 love, especially when it's reflected in our relationships and we're so glad you're joining us for hope today and you're a Tom and Amy and we're really excited about our guest today, Tom, because it is going about relationships. It's about relationships, about marriage. You know, marriage was God's idea. You know that, right? We know he designed it to be a very good thing. Well, coming up, we're going to have a discussion about marriage with Brad Rhodes. He and his wife, Marilyn, found themselves disillusioned and disappointed shortly after the honeymoon. In fact, on the honeymoon, well, Brad will share with us a revelation of God's grace for their marriage and a fresh conviction of the need for investing in their marriage. It transformed their hearts. It transformed their relationship. It's called a grace marriage and it's going to be a great discussion. You don't want to miss it. A grace marriage just sounds good. I mean, maybe you're like me. You've been married for a couple of decades, almost three decades. Listen, more grace, more grace, more mercy. And guys, you know, this is the season where it's cold outside. The season has shifted. We need our coats. The atmosphere has changed, but what we do not want is a cold marriage and a cold relationship, or a cold relationship with God, or a cold football game. Are you going to say anything about my Steele? Well, that's what I'm wondering. I'm rocking my Steele insignia here. I'm thinking Tom is bold with his Steele fan base right now. That's right. Well, they play tonight, so we're hoping for good things. Although our guest is a big University of Kentucky fan, he told me, and the opposing quarterback is from Kentucky. Isn't this a weird night for football or is it me? Thursday, they do it. They do? I'm used to Sundays and Mondays. It is a weird night for football. Well, just thinking of, you know, like talking about football, but sometimes I think in marriage, you can feel like you're on opposing teams, right? Like offense and defense. And so I think like one of the things with marriage, I feel like even just hearing about our guests with the honeymoon, there's so many stories. We all just keep it real. The honeymoon was rough. I feel like there was tension. I remember on our honeymoon. There's everybody I've talked to. There's not one person. There wasn't some type of warfare that comes in, but I think it is so evident because it is a covenant. Because marriage is so sacred. It's so set apart. It's God's idea. And so I think even in our culture and our world where there's so much divorce, so many people want to give up. It is rough. It is hard. I mean, we just see all these things happening in our culture. I mean, I even think of like recently you hear about Will and Jada. Like they were separated for seven years. I mean, honestly, this is a real thing that people are going through. So I think it's important for us as Christians to be honest. And I'm like, Oh, everything's good with my marriage. Now y'all know you struggling. We go through hard times. You got to call your girlfriend be like, Oh my gosh. And that is why I escape and watch all of these Christmas movies on all the time. Thank you God for the season. It all works out at the end. Everybody meets the right person. They fall in love at the right time. You know, there's no mistakes. The problem with that is that that's not real life. It's not. You don't see them paying the bills together, doing the laundry, arguing over how to discipline the kids, what to do with this decision. That's not happening in those movies. That's why we escaped that. But we want our real life, our real relationships to really bring the grace of God in them. So I'm excited to talk about a grace marriage. When did you start playing Christmas music? Last month. Last month. You're not going to hear any Christmas music. I love it. Well, you know, most married couples, they don't think about the condition of their marriage until they encounter turmoil, especially guys. We can be really that way. Brad and Marilyn Rhodes wed after a brief courtship but were quickly confronted with intense marital challenges. They say the honeymoon was over before the honeymoon was over. And as they began to prioritize each other, God transformed their marriage from reactive to proactive, from performance to grace. And in their book, The Grace Marriage, we'll learn some tips to make your marriage great. Brad Rhodes, welcome to Hope Today. Thank you. Well, sorry that Marilyn couldn't be with us today. I'm sure she'd have some interesting perspective because this whole thing about your honeymoon, I mean, you were the quintessential courting your wife and wonderful and everything. As soon as the marriage happened, you were a Claude. Okay, can I say that? You were like pretty much a Claude. Can you tell us what happened? Well, Marilyn told me, she said, you were great at dating. You are horrible at being married. She said, and we actually, our first fight actually was at our wedding reception. We didn't even make it to the honeymoon before we had our first fight because I was rude to the photographer and she was, I got tired and grouchy and yeah, it definitely didn't get off to the right start. Well, tell us about a grace marriage versus the, we already mentioned like performance based marriage. Tell us what a grace marriage is. What is a performance based marriage? Maybe you