Thriving Amidst Differing Spiritual Beliefs in Marriage

Navigating spiritual differences within marriage and parenting can be a tricky terrain, but we promise you, it's not an insurmountable obstacle. We’re here to guide you through maintaining your personal faith practices even if your spouse isn't on the same spiritual wavelength. We've faced these challenges ourselves and have emerged stronger and more understanding, sharing the lessons learned with you so you don't have to walk this path alone. Follow us as we debunk unrealistic expectations of a Christian spouse and emphasize the importance of focusing on your own spiritual journey rather than your partner's. 

In the second half of our discussion, we delve into the challenges of spiritual parenting and managing varying beliefs within a marriage. We underline the need for humility in discussing faith-based matters and the significance of understanding each other's personalities for maintaining spiritual accountability. Turning to the delicate issue of imparting faith to children, we ensure to remind you that God's ways often surpass our immediate understanding. We wrap up our conversation with the power of prayer, especially for those grappling with difficult marriages or non-believing spouses. We offer our prayers for struggling marriages and the opening of hearts to Jesus Christ. Join us for this enlightening discourse immersed in grace, truth, and hope.

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Transcript

Heidi Franz: 0:00

Melanie, we received this question on social media. I'm trying to figure out how to model spiritual practices and other things without my husband's participation and without modeling disrespect towards him. What do I do when my spouse is not spiritually engaged? I think this is a question that many women across the globe can say yes, that's me. I desire to raise godly children, but I'm doing it alone, even though I'm married to a Christian. Why is this so hard?

Melanie Simpson: 0:41

Yeah this is going to be a sensitive one, so I just am praying on the front end for just tender hearts and grace as we wade into this topic. We do not, in any way, shape or form, suggest that we have all the answers. This is discussion.

Heidi Franz: 0:58

Welcome back to parenting, to impress your go to podcast, to learn practical ways to love God and love others and impress this on the hearts of your children. I am your host, heidi Franz, and I am joined by my dear friend, melanie Simpson, two moms who have made a lot of mistakes but have found grace and truth along the way. Melanie, what is it within us that creates this vision of what a Christian man is supposed to be?

Melanie Simpson: 1:28

It's a great question, heidi, and I mean I think part of it is our human nature. We look to the things we don't have, so our eye is often drawn to I mean, think about it just in terms of like social media, right, our eye is drawn to the beautiful home that we don't have. The comparison, our eyes are drawn to the people that we think are doing it right.

Heidi Franz: 1:51

Yes, as if there is a right way, and we have that desire to be like that person and for our spouse to be like that person, even though we're only seeing one side of that person.

Melanie Simpson: 2:02

Yeah, and I know I also don't want to say there's nothing wrong with aspiring to be a growing, maturing Christian. That's a good thing. But I think that gets distorted, as so many things do in this fallen world, when it is twisted up with a sinful expectation of forcing change, of forcing something that just simply is not meant to fit.

Heidi Franz: 2:25

Yeah, so let's start with that word expectation first I think a lot of the struggles that I have had in my own marriage of my husband not meeting my expectations for what it looks like to be a spiritual leader are because they were my expectations 100%. For me too, they were unrealistic. They did not take in his giftings and his personality. They were what I was foreshadowing on him.

Melanie Simpson: 3:00

Yeah, that's the same of mine as well. It kind of came to a head and ultimately I apologized because what it really boiled down to was I had not been loving Jeff with a gospel love. What I mean by that is I expected him to love me the way I wanted to be loved, the way I thought I should be loved. I expected him to be a certain way because I thought that was how he should be. That's not the way we love according to Christ. We love people because God loved us and we love out of the overflow of the love that God shows us, not because I want to manipulate you to be the person I think you should be.

Heidi Franz: 3:43

Oh, so true. So that is the first place that I would encourage all women to start is what are my expectations for my husband? What are God's expectations for my husband? And then looking at and understanding the spiritual direction looks different between personalities, and it looks different between women and men. For sure, one of the things that I've seen in our home is I did more of the spiritual direction when my kids were little. I was a stay at home mom and so I had more time with the kids, and so we did a lot of Bible reading, a lot of discussion about the different characters in the Bible stories, and I played a different role than my husband did when he came home from work, and I can't expect him to be something that he was not.

Melanie Simpson: 4:39

Well, and the way your family structure is set up. You know he's been gone from home for seven or eight hours a day and then you expect him to do the same work you did in the three hours, two hours that they had before the kids go to bed. That makes zero sense and yet somehow in our human brains we make it out to be that they have, yes, work outside the home for all these hours, then come home and do the same thing I just did. Yeah, very true.

