Building a Christ-Centered Marriage: Faithful Foundations for Lifelong Love
Jul 04, 2024
Renee Richel
What if you could lay the groundwork for a marriage that not only lasts but thrives, centered around your Christian faith? Join me, Renee Richel, founder and president of 1 True Match, as we uncover the vital steps to building a Christ-centered marriage. From the essential practices of praying and studying the Bible together to the profound impact of serving as a team, discover how involving your faith in every aspect of your relationship can create an unshakeable bond. We'll also explore the vital role of premarital counseling and discuss the key questions to ask about love, sex, finances, and family goals to ensure you're both prepared for a lifelong partnership.
In the second part of our episode, we look at the indispensable role that community plays in Christian dating. Whether you're single and on the search for your life partner or seeking to strengthen your current relationship, I offer practical tips and strategies to make your Christian dating experience both fulfilling and effective. By integrating Christ from the very beginning and maintaining strong community ties, you'll be equipped to build a healthy, exclusive relationship with the potential to evolve into a powerful and loving marriage. Tune in for more insights, and remember to share your questions and comments for our future discussions. God bless!
What if you could lay the groundwork for a marriage that not only lasts but thrives, centered around your Christian faith? Join me, Renee Richel, founder and president of 1 True Match, as we uncover the vital steps to building a Christ-centered marriage. From the essential practices of praying and studying the Bible together to the profound impact of serving as a team, discover how involving your faith in every aspect of your relationship can create an unshakeable bond. We'll also explore the vital role of premarital counseling and discuss the key questions to ask about love, sex, finances, and family goals to ensure you're both prepared for a lifelong partnership.
In the second part of our episode, we look at the indispensable role that community plays in Christian dating. Whether you're single and on the search for your life partner or seeking to strengthen your current relationship, I offer practical tips and strategies to make your Christian dating experience both fulfilling and effective. By integrating Christ from the very beginning and maintaining strong community ties, you'll be equipped to build a healthy, exclusive relationship with the potential to evolve into a powerful and loving marriage. Tune in for more insights, and remember to share your questions and comments for our future discussions. God bless!
, the founder and president of One True Match. I'm here to help you find and cultivate the love of your life. For over a decade, I've dedicated my life to the importance, purpose and dynamic of human relationships. My team and I are disciplined by faith, love and integrity to help our clients find the quality relationship they've always dreamt of. Each week, I will be sharing the tools and tips I've learned that have rooted my success as a matchmaker with other leaders around the world. Hello, loves, welcome back.
Renee Richel:
I am always excited to talk about any topics that we're going to talk about when it comes to love and relationships, but today we're going to talk about building a Christ-centered marriage and how to keep God at the center of your relationship while you're dating, to get you into a healthy, enriching and loving marriage that God has designed for each one of us to find with the right partner, when we have some of the tools and the just foundational practices from the beginning to have a Christ-centered marriage. So let's begin. So, number one, it's so important to set a godly foundation. And what does a godly foundation mean? It means where you're praying together, you're studying the Bible, you're serving together, you're doing activities. That's, of course, fueling your mind, body, spirit and soul with Christ at the foundation. And when people start to crumble, it's because their foundation maybe was not built from that Christ-centered relationship in the beginning. And that relationship that you have with God doesn't mean it always has to be in a brick and mortar type church environment, but at least you're doing things that are involving your faith, together with other Christ-following individuals, I mean through a lot of different organizations. If you haven't found that right church yet or you're looking for the right church, find a church that you're both drawn into, that you both enjoy. I want you to be involved in a community that's something you both enjoy being at and something that's fueling your marriage and relationship, to grow together and have open, honest conversations. And remember it's important to set boundaries so that you do have the time that you need to enrich your relationship and your own body, mind and spirit, to have just that loving, fueled relationship inside of you that just spreads to everybody that you meet. Because how many times are we in a relationship or we have a really tough day, or something's been difficult and it just sucks the life out of us. So it is paramount not only to your own self-existence and being. It also is to God for him to be all that he needs you to be for others so that you can have a healthy relationship.
Renee Richel:
Number two deepen a Christ-centered focus on your relationship. So if you are in the phase of dating, of course today we're talking about being married already, but what you've done up to this point is paramount to what the future will unfold. So a lot of our couples, when they're dating, we tell them to start doing like the questions before you actually get engaged that are designed to be premarital questions, because by the time you actually get engaged and by the time everybody's planning the wedding, it's amazing how many times people forget about all the fundamental questions that matter after you get married and what that will look like. So it is very important that you know you always do premarital counseling, you do any type of preparatory, you know questions or things that are billed, categorized, like you know, anywhere from love to sex to finance, to like dreams. You have together goals, you have together family and all of those things. So if you're looking for any of those advice, we obviously have many avenues we can point you on. If you've not done this before or you've never thought of this. It's never too late, even if you're already married, to kind of even go back to the beginning to build that foundation today. It is never too late to enrich your marriage in a playful, fun way. When two people are ready to want more, make sure that you're also making joint decisions together. I know that can be tough sometimes when two people are coming from completely different worlds and they're wanting to like you know, they're set in their ways, both independent. They're trying to do what they're trying to achieve because of what they're used to in their past patterns.
