Submit your questions to MailBox Monday: podcast@thebusymom.com

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Aaron & Jennifer Smith have been married for over 12 years and currently, have 4 young children. Ever since they married they have purposed to serve God and build His kingdom together. In 2011, they started blogging to encourage husbands and wives to center their marriage relationship on God. The newest addition to their ever-growing online ministry is their Marriage After God site, podcast, and book. The Marriage After God podcast is published every week. Aaron and Jennifer share candidly and honestly about personal stories of failure and victory in Christ in hopes of encouraging other couples to be used by God for His extraordinary purposes. You can find them on social media @MarriageAfterGod @HusbandRevolution and @Unveiledwife.

Marriage After God

Since the very beginning, God’s design for marriage is for husbands and wives to be ambassadors of holy love to a hurting world. Still, so many couples stop short at happy and wonder why they feel unsatisfied. Rather than “you and me against the world,” God calls each couple to the rich and meaningful mission of “you and me for the world.”

Aaron and Jennifer Smith, popular marriage bloggers at HusbandRevolution.com and UnveiledWife.com, transparently share their journey from a marriage in crisis to a marriage built on Christ’s redemptive love. Through fresh biblical insight and intimate stories of their own struggles and victories, this book will guide you toward a God-centered, ministry-minded, and thriving marriage. You will discover the signature marks of a marriage after God, find principles for building an unshakable marriage foundation, learn how to let God’s story take the lead in your love story, and recognize the tools God has already equipped you with for a missional life together. Filled with helpful illustrations, this thorough and practical book will empower you and your spouse to dream, decide, and do as you step hand-in-hand into God’s ultimate purpose for your marriage.

Your oneness is also meant for witness. God has purposed your remarkable, romantic, and redemptive relationship to be a powerful light to a dark and hurting world. This is your invitation to marriage as God intended – a life-saving, hope-inspiring, and transforming force of God’s love.

Connect with the Smith’s: Unveiled Wife Blog | Unveiled Wife Instagram |  Husband Revolution | Husband Revolution Instagram |  Marriage After God | Marriage After God Instagram

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TRANSCRIPTION:
Hey everybody, this is Heidi St John. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today at my little corner of the Internet. Today is Friday, May 24th—it’s episode number 770. This is Meet-My-Friend Friday and you guys know by now I love having guests on the show who are following hard after God and today is no exception. My friends Aaron and Jennifer Smith are on the show with me today, we’re going to be talking about all things marriage. If you want to be encouraged in your marriage day and really get a reboot as to why God calls us to marriage in the first place, stick around. I think you’re going to be encouraged.

All right, so you guys know that we are mostly through, I cannot even believe it, mostly through the month of May. For those of you who’ve been following me at MomStrong International and are doing the Scripture Writing Challenge. Today’s Scripture is found in Psalm 37:3-6. I’m going to read it for you:

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in Him, and He will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday.

This is the Scripture Writing Challenge for today. You can download the months challenged free at MomStrongInternational.com and we have recently added a Spanish version to this Scripture Writing Challenge. So I want to just encourage you—you can have your kids join, there’s copywork for you, there’s cursive copy work for those of you who are doing the premium a Bible Study with us—but check it out at MomStrongInternational.com. One of the things I love about the Scripture Writing Challenge, particularly as it relates to what God does with people that are on the show and when that verse is—you know, that we are writing it out—is it almost always corresponds to what we’re going to be talking about on the show that day. And today’s no different.

One of the things I loved about this versus, I was looking at it earlier today, is it starts out saying—trust the Lord and do good, dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. That’s something we don’t hear a lot about in the culture today. And we’re going to talk a little bit about that today because my friends Aaron and Jennifer Smith are on the show with me today. I’ve been following Jennifer for quite a while at Unveiled Wife—she began blogging a long time ago and I’ll let her tell you about that.

But her husband’s also a blogger at Husband Revolution and they speak and write about marriage in a way that’s very powerful and relevant. I know you guys are gonna be encouraged. Arron and Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

[Jennifer] Thank you for having us.

[Aaron] Yeah, we are honored and humbled.

