciliation, which was last episode. And now today. Now today we’re talking about holiness. Holiness being set apart in our marriage. We’re going to talk about the process of how God refines us and how marriage provides the context for him to continue that sanctification in our life. I feel like it kind of comes out in every episode a little bit of just how cool marriage is and how he uses it and how he designed it to really draw us closer to him and yeah, refine us.
And to make waves in this world, you know, when we’re doing it well. We’re going to start by reading Colossians 2, 6, and 7, and I just want to share with you guys that the scriptures that we’ve been sharing through the podcast episode series, there’s way more in the devotionals. And so at the beginning of each chapter, each day,
You’ll see a set of scriptures that you can read through and we just wanted to encourage you guys to really dive in and that’s one of the benefits of having the books that you mentioned. Go get a copy so that you can ⁓ just have even more to look through and yeah, just be encouraged by. So this first verse is Colossians 2, 6-7. says, Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
We’re going be talking about being set apart, being made holy, this thing called sanctification. And why does this matter to our marriages? ⁓ Believers, when we commit our lives to following Christ and obeying His word, ⁓ if we aren’t believing what He said, and if we aren’t living according to His ways, we need to back up. that’s a red flag. Well, it’s got to be the foundation for everything. It’s got to be foundation.
So we need to reevaluate our relationship with Christ and maybe even recommit ourselves. This is why we do this podcast. We don’t do this podcast just to have good marriages. That’s a good thing. a good marriage is It’s a benefit. It’s definitely a benefit. But our biggest heart is that everyone’s walking as they should with Christ. And there seasons that we go through as believers where we’re probably really strong and we feel really intimate and close with God.
And then there’s other seasons that we go through and things hit us and come our way that challenge our faith or we struggle. And then there’s other seasons where we have chosen to be distant. We have chosen to be far and we need to be pulled back in. We need to choose to walk faithfully with Christ and to be in the Word and be in prayer. so anyone listening right now, you could be in any one of those seasons. And we’re just wanting you to know that we’re here for you. And we want to encourage you to
do what’s necessary to remain close to God. We’ve always felt that our call and our ministry in this world is to encourage believers. Yeah. And so that’s what we’re doing. it’s hard. We know life is hard. We know there’s trials. We know there’s tribulation. We know that there’s things like doubt ⁓ or sin when we are hiding sin and we are severed in our intimacy with God and so, So to start this off because we’re going to be talking about holiness, the first thing I want to ask is
If you have not responded to Christ, if you have heard this message and you’re like, I don’t know where I stand, we want to ask you to receive him today. The Bible tells us that today is the day of salvation, that you can humble yourself before God and call out to him and confess to him. That’s Romans 10.9. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. The beginning of this, all of the things that we’re talking about starts with surrendering to Christ, receiving the free gift he offers on the cross.
that we could be saved simply by believing in the work that he did and not believing in our own work because no amount of work we do is enough. It’ll never be enough. No matter good work, no matter good thoughts, no matter anything you do, can do it. we just want to encourage you to, if you haven’t done this, confess Christ, turn to him, believe in him. Yeah, that’s great.
⁓ Going back to Colossians 2-7, I know you said that there’s nothing that we can do when it comes to salvation in Christ except for belief and confession. ⁓ It does say to be rooted and built up in Him and the requirement there is just what you’re saying is to draw close to Him and to read His Word, to examine it and to evaluate, I living this life according to my own flesh or according to His Word? And so we need to be… It’s so good for our…
souls in our flesh and our hearts to be in the Word and to daily surrender ourselves to Him and to understand what it says and then to obey it. Our life will reap the benefits, our marriages will reap the benefits, our kids will, ⁓ our community.
