Faithful Foundations: Cultivating Emotional and Spiritual Maturity in Your Christian Marriage
Jan 26, 2024
Doug & Leslie Davis
Have you ever wondered what it truly means to have a marriage that not only survives but thrives? Join us, your hosts Doug and Leslie Davis, as we share insights into the essential threads of spiritual and emotional maturity and their impact on building a resilient Christian marriage. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom where we dissect the transformative power of maturity on communication, vulnerability, and ultimately, marital unity.
Imagine a relationship where challenges are met with grace, empathy, and a deep understanding of each other's emotional journeys. Throughout this episode, we navigate the complexities of expressing emotions in a partnership, especially for men who may wrestle with society's expectations. We offer you strategies to foster self-awareness and self-regulation, and we reveal how these emotional skills lay the groundwork for a stronger, more empathetic bond between spouses. Our dialogue dives into the direct correlation between the health of your emotional connection and the strength of your marriage.
Concluding our heart-to-heart, we reflect on the beautiful synergy between spiritual and emotional maturity. It's an incredible journey to witness how shared spiritual values and goals can lead to a more profound sense of unity and growth, both individually and as a couple. We discuss practical steps towards embodying the fruits of the Spirit within your marriage, and how this spiritual pursuit can enrich your relationship and deepen your connection with God. Embark on this enlightening path with us and discover how a vision-driven marriage can transform your life.
Have you ever wondered what it truly means to have a marriage that not only survives but thrives? Join us, your hosts Doug and Leslie Davis, as we share insights into the essential threads of spiritual and emotional maturity and their impact on building a resilient Christian marriage. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom where we dissect the transformative power of maturity on communication, vulnerability, and ultimately, marital unity.
Imagine a relationship where challenges are met with grace, empathy, and a deep understanding of each other's emotional journeys. Throughout this episode, we navigate the complexities of expressing emotions in a partnership, especially for men who may wrestle with society's expectations. We offer you strategies to foster self-awareness and self-regulation, and we reveal how these emotional skills lay the groundwork for a stronger, more empathetic bond between spouses. Our dialogue dives into the direct correlation between the health of your emotional connection and the strength of your marriage.
Concluding our heart-to-heart, we reflect on the beautiful synergy between spiritual and emotional maturity. It's an incredible journey to witness how shared spiritual values and goals can lead to a more profound sense of unity and growth, both individually and as a couple. We discuss practical steps towards embodying the fruits of the Spirit within your marriage, and how this spiritual pursuit can enrich your relationship and deepen your connection with God. Embark on this enlightening path with us and discover how a vision-driven marriage can transform your life.
Welcome to the Vision Driven Marriage Podcast. If you're struggling in your marriage, or maybe you're wondering if it's even salvageable, before you give up or before you let things get too hard, let us come alongside you and help you solidify your marriage. We offer biblical encouragement and insight to help you strengthen your marriage. Welcome to the Vision Driven Marriage Podcast. We're Doug and Leslie Davis, and today we're going to be looking at faithful foundations, cultivating spiritual and emotional maturity in your Christian marriage.
Speaker 2:
Why is spiritual maturity and emotional maturity important for us to talk about? That's a big question and the answer is because study after study after study that's done shows that spiritually mature and emotionally mature people have better relationships Right and they're not just their marriage relationship but all of their relationships.
Speaker 1:
So you know it's something that's an incredibly important thing for us to want to do, but you know you can want for something and not know how to do it. So we're going to be looking at how you, first of all, will look at the importance, but then also some of the signs that show you you're maturing in emotional maturity, and then we'll look at the importance of and some of the signs that show you're maturing in your spiritual maturity.
Speaker 2:
I know, in our interview with Robert Bass he spoke about spiritual maturity and how important it was within a relationship, and so you know, continuing to talk about that today is just going to be really important for us, because a lot of people, when they first get married, emotional maturity and spiritual maturity isn't even on their radar. I know it certainly wasn't when we got married and I think we're pretty lucky to have gotten through the first five years of our marriage because we were both very we were physically young when we got married. We were only 20 when we got married and we were both emotionally immature. I can say with a great amount of surety that I was much more emotionally immature than he was, and I'm thankful that it wasn't the other way around. I don't know if you're thankful for that or not, but I'm thankful that it was that way and not the other way around.