[Heidi] Well, I am the one who’s honored and humbled. I love your passion for helping parents, and husbands and wives in particular, see themselves through the lens of Scripture. And that’s really what you do. And you guys have a brand new book out. But before I get to it, I would like to introduce our listeners to you. Is this the first time you guys have been on my show?

[Jennifer] I think so.

[Aaron] Yeah.

[Heidi] Yeah, I was thinking it’s 770 episodes. That’s bad. My bad. Cause you guys are doing amazing work through your blog and through your ministry to marriages. And you guys have been married what, 12—little over 12 years now?

[Jennifer] Yup. 11 and a half years.

[Aaron] January will be another year.

[Jennifer] Yup.

[Heidi] Another trip around the sun. Yeah. And those, uh, 12 and a half years around the sun have been fruitful for you because you’ve had four young children, right?

[Jennifer] Yeah, we do. Elliot is our oldest, he’s six and a half. Olive is—she just turned four. Wyatt is two, and Truett is nine months.

[Heidi] Oh my goodness. I love it. So you guys are in something I like to call—the wonder years. So everyone listening to me, they’re like—oh, Aaron and Jennifer and the wonder years—Heidi had to say it! This is when your kids are like, in awe and hope of everything around them. And you can really teach them about the creation of God and the wonder around them. And it’s also before they start to wonder if you know what you’re talking about. So it’s like—it’s like a twofer. These are some of my favorite years, ever. So you guys having fun? Do you feel overwhelmed yet?

[Aaron] It depends on what day it is.

[Jennifer] I was going to say yes and yes. They are in that season where they just love to explore and I feel like we’re learning a lot from them.

[Heidi] Yeah, it’s the wonder years, I’m telling you. Yeah, it’s so good. And you guys have an online ministry. You’ve got a podcast, and a book. I want to circle back to it, but by way of introduction, tell everybody what it is that you guys are up to you. What’s your passion right now?

[Aaron] So right now we’re putting a lot of attention and focus into our podcast, Marriage After God, you know, you’ve been doing it way longer than us, but we’ve been enjoying it. We do it together. It’s a weekly podcast where we talk about things that the Lord is teaching us in our marriage. And then our book, A Marriage After God, which comes out June 4th— is the culmination of just all of the things that the Lord’s been teaching us. And it’s a movement where we are trying to start to get marriages to recognize that God’s got them, He’s given them gifts to use for His kingdom.

[Heidi] I think it’s important too —one of the things I love about you and your stand together for the Lord is that what you’re really doing is reminding people that God’s Word is relevant. And it was relevant when it was written. It’s relevant now. And the most important thing that we can do is couples, if we want to follow God, is to have that strong biblical foundation. And you guys cover that in your book. So when you talk to people and they come up to you, say at a conference, and they’re talking about marriage and you want to encourage them to build their marriage on a strong foundation—where’s the first place that you have them start?

[Jennifer] The Word of God. We encourage them to dig in and—you know, we don’t want them to look at and take our word for it. We want them to understand and know who God is. We want them to apply His Word to their life.

[Aaron] As I was writing this book, I did a lot of the heavy writing on the front end of the book and then Jennifer did a lot on the backend. And I kept telling Jennifer—I was like, I just want to stop because the Bible’s already said this better than me. I’m like, no, this is just, you just need to read Galatians. So we start the whole book off with the Word of God is our culture. We don’t apply ourselves to the current culture. What we do is we apply to the foundation—that never moving, never shifting, Word of God. It is our foundation.

[Heidi] That’s right. And it’s amazing to me, and I’ve said this many,many times on the podcast—the church, in an effort to be seen as relevant, is really moving away from the only thing that makes us relevant, which is the unchanging, living, breathing Word of God. And you have done a very good job of having that be the foundation for everything else that you say after that, right?

[Aaron] Yeah. And we often tell people—they’re like, well, what about the stuff that you do? You don’t understand, or that is controversial. I say—well, if it’s something I don’t understand or it doesn’t make sense, it’s because I don’t understand it yet. Not because it’s wrong.

[Heidi] That’s right.

[Aaron] We get to change ourselves to what the Bible says, not the other way around.