Heidi Franz: 5:02

Another thing that I see in walking alongside my husband in spiritual training of our children is the understanding that I am responsible for myself. He is responsible for himself. We are not going to stand before God as a married couple and God says how did you serve me, how did you love I? Stand before God. He stands before God. We are both responsible for what we do. Yeah.

Melanie Simpson: 5:36

And that's a hard one, because when we enter into the marriage relationship, we're told to become one. We're a team, right, and so those are all true. In the temporal world On earth, you are a team, you are working together, but in terms of your walk with the Lord, it's your walk with the Lord. You are not in charge of your husband's walk with the Lord and praise God. He's not in charge of mine because he got. Keep your stuff to yourself sir.

Melanie Simpson: 6:05

Praise God that he deals with me individually and that I will be called to stand before him by myself. That's going to be enough, quite frankly Right.

Heidi Franz: 6:15

So my second encouragement to wives is to stay in your circle. Focus on what you need to focus on. It is so easy to see the spec in our husband's eyes, all the things they're doing wrong, and we fail to look in the mirror and see how we are nagging, how we are bitter, how we have expectations, unrealistic expectations, unspoken expectations that our husbands can never match up to.

Melanie Simpson: 6:53

That's a great point, heidi. I think that when we start to feel that discontentment, when that bitterness starts to kind of we can feel it, maybe we get short tempered or we withdraw. Whatever that looks like for you, that is a great time to go. Okay, I'm going to push pause. Something's not right here. The Holy Spirit is convicting me of something. Instead of lashing out at him, I'm going to go take this to the Lord in prayer. God, show me what is happening inside me, what's rubbing me the wrong way here and I'm telling you that was part of that apology to my husband was for all of these years. If I had just taken the time and spent half that time, that I was worried about what you were doing or not doing, and I had spent that time in prayer and confession and repentance holy smokes, that would have been a totally different marriage.

Heidi Franz: 7:41

Yeah it would have been a game changer. Yeah, I completely understand that. Proverbs 27, 15 and 16 says a nagging wife is like the dripping of a leaky roof in a rainstorm. Stopping her is like trying to stop the wind. It's like trying to grab olive oil with your hand. And does that not describe how I can become when I am so focused on what my husband needs to change instead of God working me?

Melanie Simpson: 8:19

And can we talk about the root of that for a second? Because I do think, in all honesty, sometimes that comes not. Sometimes, probably more often than not it comes from a place of fear. Right, we are worried, we're fearful that unless our husband does X, then our children are not going to get the fullness of the spiritual education, training, and so that's, that's fine. Acknowledge that fear and even maybe speak to your husband about that, say, you know, I realize that I am, just, I'm scared that we're missing the boat here. Call it what it is, yeah. And then say what do you think about that? Do you feel the same way? Is it just me? Am I, you know? Am I blown set of proportion? And then be willing to accept his answer, ladies, because it's not always going to be what you want to hear.

Heidi Franz: 9:06

Well, and we can't force our husband to do something that they're not going to do.

Melanie Simpson: 9:11

Yeah, or be somebody. They're not Exactly. I mean, we were talking about this before my husband. His preference is not to read out loud and I can remember just beating a dead horse here about having him read devotions out loud at dinner. Well, God love him, he did it, but I know it wasn't out of a place of joy and excitement. To you know, share God's word with kids and kids see that.

Heidi Franz: 9:33

Yes, they see through what's going on?

Melanie Simpson: 9:37

Yeah, Instead, I think the solution or the better option is speak life into your husband, encourage him and look for the ways that he is gifted and how he can use those gifts. Point them out to him.

Heidi Franz: 9:49

Right.

Melanie Simpson: 9:49

Thank you for the eight days work that you just put into support our family, whatever the thing is. Exactly.

Heidi Franz: 9:55

First, Peter, three, one and two, says wise in the same way, submit yourself to your husband so that if any of them do not believe the word and I would say any who are not following the word they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. We aren't winning them over by our words. It's by our behavior, by our submission, by our respect, by our love. That's how we're gonna win over our husband, not by the nagging and the bitterness and the constantly letting them know how they are failing you.