Speaker 1:
And see, as we look at both emotional maturity and spiritual maturity, something that has really stood out to me is that, as God tries to show me the places where I need to grow, he showed me that within my spiritual maturity. When I was spiritually immature, I was constantly looking to please myself, and so I was trying to fit God in a box and I was pleasing myself with the things that I did and the choices that I made. Spiritual maturity caused me to change my focus from pleasing myself to pleasing God and I started to grow spiritually. But God's also shown me that when I was even more emotionally immature, that I would focus on how everything affected me. It was about me. I thought that the circumstances were about me. I thought that Leslie's reactions to things were about me. When she spoke something that was, you know, a criticism, I took it personally, thought it was just about me, not about the circumstance.
Speaker 1:
And what God started to show me is, as I grow emotionally more mature, I think about her and I think about the circumstance more than I think about how things affect me.
Speaker 1:
So spiritual maturity was when I started looking to please God instead of just pleasing me. Emotional maturity really started to develop when I thought about the situation and thought about my wife, I thought about Leslie more than I thought about how things were all about me. And I know you know, if we say that out loud, we realize that it's very emotionally mature to think that everything's about us. But think about how true that can be and how, still today, there might be a time where, because you're tired or because you're struggling, or maybe just because it's at the place you're at right now, you have this belief at a subconscious level that everything's about you. The good news is there's an emotional maturity that you can develop, and God will give you the ability to develop it. And so we're gonna look at both emotional maturity and spiritual maturity. But let's just get a little caveat she'd like to share with you.
Speaker 2:
So what I hear you saying is that emotional maturity and spiritual maturity kind of go hand in hand.
Speaker 1:
They kind of do.
Speaker 2:
They kind of go together.
Speaker 1:
And we want you to seek both.
Speaker 2:
but but so if you're growing in one, you're going to be growing in both of them. If you're growing in spiritual maturity, because your emotional maturity is going to be growing also. So the importance of emotional maturity within your relationship. Being emotionally mature in your relationship brings in some qualities to that relationship. That's going to edify your relationship, it's going to strengthen your relationship, and here's some of the characteristics of that. Emotional maturity cultivates a strong foundation for communication. If you've heard us say it once, you've heard us say it a million times, communication is really, really important, and not just any communication, but good communication. And a person who is emotionally mature is going to lean toward the good quality, effective communication.
Speaker 1:
Right, not just speaking, but being able to listen as well, and being able to recognize when your spouse didn't understand something, so that you can maybe use different words or somehow explain it differently, because communication only becomes communication when what's spoken is understood. Now, when we're emotionally immature, I told you that is our response, because we're focused on ourselves, but as we start to mature emotionally, communication becomes something that we understand at a different level. It's about being not just heard, but being understood and being able to be patient. It might take more than once before something's clearly communicated.
Speaker 2:
And another aspect of good communication is being able to express your emotions effectively. A lot of times when we have a negative emotion, it's going to come out as anger, and that anger can be explosive or ineffective in the relationship, and so a good sign of effective sorry, a sign of emotional maturity is being able to express your emotions in a way that is good for the relationship.
Speaker 1:
What's another reason that emotional maturity is important?
Speaker 2:
It helps a couple navigate the challenges with grace.
Speaker 1:
Right, because you are going to face challenges. You're going to face things that go wrong. You've heard us talk about things going sideways. It's just a normal part of life. Things are going to happen that you didn't predict. When they do, you're going to have to jump in together to be able to navigate some of those things. But if, when I share what's going on, leslie feels attacked, emotional maturity is going to decide whether you're able to communicate through that and be able to have grace and understand that you really weren't attacked. It was the circumstance that was being discussed, not you personally, but emotional immaturity. I'll just go ahead and say in my life, whenever I'd hear a legitimate critique, when I was more emotionally mature than I am now, I'd hear a legitimate critique and I thought that it was all about me and it was an attack on me. I felt defensive and that didn't help anybody. It definitely didn't help us navigate the problem. But emotional maturity helps you navigate those things with patience, with love, with grace.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, with grace, with grace. Another important aspect of having emotional maturity in your relationship is that it allows you to foster empathy and understanding A lot of what you were just talking about being able to navigate some challenges together and be empathetic towards your spouse's plight in how they face that challenge.
Speaker 1:
Well, and one of the things that we see a lot and we've not only seen it in our own relationship. We've seen other couples tell us that they've dealt with the same thing we've dealt with as we were more emotionally immature and please don't misunderstand that we want to continue to mature emotionally. We still want to constantly grow and constantly mature there. But when we were even more emotionally immature than we are now, there would be times where something would happen and Leslie would express what was going on and all I could focus on was the way she said it or the tone that she used, and sometimes it didn't feel well. Here, we've all been there. You felt like, well, I didn't deserve to catch grief like that, instead of realizing as I became more emotionally mature.
