Pastor Priji & Rashmi share insights on prioritising the presence of God in your family and marriage. We hope you are edified by this conversation.

Pastor Priji & Rashmi share insights on prioritising the presence of God in your family and marriage. We hope you are edified by this conversation.

Today’s marriage podcast emphasizes on the importance of ‘holiness’ and how this can flow into your marriage. Let’s dive into the conversation to learn more about the same.

Pastor Priji: Hello everybody, I hope that God has been good to you. Even if we don’t see, sense or know it a hundred percent we have to believe and know who God is in our life and that goes a long way.

Pastor Rashmi: It’s good to be on the podcast and I hope you’re all working in your marriage because we’re all work in progress, so is our marriage!

I read this very beautiful quote and if I want to paraphrase it for you, it goes on to say, “ We all wait to be a final product before we enter into the marriage thinking that the other person would be as perfect as you expect yourself to be but, it is more joy to work yourself and for your spouse to grow together in the relationship of marriage.”

Marriage is like a little plant you water and care for and you nuture and nourish, so it grows out to be a healthy plant, blossoming with life.

Pastor Priji: Absolutely! Marriage is not beginning at a finishing stage, begins at a stage where we begin and walk together.

I’d like to begin today’s conversation with reading this particular text from 1 Corinthians 7:14 NLT

“For the believing wife brings holiness to her marriage, and the believing husband brings holiness to his marriage. Otherwise, your children would not be holy, but now they are holy.”

This speaks about how one person in a marriage is capable and powerful enough to bring holiness into the entire marriage.

The context of this is where Paul is speaking to families only one of them is saved. When Paul started preaching in the church of Corinth not the entire family would always be saved. Either the husband or the wife would be the first person to receive the Lord. Paul says, if you are in a family/marriage like that, where your husband or wife is not saved, don’t leave your husband or wife for that sake. Instead, you could walk with with God and the grace of God that you carry upon your life, the relationship that you have with God can automatically overflow into the rest of family.

Pastor Rashmi: That’s true!

How do you bring holiness into your marriage if you are not holy yourself? By holiness I do not mean the worldly idea of holy. If in your life, God is not above and beyond everything then you and your life are not sanctified.

Let’s talk about how we can bring holiness in our personal walk with God. It’s like saying that either you hold the reigns to your life in your own hands or you give the reigns to your life to God and you work on the principles of God, because He is a God of principles, and that moves Him into action and favour upon your life.

How do you achieve the fact that you are inching closer towards holiness, a sanctification or a separation in your personal walk with God. That holiness you carry in your personal life, how do you bring that into marriage?

Pastor Priji: That’s an important thing to discuss. The definition of holiness we have is very skewed. However, the definition of holiness is, holy means to be set apart for a particular purpose.

God created us for deep personal fellowship with Him. In the garden of Eden, the holiness was not lost when they ate the fruit. Holiness was lost when they started engaging in a conversation with the serpent.

She (Eve) was allowed to grow in a relationship with Adam, she was allowed to grow in a relationship with God but not outside of these two. Outside of these two is she got into a conversation with the serpent that led to sin.

Pastor Rashmi: Holiness is you carrying or hosting God. It can be as simple as saying that the Bible that you carry is a Holy Bible because it carries the words of God. In the same way, when your phone carries the Bible inside it, it is a holy phone. Just like how your mouth it carries the words of God, your mouth, body, your very being. When you carry the presence of God and not carry the filth of the earth you automatically become holy.

Your phone is actually holy when you don’t carry the filth of the earth on your phone but instead the Bible.

If your phone carries your Bible and you use your phone to read the Bible and to meditate on the scriptures or share an encouraging word then your phone in your holy hands is holy. You have been given the mandate to keep your body holy because when you carry the presence of God you sanctify it and make it holy just like how when you carry the presence or the voice of God in yourself you become holy and then you take it into marriage and your marriage becomes holy, your parenting becomes holy, your covenant relationship becomes holy.

Pastor Priji: Absolutely! It is necessary to understand and study holiness in the context of marriage, to give God access where God is number one, God is above everything.

One of the thing as couples you should do is, identify every distractions, serpent voices in your life, everything and everybody that is speaking and negating what God is doing in your life trying to bring in confusion, trying to direct you into direction not from God and as husband and wife you need to have conversations about this regularly.

It’s necessary to have a conversation about this in your house and learn to identify each and every one of these distractions. Identifying these distractions itself goes a really long way in trying to tackle them.

The things we don’t know have the power to hurt us but when we know this is our enemy; an area that is open and I can be tempted or distracted/deflected from my goal and give attention to this serpert, then we can immediately become watchful and become intentional to avoid this distraction.

Once you identify that distraction you need to start making choices that will alter your lifestyle which means if you have make a change in your work environment, your habits of waking up on time or habits of watching television late into the night or whatever things are part and parcel of yourself that are causing you to lose your focus on God, you have to learn how to reprioritise and make choices that will help you alter your lifestyle.

Pastor Rashmi: Exactly, I’ve always felt, when we enter marriage with the idea we need to be extremely dependant on the other person and sometimes we misinterpret verses that say wives, submit to your husbands. The fact that we are independent in our marriage, we are not dependant on each other for our walk with God, spiritual counsel. God made Adam first and Adam had fellowship with God before he brought in Eve into the picture.