Melanie Simpson: 10:42

And I would say, though the danger is, that can't be performative that has to be from a true heart place, where you are doing it because of your love for God and your love for his word, that the overflow in that case, will be a pure spirit. If you are doing it strictly to manipulate and to be like I'm doing it the right way, I love God, and you don't, it's gonna backfire. I mean, it's ultimately you're not responding from a pure heart.

Heidi Franz: 11:09

You said something that I thought was so crucial is that we have this fear that if spiritual training of our children does not look exactly the way it should look, then our children are not going to follow God, and we've said it multiple times on here. I don't care how you parent. God has given your child free will and they have to decide. Are they gonna submit to God's authority or are they not? I could be the Mary Poppins of parenting and spiritual parenting, but if my child does not take that spiritual learning to heart and as their own, it doesn't matter what I did.

Melanie Simpson: 12:01

Yeah, and ultimately, can we just talk about? Salvation is a free gift of grace from God. God puts that call on our hearts to turn to Him in repentance and faith, and we cannot bully or force or manipulate anyone to come to faith, and that includes our husbands in terms of how they live out their faith. I mean, you can petition, you can ask, but at the end of the day you can't bully somebody into being the Christian you want them to be.

Heidi Franz: 12:35

Yeah, I think it's also important to understand that we can't turn our husbands into our girlfriends.

Melanie Simpson: 12:45

Okay, say that again and explain it.

Heidi Franz: 12:48

We can't turn our husbands into our girlfriends. My husband is my best friend, but I also have girlfriends that hold me accountable, encourage me, and I think sometimes we have this idea. The relationship with our husbands are supposed to look like the relationship with our girlfriends and it's not going to, and we can't expect our husbands to. For the most part, my husband is not my accountability partner In our relationship. I don't think it would be healthy for him to be my accountability partner all the time I need him to be my husband.

Announcer: 13:30

Yeah.

Melanie Simpson: 13:30

I remember hearing a very prominent Christian speaker, author, pastor, and he talked about how he confided in his wife and his wife did likewise. Some issues that I don't know that I would be the best person for my husband to share that sort of information with and, honestly, it's because of my own sin, it's because of my own issues, that I couldn't process it well. I wouldn't be the best person to walk with him through those things. I'm 100% in agreement, and I think for a long time I beat myself up about that though, because I heard this person, this very well known godly man, say that this is what a marriage should look like, and I took it to heart, and so I felt like I was not being a good Christian wife because I didn't want to talk to my husband about those things Interesting. I say that by way of encouragement and caution that it's just another way that, in this age of inundation of information and all the things, just because something works well for somebody else, another marriage, another couple, doesn't mean it will work well for you.

Heidi Franz: 14:37

And accountability with my husband and my personalities, I think I would lose the safety of our marriage. I think you need to take in the personalities of each of you. Would having accountability between the two of you, let's say, in how much you eat, in how much you exercise, it's gonna depend upon your personalities, it's gonna depend upon your relationship. I know of married couples who exercise together and that accountability is huge. I know married couples that if a wife has said, hey, can you hold me accountable for what I eat, it creates a judgmental situation and insecurity. So step back and go. Is this something that is going to build our relationship or is this something that I need to leave to a girlfriend?

Melanie Simpson: 15:37

And I will just quickly add we are not in any way suggesting this is something you do in secret.

Heidi Franz: 15:43

Oh goodness no.

Melanie Simpson: 15:44

Our husbands are fully aware of the topics that we discuss with our girlfriends, our accountability partners. We are not withholding that information. This isn't that sort of thing.

Heidi Franz: 15:53

I just wanna make sure that's clear. Yes, thank you.

Melanie Simpson: 15:56

So what else would you say would be either beneficial or would be a stumbling block in a marriage like this, where you, as the wife, are wanting to have a household that looks a certain way in terms of how you go about training your children in spiritual matters, and maybe your spouse is not on the same page?

Heidi Franz: 16:16

If you have the opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom, you have, let's say, approximately eight hours during the day for you to be a spiritual leader, to read those Bible verses, to read those Bible stories, to listen to those spiritual songs. And, yes, it will look different in the evenings when your husband is home. But how prideful of us that we think that God only works when the spiritual legacy to our children is looking the way we think it should look.

Melanie Simpson: 16:54

Just as we're having this conversation, Heidi, what I keep hearing is we need to stay in our lane.

Heidi Franz: 17:00

Yes, get out of the way.