Speaker 2:
That grief wasn't about you.
Speaker 1:
It had nothing to do with me and you know she well, for example, there would be a couple of times where something would happen and the reaction seemed bigger than the situation demanded. With emotional maturity, I was able to understand oh, that's a trigger from something that happened five years ago, it's not even about now, or when our children were small. The fact that the kids had just destroyed everything was really affecting the way she was able to communicate something much more than the current situation did, and so I was able to develop empathy as I emotionally matured to understand that there were times where, rather than trying to protect myself, I should just be empathetic about what's going on in my spouse's life.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, because sometimes, when we had little kids, our life was pretty crazy, wasn't it?
Speaker 1:
Right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it was. It was crazy. So let's run down the signs of emotional maturity and we've talked about I think we've talked about all of these signs already or at least given an example.
Speaker 1:
But we want to make sure that you have a chance to catch them. So it's something that you can either acknowledge and say hey look, this is happening, we're growing or you can try to focus on so you can put them in place in your relationship.
Speaker 2:
Yes. So the signs of you of emotional maturity is effective communication, and that includes active listening and expressing your emotions with vulnerability.
Speaker 1:
Now that's going to be something that's a little difficult. In our interview this month with Robert Bass, one of the things that he was explaining was that a lot of the things that men in particular do when they are being emotionally immature is that they don't actively listen. They problem solve, they jump in or they don't know how to show any kind of vulnerability because they're afraid that that will show weakness and somehow discredit their masculinity. One of the things that he was encouraging us and our listeners to do was to realize that it's okay, as a man, to be completely vulnerable with your spouse and to be able to do that. You know it's difficult, but it doesn't. It doesn't in any way threaten your masculinity. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things that will allow you to be a more courageous and stronger man than you ever could have been before, because you're opening yourself up to criticism, recognizing that it's okay and that you were able to do so in a way and in a place where you can grow.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely so. Another sign of emotional maturity is self-awareness and self-regulation. I know, as we were originally talking about the outline of this podcast, that's the one thing that stood out the most to me was that a emotionally mature person is going to be able to regulate their negative emotions. And I, when I was going through college, when I was taking my classes and was doing some research with one of the professors that I had at Illinois State, he developed a scale that would determine how well a person could regulate their negative mood and in that negative mood regulation, that person was less likely to be depressed, was more likely to communicate effectively, was more likely to connect in their relationships in a more solid way. So many emotional health benefits and so many physical benefits within those relationships just from being able to regulate your negative moods, and that's a sign of an emotionally mature person.
Speaker 1:
Right. And once you realize that it's not just about you and you're able to self-regulate some of those moods, it also opens up the opportunity for your spouse to come alongside you and help you with the regulation of those negative moods. Because we know we've talked about this a lot where if you explode emotionally, rather than being able to communicate the way you want to, it often puts your spouse on defense and then they say things they shouldn't say and instead of listening, you're thinking about what you're going to say to counter what's being said at you. And we know that's just a bad deal. But as you start to realize, okay, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna self-regulate, I'm gonna regulate my mood, I'm gonna try to communicate better, I'm gonna be listening, I'm growing emotionally, I'm becoming more mature. It allows your spouse to come alongside you and and help you continue that regulation. So, yeah, you have to start by self-regulating. It's incredible, when emotional maturity is shown, that your spouse then can come alongside and help you continue that regulation.
Speaker 2:
It's amazing Right as long as it's not critical.
Speaker 1:
Right right.
Speaker 2:
Not in a critical way, because that would undermine the connection in the relationship.
Speaker 1:
But the calm, being able to communicate, the pointing out what you see, recognizing what you see and, especially if your spouse has had trouble in the past, being able to regulate whatever emotion it is. You know we've been talking earlier about anger, but it doesn't have to be anger whatever emotion. If they've had trouble regulating it and you recognize that they are regulating their emotion, showing emotional maturity, I want to challenge you to to recognize it out loud. I see what you're doing and I appreciate it so much. Thank you for for controlling that mood. I am so grateful for you.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely yes. Positive words of affirmation go a long, long way.
Speaker 1:
And it kind of leads to one of the other signs of emotional maturity.
Speaker 2:
Which is empathy and compassion.
