Praying for Your Marriage is Essential

John Fuller: Welcome to Focus on the Family’s weekend broadcast. We hope the following program will challenge you and encourage you in your faith journey.
Jody Bernt: I’m going to time myself to see how long it takes me to load the dishwasher instead of being mad at John. She went and said it took her 13 seconds. 13 seconds to put his dishes in the dishwasher. She said now, instead of using those things as an annoyance, I look at them and I say I have 13 seconds to do something for him. Not only that, I’m going to use those 13 seconds to pray for his day. She uses that as a trigger to pray. I love that. It changes the whole climate from being an annoyance to being a time when marriage can flourish.
John Fuller: That’s Jody Bernt describing the powerful impact that pausing for prayer can have on your marriage. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and I’m John Fuller.
Jim Daly: John, it’s said that praying in your marriage is one of the most important things you can do. I’ve tried it both ways. Jean and I got busy and we’d go through long stretches where we weren’t praying together. I think that is kind of disastrous. When you do pray together consistently, it’s amazing how that just rubs some of the edges off in terms of those hot buttons that you can push. Today we want to talk about that. One of the great statistics in Jody’s book says that married couples who pray daily have less than a 1% divorce rate. How about that for a silver bullet when it comes to keeping your marriage together and moving forward in a healthy way? Let me add, a young woman said to me the other day, “Whenever I hear in Christian communication someone talk about marriage, they talk about how hard it is to work at your marriage.” Let me debunk that a little bit. The reason we talk about that is because you want to have a marriage that’s really good. It takes a little work. If you want to be in shape, you’ve got to go to the gym, that kind of thing. It’s not a burden. These are things that we want to equip you with so that your marriage could be the best it can be. If you’re hearing it’s hard work to be married, it’s awesome to be married. It does require some work, but it’s a good thing.
John Fuller: It really is a wonderful gift. We’re going to be talking with Jody today. She’s been here a number of times. She’s a public speaker, a Bible teacher, and author of the bestselling Praying the Scriptures series. One of the books in that series is called *Praying the Scriptures for Your Marriage*. We’ll have more details about Jody and this great resource at our website.
Jim Daly: Welcome back, Jody. So good to see you. I need to confess, Jean was the one who said we need to pray more together. She gets the credit on that. I want people going, “Oh, Jim is so wonderful.” Jean is awesome. Jean is the anchor. But it’s true, so often you probably see that, too. Women want to feel that connection that way. Typically, I would think the wife is the one suggesting, “Why don’t we pray more together?”
Jody Bernt: That’s certainly what we heard before I wrote this book. I threw out the question on social media and in my email group, “What would you like God to do for your marriage?” It was interesting to hear people’s responses. You can imagine the different things people wanted: better communication, help handling money, handling conflict, dealing with parents and in-laws, that kind of thing. One of the things that came up again and again is that people wanted that deeper intimacy, spiritual intimacy, not just with God, but with their spouse. I think that’s great. I really do. I encourage people to think about what you would like in a spouse or, if you’re already married, speak to those things you are seeing that are positive in your marriage and your spouse and breathe life into those things by affirming them. I think we make a mistake when we think we can find “the one” because you get married and immediately you change. College Jody that Robbie fell in love with was way more fun, I think, than newlywed Jody who was trying to juggle a job and a house and a new marriage. Then along comes Mother Jody and Mom Jody is less fun because she’s starting to worry. They say, “I’ve been married to 37 women or 37 men and they’ve all been the same person,” but they change all the time. Stanley Hauerwas is an expert of some kind. He writes that the challenge in marriage is learning to care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married. You do wake up sometimes and say, “Wow, you’ve changed. I’ve changed. We’re all changing.” I think that’s really important.
Jim Daly: Let me ask you this. You’re mentioning the multifaceted part of life. You start as dating your husband and then you marry, then eventually kids come and you’re a different person in all those settings, obviously. When you got married, what was your prayer life like and then where did it go? So many times as authors and speakers and communicators, people think they just had it down. It’s really not true and it’s so important to debunk that. You’re writing out of experience, what didn't work and what was causing you maybe some pain or frustration. Describe that journey from what it was as that first Jody to the 37th Jody.
Jody Bernt: It is continuing to evolve and God is continuing to teach and train and He’s so filled with grace, which I so appreciate. For Robbie and me in our shared prayer life, that’s been a little bit of a mountain to climb because as husbands and wives, as men and women, we approach prayer differently. I like to use a prayer journal. I’m fond of praying out loud. He’s very good at praying in his head. He doesn’t need to write everything down to remember it. For us to have that shared connection, we’ve had to be intentional and just say, “Take my hand and let’s just pray about whatever it is that’s concerning us.” It might be for anybody listening who thinks Jody and Robbie have this deep and intimate wonderful long-term prayer life, we might pray for three or five minutes about something. I have these things on my website that are 31-day prayer calendars that just have one verse. I’m all about making prayer doable. I think sometimes when you just take one verse, like First Thessalonians 3:12 says, “May your love increase and overflow for each other.” If you’re feeling a little tension in your marriage, maybe you just spit that one out: “God, help our love increase and overflow for each other.” And you’ve prayed. It can be simple like that.