I love that you’re pointing that out because ⁓ it’s not works that save us, it’s Christ that saves us. But while we’re saved, there’s things that we can do as believers to be strengthened in him. I want to focus on this word in this verse. It says rooted in Christ. ⁓ When we rooted, so like a tree has roots that dig down. When we extend our roots, we become stronger, we can grow taller, we can last longer. This is the point of
roots is that the tree is healthy. Yeah, like if wind comes, if storms come, if anything comes to push it over, can stand tall. And in actuality, and this is going to what we’re talking about in being refined. And so starting, you know, you’re a believer, but there’s a process that takes place. So in the moment of salvation, you’re made right with God. But then there’s a lifetime of sanctification, of being refined as Christ makes us more like himself.
and that the Holy Spirit works in us. And so just like a tree needs wind. What’s that big building? There’s this big beautiful building in Kentucky. Oh no, Tennessee, I’m sorry. And inside of it are trees and there’s no wind that hit them. so sometimes- it’s called like the Gaylord. Yeah, I think it is. It’s a big dome and there’s a big garden inside. It’s beautiful actually. But the trees on the inside, sometimes they just fall over because there’s no root system strong enough.
In the wild, trees, they get droughts, they get times where there’s not enough water, they get wind that push them back and forth, and all of those stresses, all of those things cause the roots to go far wider and deeper. And that’s what happens to the believer. When we’re rooted in Christ, we have our roots in Him. The hardships in life, the things that come at us causes those roots to go deeper if we’re rooted in Christ.
I also love that picture because roots are a means to nutrients. Pulling nutrients in. Yeah. And you guys know this, you listening, like when we feel dried up and starving, it’s because we haven’t nourished ourselves. Like we need- We’re not rooted. We’re not rooted. And I’m talking spiritually, like we need to be rooted in Christ so that we feel peace, we feel confidence, we feel security, we feel loved, we feel all the things that we need to-
fulfilled so that we can then extend ourselves out to others. And I think that this is a really good picture for the needs that a human being has to be rooted in Christ. where we get our nutrients. What happens when just you like horticulture? Do you like plants? You buy bare root plants all the time? when you’re moving up rooting a plant, because we’ll plant something somewhere and be like, actually, I don’t like it there. Let’s move it over here. What do you have to make sure is taking happening with the roots?
Well, one thing is I amend the soil that where it’s going into and just making sure that it has everything that needs. If I’m, you have to be really careful of roots that you’re transplanting because yeah. And then ⁓ if, if I’m taking something out of a pot, I have to kind of break it up a little bit and then make sure they can move. But the point is, that if you just lift that up and those roots get damaged, if they get dry, plant’s dead. There is no bringing it back. And so.
Just like a tree needs drought, wind to grow taller and stronger, it needs these things, but it still needs the nutrients, needs the ground secure around it. All of this picture shows what it means to be rooted in Christ. But I want to talk about the stresses, the drought, the wind that causes those roots to go deeper, that causes those roots to go wider. And God has a similar refining process, strengthening process.
for us, just like trees have it. 1 Peter 1.7 it says, So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Yeah, before we talk about those stresses, ⁓ gold is another process that this imagery lends itself to, this understanding of refinement ⁓ in that
It needs to be heated under stress or those extreme temperatures, all those impurities to rise to the surface and then be removed. that’s repeated, you know, until the gold is pure. I’m sure you guys have heard this analogy. ⁓ And then Proverbs 17.3 says, the crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold and the Lord tests the hearts. So he provides the stress, like he allows the things around us to ⁓
be a means to draw out a crucible, the impurities and the ways that we need him. Sometimes our marriages are that crucible. Totally. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about is, is in this life, God has a purpose. He wants to use us, but he also wants to change us. He wants to transform us into the likeness of a son. And he does that through many means. Why don’t you share personally just some of the stresses or the things that our marriage has been through?
Um, some of those fires that we’ve been through, mean, we’ll, and we will go through more, but you know, we’ve had in the early days, sexual intimacy issues. Like that was a, that was a big deal. was hard for us. would say at different seasons throughout actually. Yeah. It wasn’t just fixed one time. Like it’s been a, it’s been a lifelong journey with each other of learning that part of our marriage and finding fulfillment in it and not becoming bitter and angry. Um, but that was a.
Early on if you know our story and we’ve talked about it a lot, was something that God used. We look back and we’re like, oh God was using that to get a hold of our hearts in many different ways. In the midst of it, we felt like crumbling. felt like too hot of a flame. Well sometimes, yeah, feels like overwhelming. Financial struggles. These are the kinds of things that also why marriages get divorced. Why they break up. They deal with these very normal struggles. These very normal refinement processes.