Speaker 1:
Right, and so if you can put yourself and your spouse's shoes in any way now, you're not going to be able to do it perfectly all the time. We know that men and women are very different. We achieve the same things. We accomplish the same things. We don't always take the same path to get there, so there's times where you understand exactly what your spouse is doing and there's other times you don't. However, you can always have the compassion to realize. As different people, but with shared goals, you can listen to them, you can have compassion for what they're going through, you can have empathy for what they're going through, and I guarantee it will put you in a position to be able to develop and grow as a couple and it will allow your progress and your emotional maturity to really continue to thrive.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So to recap the signs of emotional maturity effective communication, self-awareness and self-regulation and empathy and compassion. So if you see those things operating within your relationship, you know that you have an emotionally mature spouse or you're emotionally mature in yourself, and so that goes a long way. But that's not the linchpin and the whole thing. The greatest part of it, is what we're going to begin to talk about now.
Speaker 1:
Now, leslie alluded to something important. We want to go ahead and deal with that right now. We're going to be talking about spiritual maturity. If you seek after spiritual maturity, your emotional maturity will come along also. If you're just seeking after emotional maturity, you can grow in that area, but your spiritual maturity won't automatically come along. So if you focus on your spiritual maturity, it will bring your emotional maturity along as well. It's one of the things we talked about just last week. Go back and check out last week's podcast episode as we look at the fruit of the spirit. It's something that Robert Bass had talked about. He's got a book on it. It's amazing, but, as his book, hidden Fruit is something that we recommend that you check out as well, but it talks about how we can truly grow in our spiritual maturity. So what is the importance of spiritual maturity? Well, first of all, it will align your values and your beliefs, so it'll create a harmony within your relationship.
Speaker 2:
And I think this is one of really an important step for especially a young couple who have, or maybe just dating. But the Bible talks about not being unequally yoked and so when you have a believer and an unbeliever coming into a relationship together, you are not going to have aligned spiritual goals or even spiritual beliefs, and it's going to create a hardship in that relationship that God doesn't want us to have to struggle through.
Speaker 1:
That and it's not something that you necessarily can just look and see, but occasionally there will be. You may both be believers, but there's just a spiritual maturity difference, and so as you look at being able to not only align your values and your beliefs with one another, but to be able to grow, now that doesn't mean that you're both going to be at the same exact level of spiritual maturity, but it means that you're going to continue to mature together, and that's always going to be a blessing. Now, a second reason that spiritual maturity is so important is that it nurtures spiritual growth as individuals, but then also as a couple. So it goes back to what we were just saying as an individual, you should constantly be looking to grow in your relationship with the Lord, and then, as a couple, you'll be growing as well. Or, excuse me, as you grow spiritually, as a couple as well, you create a marriage.
Speaker 1:
That is an amazing place. It's a place where you can heal. It's a place where you can be vulnerable. It's a place where you can find rest. It's a place where the noise of the world can be temporarily shut off so that you can truly get the rest and the health and the healing that you need.
Speaker 2:
I know that's a really important concept to me because that is part of my own personal testimony that our marriage created a safe place for me to heal from childhood wounds that I had carried into our relationship and because of where he was at spiritually, I felt less criticized In fact I didn't feel criticized at all and that allowed me to overcome some of the criticism that I had lived under when I was a child growing up. So it gave me a place to heal and so I am, you know, living proof that a relationship that is spiritually maturing you know that spouses that are spiritual, are gaining in their spiritual maturity can heal places and wounds in your heart that you're carrying.
Speaker 1:
And then another important reason why we need to continue to grow spiritually, mature spiritually, is that it will strengthen a spiritual connection, a spiritual intimacy, within your relationship. We've talked before God created the marriage relationship to be intimate and it's easy for us to understand physical intimacy. It's a blessing, it's an awesome thing. When we talk about emotional maturity, it's going to allow a place where you can have emotional intimacy, but then spiritual maturity is going to let you have spiritual intimacy. That is an amazing thing, and God wants you to be closer together than you were yesterday in all three of those areas become intimate physically, become intimate emotionally, become intimate spiritually.
Speaker 1:
And so what are the signs of spiritual maturity? As we look at some of the signs of spiritual maturity, just like with emotional maturity, either some things that are going on so that you can say, hey, look, we're doing this, or some places where you can focus and ask God to show you how you can grow in those areas. Spiritual maturity is going to show a commitment to spiritual growth, because every one of us is going to have some struggles. Every one of us is going to have some failures. We may even feel like we're taking two steps forward and three steps back from time to time, but spiritual maturity is going to show itself in a commitment to that spiritual growth, and there's several things that you can do that'll demonstrate a commitment to spiritual growth.
Speaker 2:
One of them is a personal commitment to prayer and a couple commitment to prayer.