Jim Daly: In that way, expectations can be different at any phase of your marriage, newlywed, midterm, late term marriage. How do you express those expectations in a way that is helpful, not hurtful?
Jody Bernt: Expectations are big things. For any newlywed or engaged couples who are listening, and us oldie-weds, too, I just think that you need to leave room for the fact that you come in with different backgrounds. Robbie and I got married and I had a dad who helped out a lot in the kitchen. He would go purchase the groceries. Most girls can say "my daddy." The poor husband comes in and he doesn’t do everything exactly like Daddy did, or he does it differently. That definitely created some tension for us. I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing: “Hey, you’re not getting up early before breakfast, before I get out of bed and have the hot breakfast ready like my mom did.” We come in with these different expectations. I remember talking to the Lord early on saying, “Can’t you fix Robbie? Can’t you make him more like my dad?” It was really sweet because God said, “Jody, if you’ll just quit nagging and if you will trust me, I can shape him into a husband that is above and beyond anything you could create or dream up even if I gave you a blank check.” I said, “Okay, I’m just going to trust you.” I wish I could say I stopped nagging forever. I didn’t. But what God did in that moment as an answer to that prayer the very next day, and He doesn’t always answer prayers this quickly, but the very next day we’d been married nine months, maybe a year. He walked into the kitchen and said, “Is there anything I can do to help with dinner?” I burst into tears. Poor Robbie is probably thinking, “Wait a minute, I thought you’re crying when I’m not helping and now I’m helping and you’re crying. I can’t win.” God has just been wonderful in terms of shaping both of us to be the person the other person needs. It’s not at all like what we expected. I would say it’s been better.
Jim Daly: On the practical side, you do mention two different ways you can pray the scriptures over your marriage. I want to make sure we capture that to give people a taste of the book and what you’re expressing. Not everybody knows what praying the scriptures is.
Jody Bernt: All it is really is using the Bible not as something you just read, but as something you pray. Going through and when you read Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God,” you can take that and turn it into a prayer prompt. Your mind is racing, your heart is racing, you’re worked up about anything and you can just say, “Lord, help me be still. Quiet my heart. Trade my panic for peace. Let me know you are God.” That’s what I’m talking about when I say pray the scriptures. One is topically. If you pick up the book and you go, “We need help with some friends. We don’t have any good friends.” I want to flip to that chapter and find out how we can find those life-giving friends in our lives, how we can become those kind of friends. Read the stories there, look at some of the discussion questions at the end of the chapter and pray the prayers. Or you don't even need the book. You can just pick up your Bible and pray through scripture. It’s not at all topically. It’s just as you’re seeing, like I was reading the other day in Mark 6, Jesus tells the disciples to get into the boat and go to the other side. When He walks out to them later that night, they’re straining at the oars. The wind is against them. What I read in that was they’re obeying Jesus. They’re doing what He tells them. He says, “Go to the other side.” But it’s hard, that obedience. They’re finding a storm. I read that and so I pray, “Lord, when I’m obeying you and I come up and I feel like the wind is against me, help me trust. Help me continue to obey. Help me keep pulling at the oars.”
Jim Daly: Jody, you mentioned personality a minute ago and how that plays into praying for one another, but also just about everything in your marriage. Subconsciously, marriage experts talk about this, we’re typically drawn to somebody who’s opposite. Not in everything, but in many things. Extroverts and introverts, those kinds of things. It’s just a wonderful affirmation that the Lord says you’re completer, your helpmate, that we just seek a person out who compliments the things that we don’t possess. Then it starts to irritate us. I think you had a really good story about Canada and personality differences.
Jody Bernt: In the chapter on handling conflict, I share a couple of our stories. One was we had been invited to a party in Atlanta. We lived there and didn't have any friends yet. Someone invited us to come to this party where there was going to be a dance band, a dad band playing songs. I just thought this was going to be great. We’re partway through the night and Robbie was not asking me to dance. I’m twirling under his arm trying to get him onto the dance floor. I was getting madder and madder because I thought all these people look so fun and they would probably want to be our friends. We have a babysitter we’re paying at home on the clock and he’s not dancing. He’s thinking, “We don’t even know these people and I don’t want to make a fool of myself.” He’s just a little more polite and diplomatic than I am. I’m harder to embarrass and I’ll do anything. It escalated until I just left the party. I’m not proud of this. It’s in a strange neighborhood, it’s dark, it’s nighttime. I’m walking away and Robbie came after me in his car and he says, “Get in.” We went home. He didn’t know how much the dancing had mattered to me that night. We used to do a thing at our families where we’d make these movies. One of our friends was like, “We could do our own film festival. Let’s get eight or ten families and you make some home movies with plots and costumes and all that.” We did that. We had our own Academy Awards. We are heading to Canada one time with four kids and two dogs and our movie has to do with a pirate who’s kidnapping some people and taking them across the border. Robbie was the pirate. I said, “Here, we’re coming up to the border. Put your pirate hat on and your eye patch and say your lines.” And he’s like, “I am not going through border security dressed as a pirate.” The point is we each had different personalities. I’m all about going to Canada dressed as a pirate. He’s all about not walking onto the dance floor in a crowd where you don’t even know anybody. God has used me to bring him out. He made a wonderful pirate. He has ten years of movies under his belt now. He’s great. He won Best Actor. Meanwhile, I’ve learned to not always be quite as embarrassing. My children will say, “Mom, it’s so embarrassing being you.” It kind of is, but I think that thanks to Robbie, I’ve learned how to sometimes hold back.