need to tell us that too. And then what does a grace marriage look like? What a performance based marriage is, is love is given and taken away based on how well your spouse is doing. So your spouse is having a good day and they're being really thoughtful and kind and checking on you. And then you're really nice in return. But then your spouse is having a hard day and it's distracted and it's cold and then you withdraw from them or you snap at them. So the marriage is kind of on the roller coaster of the performance of the spouses. A grace marriage is different. A grace marriage is built on the grace and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. Like the foundation of the marriage is, well I was yet a sinner, Christ died for me. How do I love my spouse as I've been loved? So I love my spouse despite my spouse's struggles as opposed to holding their struggles against them. So just yesterday, Marilyn, I did something that bug Marilyn. She addressed it with me when we talked, but our marriage is as great this morning as it was yesterday. Why? It's because our marriage is based on grace. So love and kindness and gifts and physical affection. It's just, it's a free gift of grace because I choose to love you. It's not a reward. Just like God gave us a free gift of grace because he chose to love us and gives us not based on our merit, but based on his love. Could you talk a little bit about intentionality? Because listen, we're all going to say we love each other. We're all going to say, hey, we've got Jesus at the center. But what is the intentionality and how is that a great contributor to a great marriage? Oh, it's a great question and a huge contributor. It's the more time you put into something and the more intentionality you put into something, just the better it works. One author said, nothing is great by accident. And one of our biggest keys is to get people to spend time together. I mean, if couples would spend significant one-on-one time together, a lot of our marriage issues would go away. I mean, now I think I saw a stat that the average parent spends 12 hours per week per child activity. Somebody said, you don't have time for dating. We'll check your screen time. You look at marriage theologically and everything. It warrants our time. It warrants our attention. It warrants our creativity. But now the creativity is in the courtship and the wedding itself. And then you just settle into a complacent marriage and 40 to 50% fluff the tracks and end up divorced. And it's sad. Well, it very much is sad. You told me when we were talking before the show, a lot of churches don't really have things for marriage. They've got things when there's a problem, but not things that are sort of preemptive towards the problem. Well, you are so right. The Communio Barna study shows 72% of churches have no marriage ministry. The typical church, and this was our church before I became marriage pastor at our church. We did premarital counseling and crisis counseling. You know, I've had pastors say, you know, I noticed the only thing I was missing in the marriage ministry was the marriage itself. It's like, okay, we'll get ready, get you ready for marriage. And if you ever just hate each other and want to divorce, call us and we'll pour a ton of resources in you and hope we can fix you. And I just realized that's just a bad model. So the vision would be that every Bible believing church would have an effective discipleship shepherding strategy for marriage. And that's what grace marriage does. And, you know, as a pastor, I love your website. It is just loaded with resources. It's at gracemarriage.com if you're interested in going there. But how do we shift the drift when our marriage is drift? Like, how do we even recognize that it's drifting? And then once we see, wow, it's way off course. How do we get it back on course? That's a great question. What we need to do is flip the norms. Because now the norm is stagnancy and complacency with 40 to 50% enough divorce. We need to make it so the norm is when you get married, you talk daily, you date weekly, you spend time together. This is just how you do marriage. Because why did our marriage fly off the track so quick? I did marriage pretty much like everybody else does. You know, flurry of courtship, get married, settle in and just supposed to go okay on autopilot cruise control. And then it doesn't. What happened? And then people in a flawed way to say, oh, we don't love each other. You shift the drift by choosing to spend time together. It's like we're going to prioritize our marriage over other things. As one author said, if anything comes ahead of your marriage other than Jesus, it will slowly die. It is saying I will give my marriage off the top time every week and everything else has to schedule around it. As opposed to just somehow trying to find time for one another, which we all know that doesn't work. I just love these like tips you're sharing about having a grace marriage. And I just want to ask you, Greg, is that what about the couples that I think, you know, a lot of times we hear like, okay, I'm working through things. But there's sometimes you just hit these plateaus, you hit these places and there's not breakthrough. So how do you have grace when it's just like we're at this, we're at our wit's end, we don't know what to do, we've done everything we can. How does that effectively work