[Heidi] That’s exactly right. And when we talk about having that strong biblical foundation, can you for just a minute, you guys, give listeners kind of a glimpse into what that looks like for you? Because I think one of the things we’re struggling with in the culture right now, and definitely we’re struggling with this privately and corporately as a church is—how do we grow? I think we’ve become very dependent on pastors and youth pastors—like we think this is the way we grow, we go to church. But actually it’s so much more than that. So in the day to day, if someone’s listening to this and they’re like—man, I want a strong biblical foundation, I believe the Bible, I want that to be the underpinning for my marriage, but I just don’t know how to do it. Can you give some encouragement as to how that might look?

[Aaron] Yeah. When I think about the Word of God, I immediately think of when Jesus was in the wilderness and He’s being tempted by the Devil, and He gets tempted with Scripture. You know, Satan presents Scripture to Him but takes out of context of course. And Jesus says—it’s not by bread alone that we live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. And the Word of God, all of it, every bit of it. Not just picking and choosing, not just reading the stuff that is the easiest to follow. But you know, we tell people that email in—hey, how do you do Bible time with your kids? Or what do you know, where do I start? I said, well, the beginning. Go to Genesis and just read through the Bible. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in there, but it’s all important. The Old Testament makes the new testament what it is. The New Testament solidifies the shadows that we have in the Old Testament. So you need all of it, every single bit of it, all the bread.

[Heidi] So let me get this straight. You actually would take issue with the teachers out there right now that are saying—hey, it’s okay to unhitch from the old testament that that’s so BC. What do you say?

[Aaron] Well, Jesus didn’t. Jesus references the Old Testament more than anything. Before the New Testament existed, there was only the Torah and the Old Testament. So we can’t unhinge any of it of it, it’s all relevant. Without the Old Testament, without the stories in the books, and without the historical evidence that we have in there—nothing we have in the New Testament matters. Nothing we have in the New Testament is true. So Jesus didn’t come and just start this new thing. He took from the old, the original stuff, the stuff that was unchanging—and just expanded upon it in the New Testament. And so you can’t have one without the other. You need the whole thing.

[Heidi] We can totally, obviously we could do a whole other podcast just on this. And that’s not what this is about. But can I just say—thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because I am increasingly frustrated listening to teachers who are saying—, —well, that’s so, you know, we can understand the book of Leviticus and some of this stuff’s really weird. And did a snake really talk to a woman in the garden? And I’m standing in the back there going—yes, yes, yes, yes. And it matters. So thanks for going off the script today and touching on that with me.

All right, you guys, I’m going to get back to why you’re here. So you guys have written that every marriage is unique and God has brought us together to serve the Lord. And I’m always telling audiences—God never does anything apart from a kingdom purpose. So everything that God does has something to do with the kingdom. It has something to do with something that we can’t see yet, but God can see it. And you outline that really well in Marriage After God. And Jennifer, when someone says to you—does it matter? This day to day mundane, seemingly mundane job of wiping little noses, and trying to carve out time for yourself, and hoping you can get to the bathroom by yourself, and then trying to nurture your marriage on top of all of that—Does it really matter?  Well, it goes back to this eternal significance. And when a weary mom comes up to you and she’s got tears in her eyes, cause we can all relate, right? She comes up to you and she’s exhausted, and she’s wondering, she’s saying—I don’t have time to invest in my husband right now because I can barely invest in my kids. Every ounce of energy I have, it feels like anyway, emotional and otherwise, is being poured into my kids. And she loses sight of that eternal thing that God is doing. How can you encourage that mom right now?

[Jennifer] Well, first of all, I just want to say I understand, I relate. I know what it feels like. God has given us and designed our bodies to experience so many different types of emotions and we do feel weary, you know, at times. But the point is that we do it with Him and we do it because of Him. And I have, I mean, I’ve been brought down low in just going from day to day to day to being able to be with my kids. And like you said, do all the mundane things. But the purpose is the ministry of reminding them, directing their hearts, whether it’s my husband’s hearts or my children’s hearts—that God is with us and He has a purpose for us. And that is the ministry that we’re supposed to be living out day to day.

