Waging the Spiritual War for Your Marriage
RECOGNIZE THE REAL BATTLE
Jason and Tori were married in 2001 and will never forget how the country responded to the attacks of 9-11. They witnessed Americans dropping their differences and standing staunchly united against their common enemy. Jason likens that perspective to the one needed in marriage. “The problem that so often happens in marriage is that we fight the wrong battle. We wage war against each other rather than the real enemy – Satan.”
He admits the same was true of them, as petty arguments and fights became commonplace. Nearly a decade into their marriage and giving birth to four kids, Tori decided to join Jason at a CrossFit gym. The pair soon discovered that they loved competing together against the other participants. Pulling with and for each other toward a clearly-understood goal proved exhilarating. They realized they needed to work just as hard together to defend their family.
“By God’s grace, our marriage has never been the same,” Tori says. “All it took was a pivot from fighting face-to-face to fighting shoulder-to-shoulder. And it turns out that winning together in life has the same enticing power as winning together in CrossFit: It keeps you coming back for more.”
SEE WITH NEW EYES
Jason believes the best thing they’ve ever done for their marriage was to change the way they viewed it. Our natural inclination is to see through the lens of self-righteousness, self-interest, and anger, when the Lord would have us see it as a key way to love and glorify Him.
“Your marriage is not ultimately about you and your spouse. It’s about you and Jesus,” he says. “Marriage is simply the opportunity to live and love like Him.” How we treat our spouses matters greatly, Jason states. “If you discover the truth about your spouse – how God is not just your Father but also your Father-in-law – your actions toward His son or daughter will line up with His intentions for them. This is the real beauty in battle – seeing Jesus in the midst of the fight. Depend on Him to mend the brokenness of your marriage and transform your home into a little bit of the Kingdom here on earth. He will do it for you just as He did it for us.”
CURB NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
Tori says she struggled for years with discontentment and negative thinking whenever Jason went on a business trip. While he was enjoying interesting people and nice restaurants, she stayed at home with the kids, feeling stuck, left out, and angry at God and her husband. It was easy to think negative thoughts about them both, she says.
Those patterns grew quite entrenched until she decided to pray about it more and talk through it with Jason, realizing that she didn’t need to be alone in her feelings. “We talked about how I had established an unhealthy pathway of thinking – thoughts that were rooted in fear and had become the path of least resistance. Together, we began to surrender the situation to God. As we did, He gave us a plan to fight through it,” she explains. The strategy comes directly from Matthew, chapter four and involves three steps:
• Recognize
• Renounce.
• Replace.
Tori says she first learned to recognize the unfounded fears which surfaced every time Jason went out of town. Then she had to renounce the lies behind the fears and decide she was not going to follow that path.
Lastly, she needed to replace the lies with the truth of God’s Word and Jason’s promises each time that inner struggle began. “Laying down my dream and trusting God with the results felt like giving up on something really good, something I felt all along He wanted me to have,” Tori admits. “But I knew I needed to trust Him to give it to me in His perfect way and time, if at all.”
REGAIN THE FEELINGS
Loving, romantic feelings are usually strong at the beginning of marriage and often fade with life’s pressures, the Benhams acknowledge. While dating, they couldn’t imagine theirs waning. “But then we got married, and that ‘honeymoon period’ came and went.” Tori shares. “A few years into marriage, that ‘loving feeling’ totally disappeared for both of us. Yes, we still loved each other, but something had changed.”
Jason recognized it, too. “The more time I spent with God alone, the more I felt convicted that, while I was pursuing excellence in my business, I had settled for mediocrity in my marriage. I wasn’t building my marriage ‘with all my heart’ like I was building my company.” While reading , Jason saw what he needed to do to reinvigorate their relationship:
• Remember
• Repent
• Redo
Jason says he needed to dwell on what he felt for Tori when they first fell in love, and to repent for letting his love grow cold. Then, he determined to once again do the things that won her heart years earlier, like dancing to their favorite love songs, eating candlelight dinners after the kids went to bed, and taking long walks together, talking about their dreams.
Tori says she didn’t always feel like responding lovingly to Jason’s overtures, but as she practiced gratitude for him, her feelings also revived. “Here’s the beautiful thing: it will for you, too,” she encourages. “But it requires a husband’s pursuit and a wife’s response to make it a reality. Neither of those are possible without a fight. The kind of fighting that draws you closer together rather than further apart.”
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