Renee Richel:
When you couple and decide to become a we and a union together for the rest of your life, it is so important that you start to come towards each other and work on the things that are different so that you can jointly make decisions together. So it's not somebody just telling somebody well, this is what I'm doing and this is how I've always done it and that's how it is. No, it's we're a we and even though maybe some days I don't agree with this or some days you don't agree with that, it's the differences that make us interested in each other in the beginning. It's also the differences that drive us crazy. So how do we come up with a joint lifestyle together when it comes to bigger little decisions Even who's going to drive to the grocery store, who's going to take the lead on this, who's going to plan the date night, who's going to do these little things. So it balances out, so that nobody's left feeling unloved or unappreciated.
Renee Richel:
When you're focusing on your relationship, obviously, and when you have Christ in the center as your focus and number one in every decision that you make, it helps to really eliminate, you know, and even play your stress management level. That sometimes can be anxiety and can be just overwhelming. That can really suffocate and damage a relationship. So I always love recommending, when're kind of off-kilt or you're not in a balanced state of mind with your time that you've put into your life with Christ, is to rely on scripture. I can't tell you how many times I pull up my Bible and I go to the back and look for a word of like, something that's just happening that I can't either figure out, or I'm in this time of season where I'm prayerfully being patient and waiting and going to the Bible and being able to pull up some type of scripture that just gives me a peace of mind. It gives me the words that God wants me to hear in that moment.
Renee Richel:
I can then go into any conversation with anybody and, again, part of your marriage is all the people that surround your marriage too. So if there's anything off-kilt as I'm calling it in a relationship with your children, in a relationship with your dear friend, a family member, a colleague or something a partner like in business, it's important that you're going into every scenario and conversation in a scriptural way that gives you a loving answer of how to respond to somebody, again fueling up your tank of love to spread when you're filled with Jesus. And it reminds me of a scripture when it talks about a person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can conquer the world. Just meaning two are better than one. God did not design us to be a lonely shark and wants us to be in a relationship with him first, then our mate and then everybody that surrounds us that he puts in our life. So when you focus on that trinity of God first, then my mate and everything else the first person that you need to spend time with is God. The second person is spend time in a godly way, loving your mate, and it really, truly resolves a lot of what the challenges.
Renee Richel:
Marriages get so wound up in the details of all the things happening and don't really focus on the most important detail, which is their relationship, obviously, with Christ. First and foremost and number three, I would say, would be maintaining a Christ-centered marriage and continuing to pray, to worship together, to serve together, to get into God's word together, to talk about the things you might not even know. I mean, there's times we all Google things that sound insane, that maybe we should know. But it's better to Google it, to strike up a conversation about it and actually research something together so that you can continuously grow your mind and your thirst for curiosity and just another avenue for you to have something to talk about, instead of just the mundane of life that we're always just, in general, trying to catch up with. And make sure that you know you keep God at the core, relying on that being your foundation, like I was saying earlier, to love each other well, like, remember that.
Renee Richel:
I mean, how many times do we get into these like just arguments and we think to ourself like I'm so angry at you, like I'm so frustrated? I can't believe like you would think that way. And why is that Because we're in our own head and we're not actually thinking it through from their own side and we're doing more damage than it is when we're not spending more time loving each other well and thinking through the things that we're saying, because words do stick and people do remember the details of the words more than they actually remember what the outcome is of what they were trying to say, which is a lot of trying to erase and change and recraft when we don't have God in the center of our core. And it reminds me of, obviously, scripture Matthew 22, 39, is love your neighbor as you love yourself. So if we don't remember to obviously love our mate as much as we truly love ourselves, to believe in the relationship we're in, we're going to continuously go down this spiral of not getting the most fulfilling, loving marriage that you deserve, that God wants you to discover and be in, to continue to grow together. So I hope you have found this information helpful for you to remember when you're building a Christ-centered marriage, to start off, when you're dating, to get to the point where you're continuously enriching your marriage.
Renee Richel:
If you're at a point where you are looking to grow your marriage and you have questions when it comes to how do I put Christ more in the center of my marriage? How do I get my mate to be maybe where I'm at? Where do I go? What are the resources I have? Send us a message. We'd love to talk to you. We'd love to answer the questions that you have. We'd love to guide you in the right direction of how you can live and build a Christ-centered marriage for an eternity. To just literally have what I say is like that honeymoon phase, not maybe every day, but you still have that excitement in that marriage because you're both on the same goals of where you're wanting to be in your love and relationship.
Renee Richel:
Tune in next week, every Thursday, we have these fun topics to hopefully help you grow in your relationship in all areas, whether you're single, dating, engaged or married, because we care about the entire journey not just finding our clients the love of their life, but keeping them in a community of other loving and just relationships that are positive, that are going to help them have that enriched marriage that they're looking for.
Renee Richel:
Next, we're going to talk about the role community plays on our Christian dating. So this is for you that are single, that are still looking for the love of your life and we're gonna focus on some tips and things that you can do to help you advance your Christian dating life to be fun, to be exciting and also get you to your goal of having a healthy and happy exclusive relationship that then turns into a loving and powerful marriage. Until then, I hope you have a blessed day and we are going to love and leave you and talk to you soon. It's been another great talk on this episode of One True Talks by Renee Richel. I look forward to our next chat. Please write in your questions and comments so I can be sure to talk about whatever it is you want to discuss in our next upcoming episode. Lots of love, god bless, xoxo.