[Heidi] Yeah, that’s right. And it’s your marriage, right? I mean you guys know Ann Dunagan —and uh, years ago her son Mark made me a sculpture because you know, homeschoolers. So instead of writing me a thank you note, he came back the next year and said—hey, I was so touched because I taught on Psalm 127 that tells us our children have been given to us, like arrows in the hands of a warrior. And really I was talking about that warrior that God sees a husband and wife together on the battlefield, the husband in front of his wife. That God says that the man is the leader of his home—shield up taking those darts. Ad I’m not standing behind him knitting a baby blanket. Right? I’ve got a quiver full of arrows on my back and I’m shooting those arrows out, my husband and I together. And that marriage relationship is very, very powerful. I think sometimes we lose sight of that. Have you guys seen —even Christian couples lose sight of the eternal power and the eternal significance of marriage in the culture today?

[Aaron] Absolutely. What happens is because we’re so internally focused and we’re—well, this isn’t making me happy. Or this isn’t turning out the way I want. And, you know—I’m not comfortable. This doesn’t feel good. And what happens is—we, both of us, have gotten a plethora of emails over the years of people saying—well, God wants me to be happy. Therefore, since I’m not happy, God doesn’t want me in this marriage. And so they start from the false premise in the first place that God’s interested in just their happiness. If that’s your premise, then you think that God’s here for just you anyway. And the moment that we become Christians, we get grafted into a bigger picture. We get grafted into His, the vocation of salvation, of souls—the vocation of, as we’re told in the Bible—of reconciling the world to the Father.

And so, when we are looking, when we look internally, then the only thing we see is what we want or what we’re not getting—rather than what God wants and what God wants to get from us, and for us. And it becomes a distraction. As it tells us in Galatians—if you seek after the flesh, you’re going to reap the fruits of the flesh. But if you see me after the spirit, you will reap the fruits of the spirit, which is joy, peace, patience, kindness. When you have those things in marriage—I mean, first of all, happiness marriages is just a fruit of that. You know—you’re like, well, when you’re joyful and peaceful and kind to each other, that’s just a happy place to be. But when you guys are chasing after God, when your hearts are with Him, when you want what He wants, and you’re walking in the spirit—the overflow of that—because the Bible often calls us the vessels. We’re wineskins, were jars, where you know—cups.

These are things that describes who we are and what that is is something that gets filled up and then poured out, filled up and poured out.

[Heidi] Oh, you just described parenting in a nutshell.

[Aaron] That’s exactly what it is. But when you recognize what it is we’re doing—so my wife, everyday she gets, the thing that gets to sustain her is not that she did everything well or that she did it right or that she got enough done. Because when you think of that way, those are the days you feel that most week the most as a failure. But when you recognize like man, like—I’m, I’m teaching my children about God, I’m, I’m exemplifying for them who god is in our life and how we follow him. I’m teaching them the way they should go as the Old Testament says, and we, we are actually discipling our children. And we’re raising up Christians. We’re building the Kingdom of God from within, from the people that God gave us, from the image bearers that we have in our own home.

[Heidi] Yeah, that’s right.

[Aaron] That’s the perspective that we have and it changes how we operate in our marriage because we recognize that this thing that we have is not just for us—but it’s because God has a mission for us to do in this world, He has a ministry for us to do in this world.

[Heidi] Yeah. It’s a kingdom purpose and God’s about the kingdom. I think sometimes we think that He’s about our glory, but God is resolutely committed to His own glory and He’s using marriage to bring Him glory. Right? I mean, that’s part of it.

I want to take this a little bit of a different direction for just a minute and here and hear a perspective from each of you. I wrote a book several years ago, for women, about marriage after I had seen up close and personal in my own family the devastation of divorce and what happens to children who are caught up in that situation. I am a product of divorce. Most of my siblings have been divorced. It’s very ingrained in my family. Jay and I are coming up on 30 years of marriage. We’ll celebrate our 30th anniversary in September. And that is the grace of God. It really is.

