**Our Question of the Month for February has to do with how God has used our marriages to demonstrate His grace to us (and our husbands). I have been amazed at some of the stories that I have read, and I can’t wait to share them with you at the end of the month! If you have a story of God’s grace in marriage to share, please email it to question@titus2atthewell.com (with “February Question” in the subject line), or visit the original post and leave a comment. For today, here is a wonderful post by Kimberly from the archives…)**

I grew up in a strange time in history. Most of my friend’s parents were divorced (some several times), and several of the newly built elementary schools in our suburban town had to be closed because the birth rate dropped off suddenly in the mid 70′s, thanks to Roe v. Wade.

I grew up in a time when, midway through my youth, all moms seemed to suddenly go off to work, and most of a generation was left to figure out the ins and outs of homemaking and family life on their own, if ever. As an unsaved teenager in the 1980s, I came home to an empty house after school, kept company by either my friends or MTV, or both. This was obviously not a good foundation for my future career as a Christian wife and mother. Training in the spirit of Titus 2 was far from my experience.

After embracing the salvation God freely offers us through Christ at the age of 21, and meeting an on fire Christian guy through a mutual friend, we decided to get married quickly. We had a little bit of premarital preparation, which was mostly just counsel about how we wanted our wedding to be. He was also raised in a non-Christian home, and was saved in college. Between the two of us, neither of us had much practical preparation for being a godly spouse, or a parent, but we did have the grace of God that saved us and was working in us.

I was, in my new-Christian naivete, under the impression that as long as you were married to a Christian, that’s all you needed, because the Bible would be our final authority, and Christ would be the best man at our wedding, holding us accountable. It’s a nice thought, but I soon learned we all have the ability to get in the flesh from time to time. That’s where grace comes into play.

1. Grace to Save Us
God’s grace first saves us, because none of us is, of ourselves, worthy of salvation or heaven. God is so holy, and we will never measure up in our own flesh. This means you, this means me, and this means our spouses. At best, we are sinners saved by grace.

2. Grace to Change Us
Of course, God doesn’t leave us as He found us, but works through our lives as we yield to Him, get in His word, and build our relationship with Him. Just as no two babies begin to sit up or crawl at the exact same age, Christian growth is an individual thing, based on so many factors.

In the case of a Christian saved as an adult, we all start off in different places too. My life before Christ was full of bad habits that others may not ever have to give a second thought to, and my husband also had some habits in his life from his upbringing and pre-Christian days. These issues were not all resolved instantly when we each got saved, but one of the tools God used in each of our lives was our spouses to bring some of these bad habits up to the surface, so He could work on them. This was not what I had in mind for a Christian marriage. My husband has joked that we’re each the sandpaper God has used to rub off each other’s rough edges.

3. Grace to Overcome My Failures
God’s grace is also there when I fail in one of these areas. In my home growing up, I learned sarcasm, cynicism, and verbal put downs (followed by our apparent family motto, “Can’t you take a joke!?”), and I was horrified to find these things I so despised about my extended family coming out of my own mouth when the honeymoon wore off. I had to learn that God’s grace can help me to change day by day, and not to sink into despair over my sin.

4. Grace for His Failures
No one knows a man’s faults quite like his wife. We need to have grace from God to realize that we are each sinners saved by Grace, and so are our husbands. We can’t hold them to a standard of perfection that we don’t hold ourselves to. Remember the mote and the beam from Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Matthew 7? Before we deal with any motes in someone else’s eyes, we need to deal with the beams in our own eyes. We need to recognize that though he may have an area in particular where he falls short, there is an area in your life where you fall short, and which may drive him equally batty.

Let’s strive to let our marriages be marked by the working of God’s grace in our families.

By: Kimberly

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