in those situations when a marriage is truly on the rocks? That's a great question. You need outside help. You need a biblical counselor, you know, a pastor. You need to seek outside help and just remind yourself, you know, I'm under the grace of God, God's sovereign. I'm okay. And we need outside help to help our marriage when you can't work through something together, which is oftentimes the case. I mean, first year of our marriage, Maryland asked for us to get outside help. And Claude, as Tom called me, you know, I did that since you know, we're not going to air our dirty laundry to everybody else. So no, we're not talking to an outside party. So you know how that will, how will that work for me? So it's having the humility to say, look, we're stuck. We're not getting anywhere. We need outside help. I have been on the Claude spectrum. Okay. So there's no, no, no judgment here. I don't know. I think it might be a guy thing to be the Claude a little bit more, but, you know, all the women are shaking their heads. Yes, here. But I'm sure Jean's shaking her head at home. Yes. But let me ask you about communication because communication, we always say that's key. The part of communication is how to give and receive criticism a little bit. One thing I liked, I put a little note in here about going positive to go positive five times as much as you are negative in a situation. Could you just speak to that whole communication criticism area? That's wonderful. That's wonderful. I think the Gottbin research shows it's like takes five affirmations or positives to offset one piece of input. So you want the overall atmosphere of your marriage to be affirmation, positivity, looking for the good, looking for evidence of grace, encouraging one another while it's still today. But criticism, well, input's part of it. Wounds from a friend can be trusted and, you know, you don't just, grace isn't just ignoring everything and just presuming everything's okay when it's not. It's grace is dealing with the issue. So yes, primary positive. But two, if something's a barrier in relationship, you just need to talk about it. Value your spouse and your marriage enough to have the courage to do it. And then grow in being able to listen and then share with an appropriate tone where understanding is primary and being heard is secondary. Because that scripture says a fool loves their own opinions. You know, a wise man seeks understanding. So if we can get people where their primary goal is just to understand my spouse, input works a lot better. Absolutely. Well, let me ask you about grace in your marriage and related to physical intimacy. This is probably something that we don't think about related to grace, but it affects that area as well. It does. And when your atmosphere, when the atmosphere of your home is grace, it's a safe place. It's a calm place. It's not harsh place. I don't feel like I'm walking on eggshells. My spouse is quick to forgive me. They focus on my positives. I just feel the grace of God through my spouse toward me. That creates an atmosphere that there's much more likely to be physical intimacy. When you have a controlling atmosphere that's harsh, that's difficult, that's challenging, there ends up a lack of desire for intimacy and the couples end up not coming together. So really grace opens up the doors for greater and more meaningful intimacy. What about grace in times of crisis? Because we each individually, not necessarily as a couple go through crisis together, but sometimes we're each in our own crisis. How do we extend grace in those times when you've just had it? You're fed up. You're irritated. You're frustrated. And sometimes we even say, listen, the grace is out. We've had three years of child health crisis. I mean, like not sleeping. My wife gets shingles twice. I get the privilege of doing a heart cath because I'm under such stress with trying to figure out what's wrong with one of our children. And it was brutal. I mean, we were both barely getting by. I mean, but we both put each other under grace, recognizing that we're both trying. Now, was I the best spouse in the world? Was I a lot of fun? No. For a full year, when we go on a date with my wife, we'd sit down at the restaurant. She'd just start sobbing. I said, what, the Grace marriage guy? They're going to be impressed. And his wife cries every time they go out. But she would try to hold it together in front of our kids. But to your question about grace in crisis, it's just like, I love Marilyn. And Marilyn loves me. She doesn't love how well I'm doing or how good I'm doing. And so our marriage actually grew closer in all that crisis because of the grace of God. If we didn't understand grace, we didn't have anything to really give each other much. I mean, we've had a full year where Marilyn was struggling with anxiety and depression regarding to with our kid. If I was demanding performance from her, well, you need to be nicer to me. You need to be more proactive. You need to desire me more. If it was a performance-based thing, the wheels would have come off. But when we came out of crisis, Marilyn called me and cried and said, thank you. And I said, what? She goes, for not like telling me to get in the word more, to exercise, to do all these things. She said, Brad, I was barely getting by. It was everything I had to get up in the morning. And you just loving me and letting