God expects us to be independent in Him before we start contributing into marriage. It becomes extremely essential to have our walk with God straightened out, dusted, in place and in order before we think about depending in marriage over each other.

In marriage, we are not independent of each other, we are not dependant on each other but we are co-dependent.

Dependancy would mean that we are relying heavily on our spouse. Absolute independence would mean we have nothing to do with the spouse. But, co-dependance means that, you are independent in Christ but you are also working hand in hand with your spouse. That kind of independence brings in submission where, the wife is submitting to her husband, she is independent in Christ and the husband every way loves and nourishes the wife because he has been asked/commanded by the Lord to love his wife.

When we focus on God and when we focus on our spouse we would do everything to identify that one outside voice that would be creeping in to break a marriage.

We should also look for solutions to work for, in a hectic season. Probably, if we find the lack of hope in our marriage or if we find somethings not going right in a marriage primarily because we have a void in our hearts. I’ve heard this popular phrase that says, “ We all have a void in our heart and it’s a God-shaped void.” There is nothing that can fill that void other than God. Take your time to find your healing, take your time to find your independence in God.

Pastor Priji: God has divinely placed your husband or your wife in your life and at different points in life one you would be walking with God more intentionally and more intensely and at that time it is your responsibility to encourage your spouse and push them to walking with God. If they are going through a season where things don’t make sense like it does to you, why don’t you be the voice of God in their life?

Pastor Rashmi: Yeah, one mistake that Adam did when things were going wrong in the garden of Eden was, when Eve was listening to the voice of satan, the Bible says, Adam was with her, yet he did not say anything and that led to the downfall of the entire humanity.

Being intentional about being the voice of God in your spouses life, especially, if you see that your spouse is hitting the lows or going through a phase, help him/her in prayer. Be loving, be kind, be strong on their behalf.

Pastor Priji: Don’t be judgemental or critical of your spouse. You have not idea what he/she is going through in their heart.

Pastor Rashmi: Just the fact that you are there in the family knocking on heavens doors for your family would bring in all the difference in your marriage.

Pastor Priji: It’s very necessary for you to be persistent. Don’t give up, continue to keep knocking on heavens door and gently knocking on your spouses heart and saying we need to pray more, fast and go after the heart of God. Have exclusive time to teach our children on this particular topic, we need to grow in our relationship together with God. It’s one thing to grow in your relationship with God alone and another to grow together as a family.

Couples in the Bible that inspires we a lot is Priscilla and Aquila. You always hear their names together. Another couple is, Manoah and his wife (Samson’s parents). The Bible says, they encountered God together, both of them fell facedown. In Manoah’s case the wife encountered God first but then she dragged her husband along. She stopped the angel and said, I know you want to speak to me but, let me go get my husband and, together they had a conversation and together they fell facedown before the glory that came. There’s nothing more beautiful than that!

The life that God has called us to is to walk in hand in hand, intentionally in pursuing God. I think it helps to make goals to your Bible reading together as a family, to your prayer times, the standards you keep in your house for God.

If you can be that one believing husband or wife that Paul spoke in 1Corinthians 7 who can bring holiness in your marriage and write them down. It’s necessary you make this as an intentional goal in your family, that God is number one, Jesus is the highest name in this family and you become very intentional to make everybody know about it when guests come in, or when you are going through something.

Once, you know where you are headed to and achieve it – take time out to celebrate as a family.

Reward each other. Make your family fun. Let your kids know that it’s not a boring thing to walk with God. When you walk with God there is definitely honour and reward from heaven but at the same time there is celebration in the house.

We celebrate everything God celebrates. When the lost sheep came home there was celebration, when that one lost coin was found there was celebration, when that one lost son came home there was celebration.

I believe that we have to be families that celebrate a simple breakthrough or something that has changed.

Pastor Rashmi: True. Probably another thing we can do to bring in holiness is to remain accountable to one more person outside of your marriage regarding your walk with God, regarding your personal formation happening inside of you. Find either a married couple that is older to you. If you are a man, find a married man who is older to you. If you are a woman, find a woman who is older to you and who is married and stay accountable. When you talk about mentorship you do not leave your leadership outside, it can be your pastor, be a leader in church. It has to be someone who shares the vision God has planted in you and does not deviate from the teachings of the word of God. Hide nothing with your mentor. Let the work of God refine you, purify you, make you holy, bring in a kind of sanctification in your life that you may have not seen before.

We know and we have seen and we have been rewarded by the fact God has placed spiritual parents over us, placed marriage mentors, leaders who’ve worked behind the scenes so much into our marriage that we are seeing the fruits of it so many years from the day of our wedding and we have grown. We are growing. Just looking back and seeing how the growth has been and how much we have grown with each other, it’s a joyful process. Remain accountable to your mentor, to your pastor, leader whoever God has placed over you. Bring honour into your marriage.

I’ll sum up all that we have discussed regarding bringing in holiness into your marriage because of your effort:

• Identify distractions.
• Make intentional choices that alter lifestyle.
• Creative solutions for hectic seasons.
• Resolutions towards goals.
• Keep visual reminders.
• Celebrate and reward.
• Remain accountable to your leaders.

We hope you were blessed by the podcast. May your marriage flourish and go into the next level this season!

Have a fruitful week ahead!