And part of it was learning and we’re continuing to learn, right?—how God wants us to treat each other. And I get emails all the time, I’m sure like you do, from husbands who say—I’m just so frustrated with my wife because a, b, or c. You know, pick anything. Right? Or a wife who says—I don’t know how to encourage my husband. Aaron, from not just a human standpoint—but obviously that plays in to it  because we’re human beings. But from a biblical worldview and reflecting the heart of Christ—what are some ways that you have found—because I often hear, you know we talk about all kinds of things in marriage, submission becomes as big issue and we dig into roles and we missed the heart of God. And when you have an opportunity to really bless your wife—after a long day, she’s exhausted, you’re exhausted. Hello. Can we just be honest? And you know that God wants you to love your wife, like Christ loved the church and you just think—I don’t care about the church right now I just don’t go to bed. I’m tired. Right? Talk to the guy who’s going—dude, I come home from work, I’m dead on my feet, my wife’s talking about the pipes that broke downstairs the kids are crying. How, what does it look like practically in that moment to minister to really be Jesus to your wife?

[Aaron] Yeah. Well, I mean, Ephesians 5:25 is clear. This is love your wife as Christ loves the church, giving himself up for her. And then that specifically talking about death on a cross, which every believer is supposed to take up their own cross.

[Heidi] Yup.

[Aaron] So if you think about it, just being a Christian to my wife, let alone being a husband her, I have to die to myself. I have to lay myself down. I have to  put myself beneath. You know—the greatest in the kingdom that will be the one that becomes at least in the kingdom. And so having that perspective of—I will lay myself down—which it is very difficult to kill my flesh in the moment if I’m tired, and I’m irritated, or the house is crazy. And so, you know, dying to myself is this the first thing. And then it says—washing her by the water with the Word.

So a part of it is constantly reminding my wife of what Scripture says about her. And it’s not beating her with Scripture. It’s reminding her and in a gentle way and saying—hey, like I know this was a hard day. Remember what you did was important. What we’re doing is important. Hey, look at the things you did do. Look how we’re pointing them to Christ. And also at times exhorting like—hey, we need to change how we’re being because our kids are seeing a bad example right now. So it’s not always that, and I don’t want to make it sound like I do this well. Dying to self is not easy.

[Heidi] No, actually I know, I think given the instructions that God gives to wives and the instructions that he gives to husbands, I actually kinda think that husbands have the harder role. I mean, He’s saying—love your wife like Christ loved the church. He died for her. And that you’re right, that dying to self is difficult. My husband has said something over the years to me, which has been so encouraging and I just heard him say this in Nashville a few weeks ago. He was talking to the men and he was just saying—listen, I’m going to stand before the Lord someday and I’m going to answer for how my family did or did not flourish because I’m the one who’s responsible. And I bear that responsibility. And so I love my children, and I love my wife, and I’m obedient to the Lord because I want to see them flourish. That’s my role.

And I thought that boy, such a beautiful way to see marriage and to see your role in it. Jennifer, I’m going to ask you the same question, right? So, a woman says to you—I’m just so tired. I’m just so done. I’ve nursed the baby for the 400th time this week. If one more person asks me for one more thing, I’m going to lose it. Not that I would ever happen to me, but if it did, hypothetically, and I came to you and I know my husband needs my time and my attention and I’m just so weary. What’s the advice you could give to that mom right now?

[Jennifer] I think what’s been evident in our marriage is communication and being able to tell him when I’m at my end and what’s going on in my life. But also, taking time to listen to him and saying—what’s on your heart? What are you going through? What are your needs right now? And just being able to meet each other with understanding and comfort for one another. And you know, I’m not going to say that submission is easy because I’ve wrestled with that over our time being married. But,  it is easier to submit to a man who submitted to the Lord. And so when I see that exemplified in my husband, when he leads me the way the Bible calls him to, it is a lot easier for me to submit to him and to fulfill my role and what God’s called me to do.

But you know what? I’ve also learned that I’m called to do that regardless of what he’s doing. And so there’s this walk that we’re doing, right?, toward toward righteousness and towards everything that God’s called us to in His Word to do. And practically speaking, that looks like a lot of messiness. That looks like, you know, going throughout our day and reminding each other that we’re on the same team, that we are present for each other. Sometimes it’s just a matter of saying—Hey, can you put your phone down so I could just talk.