Financial stories, not having enough, like having a goal in mind and not being able to get to it or not being on the same page in the way that your actions prove what you’ve talked about. Yeah. Like budgeting and just yeah, security and finances. ⁓ Friendship struggles, ⁓ parent struggles. I feel like that was a big one. Betrayals. Those hurt. And there’s a lot of people listening right now that probably are in the midst of this or still deal with these types of struggles that they hurt so deeply.
But they’re not – these things that take place are going to happen. It’s not like God’s like, haha, I’m going to do this to you. No, these things are going to happen because there’s sin in the world. But when we’re rooted in Christ, these things become means of refinement. That it pushes us to Christ, that we need to go deeper into him and be like, I need restoration. I need healing from these things. I need help in my mental and my heart and my emotional and my spiritual.
Yeah, when we think about, you know the roles of the triune God. So there’s God who’s the creator and our father. then there’s Jesus who came as fully God, fully man and provided the atonement we needed to be reconciled to God. Then there’s the work of the Holy Spirit and one of the jobs of the Holy Spirit is to sanctify the believer. And that’s why we’re talking about this today. You had mentioned being set apart from the world. We’re set apart
⁓ So being set apart is what holiness is and so the Holy Spirit has work in us when He convicts us and He draws to remembrance what the Scriptures has said and convicts our hearts of sin and righteousness and judgment. draws us to repentance first to God and then in marriage if we’ve offended each other or we need to confess where we’re at with each other, yeah. And like you said being set apart, that’s what
That’s what sanctification is, holiness. To be holy means to be set apart. You’re not just mixed in with everything else. You are different and set apart and ⁓ put in a special place. That’s the idea of being made holy. And the Holy Spirit sanctifying us is doing this, is making us holy, transforming us into the image of His Son, to be like God. Not that we can be God, but He’s definitely drawing us in that direction and wants us to be like Him.
in our holiness. And the Holy Spirit is doing that. And He uses our marriage to do it. He uses your spouse to do He our kids to do it. He uses our neighbors to do it. He uses our jobs to do it. And like we said, if you’re rooted in Christ, if your roots are in Him, you’re not going to just fall over. He’s going to sustain you so that you can be transformed. But what you will be forced to do is go deeper. You’ll be forced to hold on to the foundation more, the earth, which is Christ.
the thing that the substrate that we’re in, which is Him, and we’re going to want to grip it more and get more of Him and get and wrap more around Him. And that’s what He wants from us is to do that with Him is to abide in Him in that way. You’re talking about sanctification. So I just want to read this verse, Romans 6 22. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end eternal.
So this work of sanctification is a ⁓ journey and experience that we as believers will experience until eternal life. I know that I’ve asked you this question, like, why can’t I just be changed in an instant? Which we are when we believe in Christ because we are changed and we’re made new. But this work of sanctification is continual. And it’s because we are sinners and we continue to sin. We continue to make those choices that…
⁓ go against God’s Word. And even though this verse talks about being set free from sin, yes, we are set free. We’re no longer bound. We aren’t in a cage. We aren’t forced to sin. We’re just making those choices out of foolishness. But ⁓ I love this. The fruit that you get leads to sanctification and it’s an eternal life. Yes, although we’re saved by grace, we’re still in the flesh, which battles the spirit. The Bible tells us this, that our flesh battles the spirit and the spirit battles the flesh.
The one that we abide with is going to win. that’s why Christ is constantly, the Holy Spirit is constantly reminding us, keep in step with me, keep in step with me because I am in Christ, I follow Christ. And so we’re supposed to do that. And so you said being changed in an instant, like, why can’t I just be changed right now? What’s beautiful is we actually will. It says in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, we will be transformed. That our mortal bodies will be put off and we will put on immortality.
The problem is we’re still in this fleshly body that has fleshly cravings and desires, which is why there’s this constant battle with the Spirit. But God and Holy Spirit and Christ, they’re helping us keep in step with Him, transform it, sanctifying us, refining us, drawing to the surface the parts of us that God’s like, want to change that. I want to work on that. I to cut that out of there. What’s important about our response when he
draws those impurities to the surface and we recognize our sin. What should our response be? Repentance? It’s saying, I don’t want that. I want what Christ wants. Being changed, being transformed, ⁓ having the humility to allow God to mold us. Saying, make me Lord into what you want. Change me. Take the things that are not of you as David would say. Seek in me and see if there be any wicked way in me. Like find it. Take it. I don’t want it.