Jim Daly: Jody, I’d like to get some examples from you on how to bridge that gap, maybe personality differences, what have you. How does prayer help you accomplish that?
Jody Bernt: When you do have these different expectations, different personalities, you can rub against each other like sandpaper. I love Charles Spurgeon said, “Conflicts bring experience, and experience brings that growth in grace which cannot be attained by any other means.” I read that quote and I thought it’s true that conflict does bring experience. It can teach us about one another. Over time, we really have seen that growth in grace. Study after study has been done to show the benefits of prayer, even things that might not be trotted out in a church or a Bible study. Secular research has shown that prayer gives you a higher sense of satisfaction in marriage, a greater sense of emotional well-being. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal saying even if you’re upset or annoyed with your spouse, they were late again or they left the toilet seat up, when you pray together or even pray for your spouse, not with your spouse, that gives you a chance to calm down. It reinforces the idea that you’re on the same team. I love that idea of remembering that you’re on the same team. Before one of our daughters got married, Virginia, we had all the families together and we said, “All right, between us here, we probably have 150 years of marriage wisdom. Get everybody to weigh in with what they think.” One of the best pieces of advice came from my son-in-law Jeff. He said you want to remember when you’re in a conflict, it’s not about trying to win. You don’t want to be the one that’s right and have your spouse be the loser. You’re a team and that would be a loss for your team. So how can you work through your conflicts to get to that point of grace so that it’s a win?
Jim Daly: This is the one where you share you learned how to pray for your husband when he left dishes in the sink. I’m familiar with something like that. Maybe it’s the laundry again.
Jody Bernt: This was actually my mom who is remarried. Mom got remarried and, in her new marriage, she noticed that her husband was leaving the dishes in the sink and it was kind of annoying her. But then she thought back to something that she had seen in their premarital counseling. We’re never too old for that. I love it. She said one of the things that they learned, they’d seen a man talking about how his wife always left the cupboards open in the kitchen. He went into the kitchen and it would bug him day after day. Then he said, “I wonder how long it takes me to close the cupboards.” He realized it took him no time at all. Instead of letting that be such an irritation that could build up, he just closed the cupboards. She said, “I’m going to time myself to see how long it takes me to load the dishwasher instead of being mad at John.” She went and she said it took her 13 seconds. 13 seconds to put his dishes in the dishwasher. She said now, instead of using those things as an annoyance, I look at them and I say I have 13 seconds to do something for him. Not only that, I’m going to use those 13 seconds to pray for his day. She uses that as a trigger to pray and I love that. It changes the whole climate from being an annoyance to being a time when marriage can flourish.
Jim Daly: She sounds very proficient at loading the dishwasher. 13 seconds. That’s Olympic speed. You discovered that you needed to be more emotionally aware one day when taking a test with Robbie. Was it like an assessment, a personality test?
Jody Bernt: We were teaching a marriage class. As part of teaching it, we thought as the instructors we ought to do all the exercises that are in the material. One of them was this thing where you rate your spouse on 20 different topics and you give them a zero to four or five whether they do it poorly or well. Then you exchange your answers. We got to the part where we’re going over what each other said and I said, “Robbie, you gave me a zero.” The question was how well does my spouse meet my emotional needs. I was like, “A zero?” He said, “Yeah, you don’t meet my emotional needs.” I said, “Robbie, I didn’t know you had emotional needs.” You are the steadiest person I’ve ever met. And he is. That is one of my favorite attributes of Robbie. It’s hard to ruffle him. He doesn’t go high and low and all over the place like I do. He’s so steady. But I didn’t know that he had emotional needs. That was one of those things that I learned that was in the chapter on protecting your marriage. The things that we have to do because it’s a lot easier to prevent a crisis in a marriage than it is to recover from one. It’s easier to build a strong marriage than it is to repair a broken one. If we take those little steps to be able to assess what can I do to support you, to understand what those are, how can I live in such a way that honors that, that can help protect your marriage and to build a stronger marriage from the get-go.
Jim Daly: That’s really good. I give both of you credit. Robbie, what are you thinking? You’ve got to score that zero.
John Fuller: Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family. Let’s resume now with the balance of today’s programming.
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John Fuller: Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family. Let’s resume now with the balance of today’s programming.
Jim Daly: Jody, you mentioned personality a minute ago and how that plays into...