me just walk my journey. Thank you. And only the revelation of God's grace allowed me to do that because the old brow is, well, of course you're not doing what you need to do this, this, this, this and this and poured things on her and the letter kills and it would have killed our relationship. Greg, thank you so much for your transparency and just sharing with you and your wife the things that you're walking through and going through. Because I think that is such a reality in marriage when you see your spouse is struggling and just being there can be really hard. And just, so thank you so much for sharing that. I just want to ask you about prayer. How important has that been in your marriage? How important is that when you're having a marriage that is centered and focused on grace? Well, it's, you know, prayer is, I mean, it's really the key to everything. You know, my mentor said God can do more in a millisecond than we can do in a thousand lifetimes. You know, my mentor, he's been so much time trying to perform well and so little time petitioning the Father. I mean, all the powers in God, all the powers in God. And when, you know, it's unless he moves and we were talking about, you know, prayers or relates to what Tom asked about churches across the country and people change. That won't happen unless God changes the hearts of churches and people. There's nothing we can do to change that, but God can change it in a millisecond. So prayer is vital, prayer is crucial. And when you pray and go to God and spend time with God, it settles you down because you abide in him. And then the fruits of the spirit and Galatians come out and people with the fruits of the spirit tend to be easily more easily married to than those that are always frustrated and stressed. Brad, one of the things I definitely want to us take a moment to address. Tell me what grace is not because I don't want to leave a wrong impression with people here. What is grace not? That's a wonderful question. I want grace is not tolerating abuse. It's not tolerating infidelity and grace is not ignoring issues. You know, big things will, you know, if I put my marriage under grace, I'll be a doormat. I'll give my spouse a jerk license. No, it's you just offer your love as a free gift to your spouse, but you address issues. And Maryl, don't tell me I love you and I love our marriage too much not to talk about this. So those are some of the things, some of the things grace is not, but it's really, we don't want anybody ever in the name of grace just tolerating things they shouldn't tolerate, narcissism, abuse, infidelity. Yeah. So can we drill down just to this person that's maybe watching that says, hey, my marriage is stuck right now. I don't know what to do. I don't know where, I don't know where to go, how to approach my spouse. I don't know, you know, we all just seem stuck. We're not going anywhere. So maybe speak to that person directly and even pray for that person. Absolutely. Well, you know, one, it's just like, when I was, you know, my year of collodness, you know, Marilyn was in despair. It's like, she said, she said, am I sentenced to a life of this? I mean, she was miserable. And then God opened her eye. God said, Marilyn, God spoke to me and said, I am sufficient for you. I'm enough. But Brad never changes. You're going to be okay because you're my adopted daughter. And your beauty doesn't come in Brad making you feel beautiful. Your beauty comes in being my unique creation. So the first thing I would say is go to God and find all your identity in him. It's not Jesus Christ plus a decent spouse and you're okay. Jesus Christ is all sufficient. And this relates to marriage. Pray, pray and pray, seek outside help, keep trying, don't give up. There's some wonderful crisis resources out there. There's, there's, there's intensives out there. There's good counselors out there. Don't, don't give up. Don't give up and really seek to be refreshed in the only place of true refreshment. Amen. Could you just pray for that person? It'd be a privilege. Lord, there's many people that are just hopeless and in despair and miserable and feel like things will never change and life has been so disappointing. And I pray that you would just, just fill them with life. Because scripture says you are the way, the truth and the life. You are the source of life. And I pray that, that you would replace hopelessness with hope. I pray you would change the hearts of oblivious spouses that are, you know, your word talks about in the proverb, you know, it's how sad it is for an unloved woman to be married. And we pray that you would open the eyes and hearts of husbands and wives all over this country to, to see your truth and to lay down their lives for their spouse as you did for them. Lord, we love you and we pray you, praise you. And we, we ask for miraculous transformation in millions of marriages around this country, not for us to have a better life, but for your glory and your beauty and your grace and your sacrifice to be demonstrated on this earth in Christ's name, amen. Amen. Brad Rhodes, thank you so much for being with us. The book is called The Grace, Marriage, How the Gospel and Intentionality Transform Your Relationship. Brad, give our best to Marilyn. We hope she's feeling better. Thank you so much and thanks for having me. