Pray to Always Keep Love Alive in Your Marriage

What do you do when love feels as though it’s slipping away in your marriage? In this episode, Stormie shares how prayer can reignite love, soften hardened hearts, and restore the warmth that once filled your relationship. She explains how even the strongest marriages can fall into emotional distance when small hurts go unhealed, and forgiveness is withheld. But there is hope—and it starts with inviting God’s presence back into the center of your heart. Learn how to identify signs of hard-heartedness, break through emotional barriers, and pray with authority for deep healing and renewed intimacy. Whether your marriage is struggling or strong, this message offers powerful truth, honest encouragement, and practical steps to keep love alive for a lifetime.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Stormy O'Mardian Podcast, where we explore the power of prayer to change lives, strengthen faith, and deepen relationships. Today we're focusing on what it takes to keep love alive in your marriage, especially when life brings stress, disappointment, or emotional walls. Discover how prayer, worship, and repentance can transform your heart and revive the love that once felt lost.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Hi, I'm Stormy O'Mardian, and I'm talking today from my book The Power of Prayer to Enrich Your Marriage. This is episode four. Pray to always keep love alive. When you get married, your heart has found a home. The home of your heart can be warm, loving, kind, comforting, joyful, grateful, and full of life and light. It can also be cold, uncomfortable, unkind, unloving, ungrateful, joyless, and miserable. Taken to the extreme that home can become locked up because one person has shut off the Lord or their spouse or both. But you can unlock the door again if you have the right key. Jesus said, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. That's from Matthew 16, 19. God has given us keys of authority when we pray, and also the power to change things according to His will, even our hearts. Now this is something we must pray about as soon as we can in our marriage. When a husband and wife harden their hearts toward one another, they have hardened them toward God as well. That causes them to stand on shaky ground. This is an all-too common and subtle trap people can fall into. So it's important to start praying about it before anything like that happens. And don't think it can't happen to you. First of all, don't trust your heart because it can grow hard over something you believe is completely justified. The Bible says he who trusts in his own heart is a fool, but whoever walks wisely will be delivered. That's from Proverbs 28, 26. God never sees hardness of heart as being justified. That's because when you receive the Lord, he sends the Holy Spirit to live in your heart and soften it. God said in the Bible to his people that he would put a new spirit within them and take away their stony heart. That's in Ezekiel 11:19. Anyone allowing their heart to become like stone has not given the Holy Spirit free reign in it. When you invite the Holy Spirit to flow freely through you, your heart will be watered and good things will grow. It's imperative that you continually remind yourself that when anything goes wrong in your marriage, no matter what it is, Jesus has given you the power and authority to take charge of it in the spirit realm through prayer. That doesn't mean you attempt to dominate your spouse or get heavy-handed and make ultimatums. It means you recognize the enemy's footprint and take charge of what is happening by praying for God to break through that atmosphere of your marriage and the condition of your heart with His love and His power. Every time you pray, you are opening the door to welcome in God's healing, deliverance, transformation, and restoration. We all know that forgiveness isn't always a one-time thing. There are layers of forgiveness that need to be recognized in any situation, especially in a marriage. Sometimes we think we have forgiven, but we don't realize how many layers there are. And if we don't deal with each layer, hardness of heart can set in and build up to monumental proportions. Only a heart that is soft toward God and the things of God can forgive that much pain so readily. King David spoke of his heart often, saying such things as my heart fails me, Psalm 40, 12, my heart is severely pained, Psalm 55. My heart is wounded within me, Psalm 109.22. My heart within me is distressed, Psalm 143.4. When we have suffering in our heart like that, in a prolonged and unresolved way, our heart can grow hard. But David's heart didn't grow hard, and the reason for that is his heart was filled with repentance and worship of God. Those two heartfelt attitudes will always soften a heart or keep it from getting hard in the first place. A hard heart doesn't happen overnight. It happens little by little as layer upon layer of crustiness fills up, and then it can become covered with a seemingly impenetrable and invisible coat of armor that is designed by necessity to protect it from being pierced through or broken again. Sometimes hardness of heart doesn't fully manifest until later in life. It's possible your heart can get broken too many times, causing forgiveness to stop flowing. So there is thick scar tissue forming that eventually hardens like a callus around your heart. But the good news is that no matter how long those scars have been there, they can be completely removed by being in the presence of God. The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart. That's from Psalm 3418. We need a heart of repentance and worship that says, I confess where I have not had a perfect heart toward you, Lord, or my spouse either. I worship you and praise you for your forgiveness of me. Because you have forgiven me, I can do nothing less than forgive my spouse too. Your heart is never too hard for God to soften. God asked Abraham, is