Speaker 1:
The first one has to come first Committing to pray as an individual, to pray for your spouse, to pray for your marriage. It's going to have to come first. We hear a lot of people feel like they're really struggling with being able to pray together and you know we've had a whole episode on that. But let us just remind you that it doesn't have to look the way the other couples you know have it look in their relationship. It may be that one of you prays and the other agrees and prayer doesn't say anything. You may both pray out loud. It may be that you take terms. It may be it's in the morning, before you start your day. It may be at the end of the day before you go to bed, it may be anywhere in between. But there's not a wrong way to do it other than choosing not to do it at all. That's the only wrong way. So making a commitment to prayer is one of the ways that you can start to see that progress in spiritual maturity. But there's other things besides that.
Speaker 2:
The other thing is a commitment to spiritual disciplines, and you know, when you start unpacking the word discipline we think of, the first thing we think of is punishment. You know well, somebody's being disciplined, but that's not the discipline that we're talking about here. The discipline that we're talking about here is being strong enough to consistently do the do spiritual disciplines that are laid out in your life, whatever the Lord is calling you to do. One of the spiritual disciplines in my life that I'm currently seeking to get better at every day now is Bible study every morning, and it didn't used to be that I was in the regular habit of doing Bible study in the mornings, and the Lord has just laid that on my heart to do a Bible study, to be in the word reading every single morning. What are some of the other biblical or Christian spiritual disciplines?
Speaker 1:
Well, there's quite a few of them, you know, and studying the word's important prayer is important, but some of the others there's a place where, every single day, you know you have an opportunity to seek God's will for your life. As you're praying, to say God, I know you have a plan for me, what does it you want me to do? But then, once God shows you those things from Bible study, plugging them in as a spiritual discipline. Too many people have memorized Scripture but they're not choosing to live by it. So if there's something God showed you to do, especially if it's within your marriage relationship, having the discipline every day to do what it is that God showed you is a spiritual discipline that will be important. But worship is another one. To worship God every day and it doesn't have to be singing, it can be but to take a moment every day to show God what you believe he's worth is worship. And so you know, having that plugged into your life. And there's so many other disciplines, you know the discipline to give, the discipline to truly, truly lift up others in prayer, some important things that God wants you to do.
Speaker 1:
But then, on top of all of those things, another sign of spiritual maturity is when you can, as a couple, can have a shared spiritual value or a shared spiritual goal, and we talked about the fruit of the Spirit last week. You know we're going to see all of those things play out with these shared values and these shared goals. You know, and it may be, that one of your shared goals is that you'll grow in part of the fruit of the Spirit. You want to grow in kindness or grow in faithfulness, or grow in gentleness, but it might also be that, as a couple, you want to commit to doing something else that God's laid on your heart. For example, you may decide that you want to do one ministry a year where absolutely nobody but you and your spouse knows you did it, just one thing. But you know, being able to set those spiritual goals and those spiritual values as a couple will cause you to grow not only individually in your maturity, but as a couple your spiritual maturity will grow.
Speaker 2:
Another example of a goal that a couple could have and it comes from Amos 3.3. But Amos 3.3 says does not to walk together without both agreeing, and that can be the basis for a couple to decide that they're not going to make a decision without both spouses being on the same page, and so nothing moves forward unless you've talked about it and that you're on the same page and being disciplined in doing that, and I think a lot of couples would benefit from that.
Speaker 1:
I do want to throw out one more thing. When we're looking at spiritual maturity and one of the signs of spiritual maturity, we know that, as we do any of those spiritual disciplines, there's things God wants to teach us, and God will show us who he is and what he does for us. One of the other signs of spiritual maturity is that, as God consistently shows you what he's doing for you, he builds up those same character traits within you so that you can do those for others, starting with your spouse. So, as God shows his love to you, he builds up the ability to love. As God gives you grace, he teaches you how to give grace to others. As God is merciful to you, he shows you how to be merciful to others. And all of those things, as you see, not only will build your spiritual maturity, but your emotional maturity will follow right along with it, in lockstep.
Speaker 2:
So, recapping what we've said, what we've talked about and I think this is one of the most important points of this is that if you focus on your spiritual maturity, becoming more mature spiritually, your emotional maturity is going to follow.
Speaker 1:
And again, as you go from trying to please yourself to being focused on pleasing God, you'll start to see your spiritual maturity come. And as you think everything's about you and you move from that to realizing that everything's not about you and start thinking about others, especially your spouse, your emotional maturity will come along, and we know that both of those things will make your relationship stronger. They'll make your communication better. They're going to draw you not only close to one another, but closer to God as well, and so we're dug in. Leslie Davis, this is the vision-driven marriage, and we continue to pray that God will solidify the marriage.