I love so much the picture of marriage and how God designed it to reflect what he’s doing and like every aspect of what he’s doing. So this idea of sanctification plays a role in marriage when when you got married, you were set apart. You’re no longer available to the world. You are exclusively your spouses. And so there’s this moment that takes place where you’re set apart. But then there’s the journey of marriage and there’s that everyday ⁓ continual commitment.
to being exclusive to your spouse and learning how to be married. So it’s choosing unity over selfishness. It’s choosing, ⁓ you know, to put the interest of others above your own and all these ways of learning how to be married, learning how to grow in your own role as a husband or a wife. ⁓ And that is a process of transformation. Like who I am today as a wife is much different than who I was as a wife on day one. So I love that. Yeah. So just like the spiritual, spiritual sanctification, ⁓
is both immediate and continual. So like when you come to Christ, know, so if you just, you know, ask Christ into your heart and you believed in him in this episode, because we just talked about it, you’re immediately sanctified. You’re set apart. You’re made holy. You’re filled with the Holy Spirit, which is amazing. But it’s also a continual event that lasts the entire life of a believer. Like every day, God’s drawing us. God’s working in us, changing us, that the Holy Spirit is
transforming us from the inside out. It’s a perpetual pursuit of allowing his Holy Spirit to work in us and to respond likewise in marriage. It’s a perpetual pursuit of loving one another and choosing each other over everything. So when you got married, you were immediately made one. Like you that covenant, like you are one new thing. But it’s also and it’s it’s media, but it’s also a perpetual pursuit.
So not only on that moment when you said, I do, where you made one with your spouse. It’s literally every day saying, I do. But then it’s an everyday event of we’re going to continue. Last episode was about reconciliation to fight for that unity that we’re continuing to be united and continuing to be set apart for each other. So it happened on day one and it’s happening every day since. That’s salvation made right on day one.
And then God sanctifying you through the Holy Spirit ever since. Yeah. And the things that we experience in marriage, like we had talked about some of those hardships that we’ve endured throughout our marriage. And anyone listening can probably think of a quick list of things that you have endured through marriage. Those are opportunities and ⁓ it’s context for what God can do through those things. you let him, marriage becomes a powerful tool for refinement.
He’s using the heat of your two individual natures to draw to the surface. And circumstances, yeah. The sin in our life. In the situation of gold, it’s called dross. The impurities that shouldn’t be there get drawn to the surface and the Holy Spirit, when you let them, scrapes it off gently. And then you, ⁓ like today we’re better than we were five years ago. When I say better, I don’t mean more sinless, but yes, in various ways we sin less.
and we wrong each other less and we’re quicker to forgive, quicker to reconcile, more in love today than we were last year, the year before that. It’s something that we’re moving toward constantly. so. ⁓ Gary Thomas, we’ve shared about him before. He wrote an amazing book called Sacred Marriage. And if you have time, we highly encourage you guys to read it. Great book. He talks about how your spouse is like a mirror. And I love his analogy because it gives you an honest reflection of yourself, but
separately your sin. And when I think back to the beginning of our marriage, I shared this last episode too, but I had this perception of myself and then I get married and I’m like, wait a minute, why is all of this happening? Something’s wrong with you. Something’s wrong with you because I’m not okay. But really it was me being confronted with my own sin and sin in my heart that was coming out because we’re now two becoming one.
and it happened immediately, but then it’s process of me understanding what that actually means. so your spouse becomes a reflection of the sin in your life because if I sin and I hurt you, I see it. And that is painful. I’m probably going to show it to you. Yeah, you’re going to be hurt or offended or angry or whatever. so when we say that marriage is a tool or the context of how God can drop these impurities in us, it’s because
we have a human being as a part of our unity that is showing us how our sin hurts and being confronted by it. And so then we get the chance to respond. Are we going to be humble and say, ⁓ my gosh, I’m so sorry? Or are we going to be prideful and say, well, you shouldn’t be hurt right now? You know what I mean? We have the opportunity. And I think that the encouragement here is that we would walk in humility. And the only way we know how to do that is if we are in God’s word and understand.
that Christ himself walked in humility for us. Talking about the mirror analogy, I think a lot of people listening and even you and I would not maybe say that we’re self-righteous. But self-righteousness is a natural state for most people, for all people except for Christ. ⁓ Because we have ⁓ a very hard time having a true assessment of ourselves.