there anything too hard for the Lord in Genesis 18, 14? He wanted to know if Abraham doubted what God could do. Our heart can get hard because we doubt that God can and will actually do what seems impossible to us when it comes to our marriage. When we start believing that God cannot change the situation or our spouse or us, we lose heart, and that's when hardness can set in. But God is the God of the impossible. So when you become discouraged, say to the Lord, there is nothing too hard for you, and then ask him to soften your heart. See Jeremiah 32, 17. There are many things you can do to keep your heart soft. Here are just a few of them. Ask God every day to speak to you through his word. You can become hard of hearing when it comes to God's word. And if that happens, your heart will grow hard as well. If you shut off yourself to God's truth, you will lose understanding. It happens like that. When you don't open your heart to hear God speak to you through his word, you can lose the opportunities he has for your blessings and healing. God's word also reveals what's in your heart. The Word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of the soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Hebrews 4 12. You can be blind to what is really happening in your heart if you don't allow the word of God to penetrate it and reveal it to you. Next, seek God each morning with your whole heart in prayer. The Bible says the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth to show himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to him. That's from 2 Chronicles 16 9. It also says, Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with the whole heart. That's from Psalm 119.2. The Bible says to invite him to reign powerfully in you and touch your heart every day with his love. When you seek after God with all that is in you, you will find him, and he will soften your heart. It says that in Deuteronomy 4.29. Next, praise God throughout the day, no matter what is happening. When you worship God, you invite his presence in greater measure into your life. In his presence your heart is changed. Always. The hardness melts away. When we have a pure heart toward God, we can stand in his presence and receive a new heart from Him. Psalm 24, 3 through 5. There can come a time in any marriage when you may lose patience with waiting to see some kind of change in your spouse that you've been desiring. You grow tired of being disappointed and waiting for a breakthrough that never comes. Your heart begins to close a door that was once opened between you. Your heart can grow cold and hard, and it will seem as if the love you once had has died. But the good news is that God has the power to completely turn things around. He is the God of miracles and restoration who makes all things new. Jesus, the ultimate source of resurrection power, can resurrect love that has died and soften your heart toward your spouse. He can bring your marriage to life again, and it can happen quickly. That's because when we pray for someone, our heart softens toward them. That then can cause their heart to soften toward us as well. Would you pray with me about this? Oh Lord, please reveal any hardness in my heart toward my spouse. Melt it like ice in the presence of the sun. Fill my heart with your love. Take any negative thoughts and feelings and overflow my heart with goodness, mercy, and kindness. Don't let me succumb to being stubborn or prideful in my heart. I want to walk in your counsel and not my own. Cut away from my heart all that is not of you, so that I can serve you with all my heart and soul. Give me wisdom to do what's right, so that I will walk in my house with a perfect heart. Help me to seek you with my whole heart and hide your word in my soul and keep all of your commandments. Teach me to understand and keep your law. Give me a full heart of love for my husband every day. Thank you that you are a God of new beginnings. Help me to take steps that signify a new beginning in me today. Create in me a clean heart and make my spirit right before you. Give my husband a heart that longs to know you better, so that his heart will be soft toward both you and me. Where his heart has already become hard, I pray that he will turn to you and find your presence waiting for him. Open his heart to hear what you are speaking to him. If ever either of our hearts start to become hard, soften them toward one another. Cause your rivers of living water to flow in and through us at all times to soften and mend and restore. Heal any brokenness so that the damage is not irreparable, and take away any scars that form. Help us to always feel genuine love for one another. In Jesus' name I pray. Now if you ask God every day to show you if there is anything in your heart that shouldn't be there, and also what isn't in your heart that should be, then ask the Lord to make the home of your heart a showplace for his love. Ask him to keep his love alive in you and in your husband for one another. And never underestimate the power of your prayers in Jesus' name. They have God's power behind them when they are prayed from a right heart. And don't grow weary in doing good, for in due season you will reap a great harvest if you don't lose heart. Ask God to keep you from ever losing heart. He can do the impossible, even if you can't see how right now. And God is the expert on keeping love alive. Love is who He is, and He shares His love with you whenever you seek Him.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Thanks for joining us. We've covered some of the most common challenges couples face and how prayer can be the key to breakthrough, healing, and long-term connection.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

God is faithful to work when we invite him into our marriages. If you're ready to keep growing and discovering what God has for your relationship, pick up the power of prayer to enrich your marriage. Available now wherever books are sold.