Melanie Simpson: 17:02

Yeah, get out of the way. Choose to intentionally speak words of encouragement into our husbands. Have frank conversations, I mean as we're able, when we don't have the emotions high. Yes, yes, do it after you've spent time in prayer. Oh, yes, very much so. So that you're getting your heart motive right. Am I coming to this conversation in an attempt to manipulate and bully and whine?

Heidi Franz: 17:26

and nag. The Holy Spirit just brought something to mind Be very careful when you're with your girlfriends.

Melanie Simpson: 17:32

How you speak about your husbands.

Heidi Franz: 17:35

I find it so interesting how girls we're constantly encouraging each other with an oh, yes, uh-huh, oh I'm sorry, oh, that's really hard and we can get into those situations with a group of girls and we're sharing that about our husbands and we take those words of quote, quote, encouragement as, oh, it must really be bad Because she just said, oh, I'm sorry and we need to be so careful how we present our husbands. I'm not saying not being real Right, but we need to be careful how we present our husbands to our friends. And, yes, ask for prayer, but don't let your prayer turn in to an opportunity to get kudos.

Melanie Simpson: 18:30

Gossip is gossip. Yes, so you can gossip about your husband, absolutely. If you're not taking those things to the Lord and your husband, but instead just going straight to your girlfriends, that's gossip Right and that is not helpful. I just think it is such a challenge to maintain a Christian marriage in this world as it is.

Melanie Simpson: 18:51

Very much so I mean, you know it takes a lot of time and energy and prayer. It is even harder when you perceive that you're not on the same page as this, as this person suggested that they're not. But at the end of the day, heidi, I think you said it well I stand before the Lord. Jeff won't be anywhere near me, yeah, but what do I need to be doing in my own heart and my own walk with the Lord so that my children are seeing Christ in me? Right, my husband sees Christ in me. I'm not living for that pat on the back, I'm just living for the joy and the blessing of faithful walk with God.

Heidi Franz: 19:32

And speaking of training up our children in the way they should go Proverbs 22, 6, deuteronomy 6, 5 through 9. Talking about impressing upon our children the commandments, there is nothing in those verses that says I want you to do this, if your spouse is doing this. These are commands for each of us individually and we need to understand that. No matter what our spouse is doing, whether our spouse is in the word himself, whether our spouse is sharing the word with our children, we are commanded to love God out of obedience, love others and train our children how to do that as well. In closing, I want to ask this question how are you supporting your husband's spiritual growth? You know we've talked this entire time about when your husband's not doing what they're supposed to do in your mind, but turn the tables and think but how am I supporting him to be able to lead our family spiritually, not to nag him, guilt him, all the other emotions crying. How am I supporting him to lead spiritually as God gifted him to lead?

Melanie Simpson: 20:57

One more thing, because it came to me when you were saying that women, our husbands, are not stupid when we offer them hey, I will get the kids breakfast ready if it would be helpful for you to have that 20 minutes to spend time with the Lord. If they say I don't want to, you don't need to present them with 15 other opportunities to spend time with the Lord. Accept their answers. If that's not something that is helpful to you, then go pray about it and let it go. But, like Heidi said, I'm going to keep coming back to that nagging wife. The dripping roof. Don't be the dripping roof, it does nothing.

Heidi Franz: 21:35

I'm going to close with 1 Peter, 3, 1 and 2, one more time, because I think it's so important for us to remember that God is God and he doesn't need us to step in and try to be him. Verse one wives in the same way, submit yourselves to your own husband so that if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Melanie, can you close us in prayer, please, sure?

Melanie Simpson: 22:12

Lord, god, what a gift marriage is and thank you so much that you have designed men and women to come together in a marriage bond. But, lord, we also come before you because, as human beings, we have a hard time in marriages when our expectations are unvoiced, unmet, when things don't go the way we think they should. So, god, would you just, by your spirit, remind us that you are in charge, you are in authority and you are sovereign over our marriages. And, lord, by your spirit, would you remind us that our relationship with you is just that. It's my relationship with you.

Melanie Simpson: 22:54

And, god, would you release us to focus on that and not fret and fritter and worry and be anxious and fearful about the things that we think are not being taken care of? Would you give us your peace and reassurance that you are a God of redemption and restoration and all things? And, lord, I just speak a special word of prayer over the marriages that are just really struggling right now, god, especially for a marriage where there is a partner who is not a believer. God, I just pray that you would soften that heart and call that spouse to you so that they might come to know your son, jesus Christ, as our Lord and Savior and Lord, we especially pray for the children, that they would come to know you, come to love you and that you would get all the glory. Amen.

Announcer: 23:45

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