Like you said, like I thought I was pretty good and I it was okay. And you know, when I sin, I will often, I will lessen the weight of that sin. But when you sin, I’ll be like, yeah, that’s big and heavy and you shouldn’t do that. Minimizing and maximizing. Who did what? It’s essentially self-righteousness. My evaluation of myself, I’m going to elevate myself and I’m going to lower you. And it’s usually other people that give us a better assessment of who we are.
best person is going to be your spouse. And we don’t like that. We don’t like when our spouse gives us their assessment of us because it doesn’t match my assessment. When you say this about me, that’s not how I see myself. And it’s something that God uses to to burn away that self-righteousness. And we know it’s not easy. I’m just thinking as you’re talking, I’m like, there’s been times where those confrontations have come and I’ve expressed to you or you’ve expressed to me that honest evaluation and our response is quite defensive.
And so I think that it’s a matter of just ⁓ allowing each other that safe space of sharing, hey, you really hurt me when you did this or hey, when you’re acting like that, you know, and really paying attention and allowing ourselves to, allowing our spouse to have that input in our lives and share that feedback with us without pride getting in the way, without frustrations stirring in us. We can be good listeners and we can allow that to play a role in
then what do we do? We go back to God, hey, in our prayer life, God, my spouse said this, is that really how I am? Because if we ignore that, it’s just going to build up in bitterness or have, you know, those deep roots of offense and hurt versus using it to refine us. So essentially what we’re getting at is look at your marriage for what it is. Not only is it your partner in life, your lover, but also someone who God is going to use to refine.
and to make you more holy and more set apart. Often this takes a lot. I mean, it takes your whole life. But the biggest chunk of it is in the first handful of years. This is why a lot of marriages don’t make it past three, five, seven years. Because you get confronted with so many things in your flesh so quickly in those handful of years. us, it was very quickly. That’s what I was going say. Because we started out our marriage. We compressed our first.
three years into four months. Erin and were missionaries. We’ve shared our story on here before but we started out our marriage as missionaries in Africa and in Zambia particularly and yeah, we lived in a tent for the first… It was a four-man tent is what they call it. It’s supposed to fit four people but when it says four people, that means four people shoulder to shoulder laying down. So when we would sleep in there, it barely fit us and then we would have to all of our stuff and we’d have to put it outside the because it didn’t fit in there with us.
We’ll say it was close quarters. was very uncomfortable. was always dirty and hot. And you know, we were just pushed beyond our limits a little bit for being newlyweds, but I don’t regret what we endured. Although in the moment it was, it was difficult and challenging. ⁓ the reason we say that all that time was compressed is because a lot of marriages, they get married, they have their honeymoon, maybe a week, maybe less, maybe a little bit more, but then, then they go to normal life. And you, in reality you spend.
handful of hours a day with each other. And that’s why it takes so many years to like get confronted with so many things where in four months we were spending every hour with each other in a little tent in hard circumstances, hungry often, dirty, working, seeing spiritual things taking place and we were being confronted very quickly with tons of selfishness. I think what I learned during that season ⁓
especially like in hindsight, just looking back and evaluating it is that we learned that we ourselves had a lot of room to grow in understanding how to be married. And also that when a marriage is seeking to do something for the kingdom of God, I mean, the enemy does not like it. And so we felt that that fire come against us as well. And that was really hard to persevere through. But I think that
when we understand that God is for us and he is for our marriage, that we rely on his truth, not our own, to sustain us. And that goes back to being rooted in Christ. So time is one way God – the more time you spend with your spouse, the longer you’re with them, the more you’re going to be confronted with these things. Another thing that has been really refining for us and if you’re in the same place, you know exactly how refining it could be, becoming parents.