[Heidi] Yea, right?

[Jennifer] But when he loves me, and like you guys were talking earlier, you know—loving me, like Christ loves the church that motivates my heart to want to meet his needs and to be there for him.

[Heidi] Well, you touched on something really important because I think that God created women to be born-responders, right? We were born to respond to the leadership of our husbands. Those of us who are married. My  grandfather said something really profound to Jay and I when we hit, I think we were maybe five or six years into our marriage and we were doing a study at our church on submission, and because I did not see it modeled well as a child or as a teenager, in fact, I saw it modeled very badly. And it damaged me in lots of different ways. My grandfather, my grandparents were married almost 75 years, so they knew a few things about marriage. And my grandfather was a pastor and he looked at me and he said—Heidi, you know what?  in a healthy marriage the issue of submission will never come up. If this is what you’re talking about all the time, something’s wrong. Something’s already wrong. Because my heart is to love your grandma, and to serve her, and to encourage, and bless her. And her heart is to serve, and to encourage, and to bless me. And because our hearts are for each other, and we want our marriage to honor God, we don’t spend our time arguing about roles in marriage where we want to obey the Lord. And the Lord says that the husband is leader of the home.

It was just amazing. I mean, it just, it was like a game changer for Jay and I, you know, to realize—oh—you know, and honestly, in the 30 years that we’ve been married, I can think of, maybe I can count on one hand the times when Jay has made an executive decision that I didn’t agree with. But the Bible teaches me that he has that role and that authority. But the point is he’s not just going to go—hey, Heidi, I bought a new car today. Sorry I didn’t ask you. He’s not going to do it because he loves me. Right?

[Aaron] Yeah.

[Heidi] We want to see each other the way that, that God sees us, which is why I so love your ministry. I think you guys are doing an incredible, incredible thing for young married couples in particular.  Your brand new book is coming out in just a couple of days. It’s called Marriage After God and we can find it MarriageAfterGod.com. But you guys—at the time this podcast airs, we’re still in the preorder, right? So people can get like bonuses—bonus time. So you know, like, it’s not hammer time—it’s bonus time. And people can actually, if they order your book right now, there’s a bunch of pre-order bonuses that they can get. Do they find that MarriageAfterGod.com?

[Aaron] MarriageAfterGod.com on the homepage, they can scroll down a little bit and there’s a form to fill out and wherever they printed it from, they can get access to the preorder bonuses so they can either order it from our store shop that MarriageAfterGod.com, or Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or anywhere. When the book releases, just as a little note—I’m you’re sure your audience will love thisit’ll also be an all the Hobby Lobby’s—which is amazing!

[Heidi] Fantastic! Love us some Hobby Lobby! I love those guys! What they’re doing too. That’s fantastic. So for those of you who want more information about Aaron and Jennifer Smith’s new book, Marriage After God, you can find all the information MarriageAfterGod.com. You can also find links to order and more information about the Smith’s at the show notes, as usual, HeidiStJohn.com/podcast.

Aaron and Jennifer, you guys are amazing. I’m going to continue just to pray for you. I’d love to encourage you in any way that I can. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it.

[Jennifer] Thank you for having us and thank you Heidi for all the work that you’re doing for God and just being a voice in today’s culture. It’s just, it’s so necessary and needed.

[Heidi] Thank you. I really appreciate it. For more information you guys about Aaron and Jennifer and their amazing ministry— you can find all things Aaron and Jennifer Smith at the show notes today, HeidiStJohn.com/podcast.

Also, don’t forget we’re coming up at the end of the monthly Bible study at MomStrong International. We’ve got almost 13,000 of you joining us every month for the Scripture Writing and the study there. It’s not too late to join. You can create an account at MomStrongInternational.com. Get your kids writing God’s Word. You guys, there is power in knowing and applying the Word of God to your life. Thanks for listening everybody, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.

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Write to Heidi:
c/o Firmly Planted Family
11100 NE 34th Cir, Vancouver, WA 98682

Support this ministry by donating through E-giving. You can also send donations to: 1100 NE 34th Cir, Vancouver, WA 98682