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Money and finances are some of the most fought over, stressed out about issues marriage faces. The reality is we all must deal with money in some form or fashion. Especially in today's financial climate in the world, with inflation and the cost of living This episode is sponsored by our book Marriage After GodThis is a great marriage resource for anyone or any couple that is looking for something meaty that will inspire and challenge a little. It is a book we wrote together that dips into our story but also gets the reader to search out “what is God doing in my marriage” This book also spends quite a bit of time on finances and marriage, so if you want to dive deeper into today's topic we strongly encourage you to pick up a copy if you have not already!Marriage After God will put you on the path to exploring what God’s purpose for your marriage is.Find it at amazon.com or shop.marriageaftergod.comREAD TRANSCRIPT- Hi, and welcome to the "Marriage After God" podcast.- We're your hosts, Aaron and Jennifer Smith.- We have been married 15 years and have five sweet children who are growing up way too fast.- We love God and we love marriage.- And we love to be honest about it all.- Marriage is not always a walk in the park, but we do believe it has a powerful purpose.- So our goal here is to open up the conversation to talk about our faith and our marriage.- Especially in light of the gospel.- We certainly don't have all the answers, but if you stick around we may just make you laugh.- But our hope is to encourage you to chase boldly after God's purpose for your life together.- This is "Marriage After God". Welcome back to another episode of the "Marriage After God" podcast. I promise I don't have the giggles this time. So, if any of you were with us last week, I couldn't keep myself together, but here I am, feeling mostly composed. It's good because in today's episode we're gonna be talking about, breezing over a little bit.- Hitting a nerve, maybe?- Maybe striking a match and igniting a fire on a conversation with money investing in marriage.- So it's something serious, is what you're saying?- Hmm, a little more. It feels serious these days.- All right, well, today's episode is sponsored by our book "Marriage After God". This is a great resource for anyone or any couple that is looking for something meaty that will inspire and challenge a bit. It's a book that we wrote together, it dips into our story, but it also gets the reader to search out what is God doing in my marriage? This book spends quite a bit of time talking about finances and marriage, so if you wanna dive deeper into today's topic, we strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of our book, "Marriage After God". And you can get that at amazon.com, or shop.marriageaftergod.com.- So, in light of this topic of money, what was the inspiration? Why'd you wanna talk about this today?- Well, number one, I mean, money's like top of the list for when you're thinking about marriage, relational things.- The things that-- Stressors.- Cause strife in marriage.- Yeah.- Money's one of them.- Yeah, money's definitely one of them. Now you take that and put it in context to today's current situation.- Issues of-- Like what are we-- Money.- Experiencing. And I think it makes it very relevant.- Do you think that we have, like, some sort of special, like, training in this or? Nope.- It's not really our genre necessarily. We have talked about money a lot in the past because God's used it in our life, but I don't know, it seemed like a good idea to bring up because it's kind of on everyone's minds, it's right in front of us, kind of at every turn. Stuff that's going on the world.- I'll say this, if you're hoping to get some financial advice from today's episode, that's not what you're gonna find here. You'll find encouragement, you'll find maybe, hopefully, some inspiration, some spiritual inspiration to get you and your spouse talking about finances in marriage. But if you want something more, go check out Dave Ramsey or other resources, other podcasts that really, really get into the nitty gritty of finances. 'Cause this is more of just like, how does it relate to your marriage.- I mean, on some levels-- Which is important.- Quote unquote "financial advice", as in, encouraging them in the way to be thinking about it and-- Right.- And the usefulness of it.- We're just not giving direct, like, "You should go do this."- Yeah, and I actually, I wanna boldly and with asterisks disclaim that we're not financial advisors. And so, please don't walk away from this episode and go do something and say, "Aaron and Jen told me to do this." We're gonna share with you few things that we think about and things that we've walked through and things that we care about, and maybe you can learn something, but we're definitely not financial advisors.- Okay, not to take a total tangent here, but you said the word asterisk?- Asterisk, asterisk.- Okay, I had to look it up because my whole life, I said "astrik", like "astrik", I don't know why. When I see that little star, that's how I hear it, "astrik". But lately when I'm working with Elliot, like, on spelling and language arts, I'm constantly looking up words and I'm realizing, I'm saying things wrong. And so one of my words this week, Elliot turns to me, he goes, "Mom, why have you been saying "interragative"? It's "interrogative". I was like, hold on, let me Google it.- Interragative, interrogative.- Said that wrong all last year.- Oops.- Oops.- I'm sure there's a lot of words we've said wrong and continue to say wrong, but that's really funny. Okay, back to money.- Okay.- Okay, we're talking about money. So we've been married for 15 years and I feel like we've gone through quite a few different seasons of life, specifically when it comes to money. Like, just how our relationship to it, how much we've had, how little we've had.- Depending on our jobs or what we were doing.- Yeah, we've gone through and we- It's only been 15 years and I feel like we're now in a new season financially and it's just gonna keep doing this rollercoaster for the rest of our lives.- I think 'cause there's so many variables, there's so many things that affect finances and then there's us, who affect our finances.- Decisions we make.- How we decide to spend it and save it and all of that.- Our relationship to it. Which is kind of like what we kind of wanna talk about today, is a little bit of that relationship aspect with money.- Yeah.- And also talk about some stuff that we've been learning and doing and experiencing ourselves. So, we've been in seasons of debt. We've been in seasons of making very little, to no money at all. I'm immediately thinking about stories in our life of just sitting in my car and we have no money in our account.- Crisis, crisis.- To seasons of abundance where God's just allowed us to have access to more than we ever thought we could have.- Yeah.- And back and forth and everything between. But I feel like along the way, when I read this scripture in Philippians, when Paul talks about how God has taught him contentment in all circumstances. You know that verse that we all like to use that says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." The context of it is around how to be content when you have nothing or how to be content when you have a lot. And so the point of that scripture is that He gives us the strength to handle every circumstance we come into in our life, whether poor or rich, whether having a little or a lot. And that's what God's been teaching us is this idea of contentment in kind of every season. And they're hard in their own aspect in different ways, depending on what side you're on.