Yes. It’s another way God uses our marriage and our coming together in unity and brings us children which are a blessing. But it’s also such an awesome tool. That whole verse about him testing us. Yes. It’s like, oh, I thought I was doing great. Now I realize how selfish I still am. How easily offended I could be and how impatient I can be and all these things. I was talking to Edith this morning about love.
and just the definition that the Bible gives us of love and I’m like, man, having children, yes, I love them but you’re challenged in what it means to love every second of the day. Are you going to be patient when – like what just happened recently? It happens and you get a bunch of detergent dumped in your car. Things happen but you get tested in your patience and I get reminded that I still need Jesus because it’s hard being patient in those moments.
Another context or tool that God uses to test our hearts is through community or friendship, the people in our life, the people that are around us and just our response to them, ⁓ cause and reaction and relationship. Things happen, things are going to happen. Jesus said this, that we’re gonna encounter tribulation in this world, but in Him we can have peace. So although it can be painful to endure through these relational circumstances, through marriage, parenting and friends, ⁓ it’s worth it.
It’s worth it to experience and go through and allow the hardships of it to transform us if we’re surrendering to it all in Christ. If we’re walking around in pride and we’re thinking that we’re wonderful human beings, which maybe we are wonderful, but we’re definitely not perfect. Well, if we keep fighting it and we say things like, I don’t deserve what’s happening right now or this is not for everyone else is the problem. That’s not healthy and that’s not going to help you thrive and…
really understand this process of holiness that God is walking us through. So the main thing that we’re trying to get at is embrace the refinement, embrace the sanctification that God is using your marriage to make you more holy, to make you more like His son Jesus, and let it happen. It doesn’t mean make it happen, because we’re really good at that anyway. Enjoy it when the storms have been calmed. But when they come, don’t run away. Instead,
force those roots that we talked about to go even deeper in Him. So, okay, Christ, what do I need to learn? What needs changed? What needs refined in me? Well, hopefully it was a good reminder for all of you today or something new for you who took on Aaron’s ⁓ insistent ⁓ urgency to be a believer in Christ. But just to be reminded that we are constantly being sanctified and set apart for Him and in Him.
We end every episode with a quote from our book, Marriage After God. And so we just wanted to share this. marriage after God is one that declares all that the Lord has spoken, we will do, which is from Exodus 19. A marriage after God is not only interested in serving God through extraordinary work, a marriage after God is interested in living out a biblical marriage. Amen. Amen. Questions. So we, at the end of our episodes, we’re doing questions and these questions are coming from our devotionals, husband after God and wife after God.
And so what transformations are you currently experiencing as a Christian or a spouse? I love this one. I love this question. You can find it in the devotionals. And I think that it’s good for all of us, not just Erin and I answering, but for you listening ⁓ to take honest evaluations of where we’ve been, where we’re at. And so this is a good question. ⁓ Now to dodge the question. I think currently I am ⁓
I kind of want to go towards parenting because you brought that up, but you had mentioned patience. And I think that being a homeschool mom of a handful of kids, patience is required of me every day. And I think that I am learning how to be a patient mom, but also how to press in as a mom and how to engage with my kids in a personal way to each of them. Like they’re not just all one big clump going through school and life together, that they’re individuals and that they
will all one day have an individual relationship with Christ and that you and I, get to participate in leading them to understand that. And so, yeah, I feel like there’s been this transformation in my mindset as a parent and the purpose that we have in our children’s lives. I think for me, I’ve been… There was a question that I asked when we went to a worship night the other day and I was wondering if we are…
actively showing our adoration and the love of God in our home. I know that sounds weird. We love God. We teach our kids the Bible. We love to remind them of what the truth is in the word. But so much of life can be so sometimes mechanical. like, yeah, we’re doing the right things. Trying to check that off box. And then I just was thinking, was like, man, but how often are we just do our kids see how much we love God or how much God loves them? And so
Something I was like just wanting to pray about and ask God to keep continue to show me like help me show My love for you in our home and my adoration for you Another one I was just thinking of as you were talking because I wanted to relate to marriage since it’s a marriage podcast I feel like I’ve grown in the last year in a transforming way when it comes to Bring things to you before answering. So like I know that’s kind of vague but
if there is a question that pops up, an event that’s coming up, instead of just responding to my girlfriends as ⁓ a, I’m in, I’m gonna do this, coming to you and submitting it to you and saying, hey, what do you think about this? Hey, what are your thoughts? can I, not that, I’m not saying that I need your permission because I know I’m an adult, but we are one. And so I think that I’ve grown in my understanding of how to ⁓ just present things to you and be on the same page.