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to have a time of ministry just for you. In this month of Thanksgiving, we're excited to send you the special Daily Gratitude Journal with your best gift. This easy to use journal will encourage you to bookend each day with short personal reflections that bring insight and intentionality to your busy and always changing life. How can six simple questions help you better navigate life's uncertainty? Bestselling author Tish Oxenreiter invites you to lean into the rhythms that each morning and evening offers with a twice daily thought exercise focusing on gratitude, truth, grace, and more. As you reflect on three key questions near the beginning and end of your day, you will be more poised and prepared for whatever God has for you in the hours between. Request your gratitude journal today when you give. Call 888-665-4483 or donate online at ctvn.org slash donate. Thank you for giving to Cornerstone Television. Don't you just love the word grace? Amazing grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. And I love the idea of bringing that grace into your marriage. Bring that grace into all of your relationships. As I was just at my daily discipline this morning of, you know, going through my one year Bible, I went through a scripture and I was like, this is perfect for what we're talking about today. And it's Hebrews 4 verse 16 and it says, In the Amplified, let us then fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace. The throne of God's unmerited favor to us sinners that we may receive mercy for our failures and find grace to help in good time for every need, appropriate help, and well-timed help coming just when we need it. So I think about like in our marriages, are we sitting on the throne of judgment, the throne of negativity, the throne of whining, the throne of, it's like what are we doing? Like his win is my win. My win is his win. We have got to extend this grace. Our father sits on the throne of grace and yet we come down on earth and we sit on our thrones of judgment. It's like what are we doing? We're here to extend that grace that we've received to others. And you know, in this relationship, is it a grace-based relationship or is it a performance-based relationship? You know, Sydney and Tom, this ties into like our relationship with God. Are we just receiving the grace of God? Are we working and striving and performing to earn it? It's not by his works, but my works. It's not that he loved me. It's that I loved him first. It's like, wait, wait, wait. We've got it wrong. We love because he first loved us. We've received grace so that we can extend grace. We've received forgiveness. We can extend forgiveness. So we are really believing God today, Sydney, for marriages that are struggling, that maybe we get off of that throne, whichever we've made it, and that we get down like God and we extend grace when they need it. They need help, right? Yeah. I love when you just did that, your quiet time, how God like so apropos for what we're talking today about the throne of grace and a grace marriage. And there's two things that are coming across my mind what Amy was sharing. And the first thing is when I think of the throne of grace is that one of the things that I know in marriage that I just want to share that has just been such a game changer, getting on my knees and praying, getting on my knees and interceding, getting on my knees and standing on the truth of God's word, God that you say that the two shall become one. You say that what you put together let no man put us under. You say that a three-stranded court is not easily broken. I start declaring these things. I start declaring the things that God has spoken over my marriage, over my husband, over myself, and I have seen time and time again coming into agreement with the word of God. I see things break, things shift. I've also something that one of my mentors once told me is she's like, Sidney, there's an issue. I say, God fix him, he's your son. And I also pray for him to draw closer to Jesus because a marriage is about two people who love God and when they have that revelation of the love of God they're able to love one another. And the other thing that I'm reminded of today that I think we have so backwards in our culture and I'll never forget it, something Dr. Keenan Bridges said to me before I got married he said, Sidney, a wedding is a funeral service. We say coming to the altar and altar is a place where you die and altar is a place where you sacrifice. That is what a marriage is a reflection of. Jesus is the groom and we are the bride and Jesus died for us and we have to lay ourselves down. So today I just want to encourage you what do you have to lay down at the altar? Sometimes we look like, I mean there's issues, you're like, you're doing this and that but sometimes I'm like, God, change me. Change my heart. Turn my heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Show me how to love. Show me what it means to love and love is all about giving, Tom. It is, you know, that's so good, Sidney and that verse that Amy read too, grace to help in time of need. What could be better? What is more needed than grace when we have a time of need and you know what? It comes when that need is there. God delivers that grace. He delivers that divine enabling what will get us to the place that we need to be. Seek him today, seek him for your marriage today. He loves you.