- Well, this idea for this episode that we had in talking about finances in relation to marriage, I thought it would be cool if we just talked about a little bit of our foundation of how we think and view of money, how we've kind of built our foundation and marriage. Do you wanna share a little bit about like-- Yeah-- Where we've landed.- Maybe how we learned certain things.- Yeah.- Because we're, again, we're not experts, but we've been learning a lot of our life, but we also have a disposition, necessarily, to money. How we think about it.- Yeah, yeah.- Because of the way we're raised. I think our parents-- Yeah, for sure.- Did teach us on some level about money. Either they taught us directly about money by things they told us and showed us. But I think we learned a lot of our thoughts of money, probably what we saw in our parents.- And our own experience as we got older. Okay, money coming in, money going out, uh-oh more money's going out, wait a minute. So just basic-- Or dealing with credit.- Basic experience of money. But a lot of, like, the dialogue we've had about money in our marriage has been based on the Bible and, like, going to the Bible and saying, "Well, what wisdom is there in the Word that we can draw from?" I was thinking about this the other day when we were getting ready to do this episode, and just how thinking about our homeschool with the kids and what we want them to learn, 'cause we're always thinking ahead. And it's like, we really want them to understand money. And I wish we were taught this more in school. I wish there was a whole...maybe there was and I just missed it.- Well, we did have a- I had an economics class for just my senior year, is the only thing like-- But one year when you're on your way out.- Yeah, it was one year, but I can't remember there being anything about investing, anything about spending.- I mean, taxes, just think about taxes. There's should be-- Just that alone.- There should be a serious talk about that. But we were thinking about for our homeschool, like how can we incorporate these really important principles to teach our kids and give them a really strong foundation for then propelling them into adulthood for finances.- Well, and it would be valuable, 'cause I feel like we're learning stuff now that if we would've known it 20 years ago, we would've made probably significantly different decisions. But, it-- Here we are.- Yeah, we're here where we're at, we're learning, and I think everyone listening is in the same place. They look back over their lives, the decisions they've made financially, they can always pinpoint those, like, I shouldn't have spent that money or wish I would've saved here or I'm glad we saved, or did this, made this decision. So we're all in the same boat.- Well going back to, you know, the Bible's wisdom over money, we wanted to share a couple of those anchor verses that we kind of lean onto when we're making financial decisions. But I wanted to share with you guys a cool resource that we use when we're looking up stuff in the Bible, it's called openbible.info, and it literally says, "What does the Bible say about" and then it has a search bar for you to just fill in and it gives you all the verses in that topic and you can even search by Bible-- Translation.- Version, yeah. So it's pretty cool.- Yeah, and these scriptures, like we said, a lot of the way we think about money, we try and go back to the Bible and say, okay, "What does God say about money?" And having God's perspective on it, 'cause it does help us. It doesn't mean we've made all the right decisions, but even when we make wrong decisions, we can easily look back and be like, "Well, that's probably 'cause we were unwise in this way, or that's probably 'cause we didn't follow this principle." So one of them is 1 Timothy 6:10. It says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. It is through the craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs." So when I was reading through this scripture for this episode, the first thing I wanted to point out is I feel like this is probably one of the most misquoted scriptures. Often people say money is evil specifically, or money is the root of evil, but that's not what this is saying.- Because money's just like a- It's a piece of paper, it's like nothing, right?- Yeah, money is an in inanimate object, it cannot be sinful or good or bad, it's just a thing.- It's not the money that's doing it, it's what is inside of us.- It says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." So this isn't even the main root, this is just one of the roots that could be a root of all kinds of evil is when we have love for money.- Well, a root supports, like, a stem of a plant that grows bigger and so if you think about it, it's like when you have the love of money and you're thirst for it and your greed-- Some bad things are gonna grow out of that.- Oh many, not just one serious thing, but like you're gonna have-- Yeah. Well, and the Bible talks a lot about fruit, good or bad fruit, so talking about- If we love money, if we have a love for money, it becomes that root and then the fruit that's gonna come out of that is gonna be bad fruit. And so I just wanted to point that out, as this is saying the love of money, this is something that's happening inside of our hearts, our disposition toward money. Do we see money as our God? Do we see money as our savior?- Our reliance.- Do we see money as our protection?- Yeah, security, all of those things.- And then I love that it says, "It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs." One of the things that Jennifer and I have learned is anytime we've overstretched ourselves to try and do something, to get more money, we try and start businesses, we try- We end up having more pangs. We're like, "Man, I wish we just would've been fine where we were at." And that's something that we've had to feel that pain several times in our lives for different little things. But that's a true thing, if we have a love for money it's gonna have us wander away from the most important thing in our life, which is our faith, which is our trust and reliance on Christ, to who-knows-what? I mean, you fill the blank.- At minimum it distracts us, for sure.- At minimum, yes.- All right, another one is Matthew 6:24. "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money."- Yeah.- Every time I've read this in my past, especially growing up, I always just thought, it's so interesting that it's talking about two masters, and then at the very end it says, "You cannot serve God and money." Like, he was talking about money the whole time, what?- Yeah, the two masters, one is God and one's money.- Interesting.- And actually the word money there, it's a Greek word "mammon", which is like a god. It was like a god of wealth, a god of riches. And so Matthew's pointing out, you know, from the words of Jesus, like, we can't serve God and serve- Like, going back to 1 Timothy, that love of money. That pursuit of, "I just need more, I need more, I need more," at that point w…
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