before answering others and letting our answer be ours and not just mine. I would say it’s less about getting permission. It’s more about wanting to be on the same page. Yeah. And having a respect there of you even knowing about the plans that I’m making or the things that I’m committing to. I like that. Last question. How can you respond to your spouse differently knowing that the trials you face together have the potential to produce transformation in your marriage?
How I would answer this is that for a long time I was very resistant to hardships, trials, conflict, things that come in every- likes them. I know. I feel so uncomfortable. to be able to respond differently to your spouse, has to be an accepting of it and a perspective shift of like, okay, there’s this really hard thing, but instead of taking it personal or-
saying woe is me. Fighting against it. Fighting against those feelings to say, but what is here that we can learn from? I have a friend that’s really good at this, going through a hard thing and it’s like their first response is, well, I know God has something in it for me and that’s my question to him. What is it? And I’m like, I want to be more like you. Can I just agree with you on that one? That’s my answer. I agree with I you said disagree with you. I’m like, wait, what? Just agree. I think that’s true. Is being able to see the hardships in life, the trials in life.
As the Bible says, rejoice, you know, in the trials, like these things, the tribulations that will come and say, okay, Lord, what do you have for me in this? What are you trying to change in me? What perspective shifts do I need to have? ⁓ What rejoicing needs to take place? Cool. I don’t know why just thought about jiu-jitsu because I just kind of started back up after having the baby. Because it’s on your mind. It’s on my mind. But I was just thinking about how when you go and you roll, you get usually bruised.
But those bruises don’t keep you from going back. If you haven’t noticed on my face, this is Jiu-Jitsu. He’s got like a scratch on his forehead and stuff. But those things aren’t going to keep you from going again and learning new technique. Nope. You’re going to jump back Well, it depends on how bad the injury is. But I see what you’re saying. The bumps and bruises of life shouldn’t stop us. Those things are meant to make us stronger.
Okay, so here’s the call to action, the encouragement this week that we want you guys to work on. You know, we all have a wedding ring or so, you know, some people tattoo or have different versions of this, but we want to encourage you guys to let your wedding ring or your ring finger ⁓ be a reminder to you of your unending relationship with your spouse and your love for them and also your relationship with Christ.
And let it be a reminder to pray for your spouse, for yourself too. Um, if there’s needs to be a perspective shift there or an encouragement in your way of thinking, um, every time you look down at your hand this week, just, just be reminded of who your spouse is and that you guys are one. that continual process of going around and around being sanctified, the gold being refined over and over and over again, heated as the imperatives come to the surface. So let me pray for us as we close.
Lord, thank you so much for giving us your Holy Spirit that when we believe in your Son Jesus, when we ⁓ put our faith in his work on the cross, Lord, that ⁓ you forgive us and that we’re saved in that moment. That you give us your Spirit to work in us, to transform us, to change us, to become more like Jesus. And I just pray, Lord, that in our marriages, we’d allow you to work in us. That when we bump up against our spouse, that our sin bumps against their sin, Lord, that you would
use our marriage to draw that stuff out and to sanctify us and to set us apart in this life, in this world and God, that we would teach this to our children, that they too can see the hardships, the struggles, the relational issues as opportunities to be refined and transformed. And so I just pray for all of those listening, Lord, that you’d give them peace and also just remind them in all these hard situations in their marriages that their spouse is not their enemy.
and God, that you desire to use their spouse and their marriage to refine them and to make them more holy and more set apart. And in doing this, as we surrender, as we abide in Christ, as we dig those roots deep and around Christ, Lord, that we can stand stronger and taller and grow. And so we thank you for that. In Jesus’ name, amen. Amen. Thank you so much for joining us on week seven of the Marriage After God devotional series. We look forward to having you next episode.
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