Developing Unity In Your Marriage

Ever feel like you and your spouse are doing great, on the same page, and believing God for greater things, only to find that in a matter of weeks or even days, you feel the space between you getting bigger and bigger?

When we first got married, we had no clue what we were doing. We were teenagers in love and ready to play house together. We were hungry for God and all He wanted to do in our lives. We were BROKE, with two kids, love for Jesus, and that was about it.

Life, although difficult, was simple. All we had was our faith to lean on and guide us through.

Through the later years of our marriage, we got caught up in the status-driven life. It’s kind of easy to do when you move out to the burbs. Everyone has nice cars, nice toys to play with, nice homes, and the comparison game kicked in strong.

Over time, the stories being written in our lives seemed like they were in two separate books, let alone on the same page. The space between us grew and grew.

When our world was rocked in 2020 due to sexual sin, we knew we had to get our marriage right.

We had to get right with God to do this, and the overarching theme of our lives became “unity. What were our new standards and beliefs for living out the lives God had for us? Establishing these morals and standards have helped guide us back to a place of oneness and unity each time….“Same Page” as we like to call it.

So what does being on the same page even mean?

Here’s a list of things we had to consider:

1. Our individual walks with God

”Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.'” Matthew 16:24 CSB

There are ways that we want to go about doing things, and then there’s God's way. We had to surrender our old way of living life in our selfishness, selfish ambition, and self-absorption and ask the Lord for HIS WISDOM and power in the way we should live. We both had to begin to focus on our relationship with Jesus individually and use the Bible as our guidebook for life.

2. Setting standards for our marriage, raising kids, and managing finances

”Marriage is to be honored by all and the marriage bed kept undefiled because God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.” Hebrews 13:4 CSB

MARRIAGE- We started to seek out ways to protect our marriage and family at all costs. Sexual sin can creep into a marriage easily, especially if there are already open cracks and doors for the enemy to walk through. For example, In our old marriage, we were okay with looking at other people as “eye candy.” Over time that grew into being okay with porn, promiscuity, lust, and sexual desires that weren’t with our spouse. However, in our new marriage, we made the choice to honor God by honoring each other. We took the scripture above to heart and made a vow to one another, “My eyes are for you, My heart is for you, My body is for you.” Throw away all the “options” in the world and choose to have eyes, heart, and body for your spouse only. Honoring each other as husband and wife is a beautiful way to honor God.

KIDS- It’s often the principle of priority that we get wrong. We can sometimes put more effort went into nurturing their desires, hobbies, and activities over nurturing our marriage. Nurturing our kids is natural and necessary but if we aren’t careful we can put our marriage on the back burner in the day to day of raising kids. We realize now that our relationship with Christ comes first, then our relationship with one another followed by our roles as parents to Noah and Cali. It's important to remember your relationship with God leads to a better marriage which helps lead to healthier parenting. We love this scripture…

”Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” Deuteronomy 6:5-7 CSB

Our kids need to be reminded of the value of living lives devoted to God; let this be the value that echoes throughout the rooms of your home.

FINANCES- We DESPERATELY needed to set some standards for ourselves here. During our “old marriage”, we both had separate bank accounts and never checked them. When we started valuing what God does, we found that “order” and “stewardship” were both good to God. We knew we wanted to be good stewards of our money, so we opened a joint bank account that was visible to both of us. We began to take inventory of how we were spending money and where we could cut back. The last year has been a slow year in our business which has been HARD to say the least. However, when tensions have risen, we are quick to work through those by communicating and aligning back with our values… Are we still staying on top of categorizing our expenses? Are we spending when we shouldn’t? Are things in order where they can be? Finances are hard to manage when times are tough, but staying on the same page means facing it head on TOGETHER. Plus, we remember that God always provides us what we need (Matthew 6).

We want to encourage you to make time at least once a week to touch base with your spouse on the important things in life. Remember that what’s important to God should be important to us as believers. Sometimes our discussion starts like, “Hey babe I want us to be on the same page about _____ and I’m not sure that we are; can we talk about that for a minute?”

Today in our marriage, we value the idea of being on the same page, and often circling back to our values and morals together helps get things back on track.

Prayer for today: “Lord, you are the pioneer and perfecter of our lives. We know that you have plans for our future and hope. As we grow in our walk with you, help us to grow in unity. Help us discover what it means to follow you in all we do. We want to be on the same page with one another and as we surrender to you, bring peace and unity to our marriage. Amen.”

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be blessed,

Armando and Liz