Barbara Rainey's Blog, page 16

The Barbara Rainey Podcast: Preparing Your Heart for Easter

I have a question for you to ponder today … How do you celebrate Easter in your home? A few years ago I realized how very important Easter is and it actually surpassed Thanksgiving as my favorite holiday! I’ve always known it was important, but in the words of Paul, without Easter our faith would be in vain. If you take away Easter and you take away the cross, the New Testament is gone.

On today’s episode of The Barbara Rainey Podcast, Dennis and I talk with our friend Tracy Lane about Easter and how to create meaningful traditions in your house this Easter season. We talk about how you can do simple things to incorporate the Resurrection account into your everyday life, even with small children! 

Our desire with this podcast, and Ever Thine Home is to help you be changed by Jesus which will, in turn, transform your home. You can listen to “Preparing Your Heart for Easter” on any major podcast platform, or simply click here! 

Praying you experience His Goodness this Lenten season,

Barbara

 

P.S. A previous email mentioned an Easter bundle, which included our Waiting for the Lamb banner and our Behold the Lamb calendar. We have sold out of those bundles, but we do have Easter items available in our Etsy store, which you can find here.

 

The post The Barbara Rainey Podcast: Preparing Your Heart for Easter appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

The Barbara Rainey Podcast – new episode!

I have a question for you to ponder today… How do you celebrate Easter in your home? A few years ago, I realized how very important Easter is and it actually surpassed Thanksgiving as my favorite holiday! I’ve always known it was important, but in the words of Paul, without Easter —our faith would be in vain. If you take away Easter and you take away the cross, the New Testament is gone.

On today’s episode of The Barbara Rainey Podcast, Dennis and I talk with our friend, Tracy Lane about Easter and how to create meaningful traditions in your house this Easter season. We talk about how you can do simple things to incorporate the Resurrection account into your everyday life, even with small children! 

Our desire with this podcast, and Ever Thine Home is to help you be changed by Jesus which will, in turn, transform your home. You can listen to “Preparing Your Heart for Easter” on any major podcast platform, or simply click here! 

Praying you experience His Goodness this Lenten season,

Barbara

 

P.S. A previous email mentioned an Easter bundle, which included our Waiting for the Lamb banner and our Behold the Lamb calendar. We have sold out of those bundles, but we do have Easter items available in our Etsy store, which you can find here.

 

The post The Barbara Rainey Podcast – new episode! appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

9 Questions to Help You Take an Honest Look at Your Marriage

Does evaluating your marriage sound a little scary? Don’t be afraid to read this. Here’s why.

Most of us regularly do maintenance of our cars and our homes. We take performance appraisals at work. Our kids are graded at school.

But do we give our marriages even half this much focus?

Your first thought is probably, “Who has time?” I’ve been there. We had six kids in 10 years and marriage was not my focus for many minutes of any given day. It was an ongoing juggling act for most of our marriage. And it still can be.

Marriage maintenance is hard to prioritize because our culture doesn’t have built-in systems like we do for health, home, car, and job care.

But it doesn’t work to pretend your marriage has no issues, no cracks in the foundation, no work to be done. Pretending is only good for little children or actors on Broadway. It’s never good for your marriage or your faith.

Here are some questions to help you evaluate your own marriage. You might feel a bit of trepidation as you start this list, but be courageous.

Grab a cup of coffee or tea and try not to do this on the run in the carpool line. Or if you do come back to it later for a reread. It’s too important to gloss over or skim.

Are you teammates in life? Are you pulling for one another, encouraging one another, because you love each other and are still best friends? Do you have compassion for one another?

I received many comments to last week’s post, “Your Marriage is Worth Fighting For: 9 Truths to Remember.” Many described significant issues and some told of their own divorces. As I read these I sensed a need to address the core of where we all find ourselves in any marriage: in a good place, a hard place, starting over or wondering why you are where you are. The essence of any healthy relationship or marriage is this principle we have taught for over 40 years: “My spouse is not my enemy.”

Listen carefully. This is crucial and foundational.

Both you and your spouse are victims. Victims of someone else’s sin; starting with Adam and Eve and progressing through the ages into endless kinds of evil and harm. And you are also victims of each other’s sin.

But you and your spouse, like every human, are also perpetrators. We are born with a self-focused sin nature that ever seeks importance, dominance, power, and revenge. We distrust, fear, control, self-protect and constantly devise ways to get what we want even if it means harming others.

Remembering these truths means neither of you are the enemy. You have a common enemy who is Satan. This also helps us help each other and be compassionate to each other in our common struggle against selfishness and sin.

It’s why you married your best friend. It’s why you need each other. It’s why the best foundation for marriage strength is keeping these truths in front of you. It helps prevent us from thinking we alone are the victims in our marriages. That it’s all his or her fault.

Are you co-laborers not only in bringing in the money, raising your kids, and doing all that life requires of you, but also in being a team, being united in the goal of becoming all God intended for you individually and as a couple?

Have you stopped being each other’s confidant? When we lose sight of who we are and what our goals are in marriage, we can easily move from friends to combatants. And who wants to go on a date with your enemy? Who wants to share personal struggles with someone who doesn’t feel safe?

If this is where you are, start asking yourself first when the change began. What were the circumstances if you can pinpoint them. Why don’t you feel safe or free to share? Then take the risk to talk about it together. That means making time. And you may need to find a counselor or a marriage coach or someone to guide the conversations and debrief with.

I mentioned last week that the last four years have been especially challenging for Dennis and me. We met with a friend, a therapist, who helped us understand why we were feeling estranged, misunderstood, and not connected. For us it was a season of many losses and we were processing them all differently, so we were missing each other.

Take the time to address the problem or your relationship will start to die.

Have you stopped dreaming together? This too is a natural consequence of the above. If you aren’t sharing your fears and your hopes then you aren’t sharing your dreams. You probably aren’t even dreaming about the future.

Marriage can easily become a business relationship. Your only communication centers on “to do” lists, your calendars, and the increasing demands of people and family members screaming for your attention and time and money.

To grow and keep a healthy marriage, these very real demands must be managed so you can have time to plan ahead, dream for the future when it‘s just the two of you again.

Do you risk sharing your struggles with sin with one another? Do you tell each other about your disappointment with God? When did you stop confessing your failures and mistakes? When did you stop asking your spouse to pray for you?

This is the crux of what God knew we needed when He created marriage. He said it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone. We are not intended to do battle with the enemy of our souls alone. We need the person who knows us best to pray for us, listen to our struggles, have compassion on what matters. We need our spouse to value the way God made us with our gifts and strengths and encourage one another in that journey “which He prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

Do you ask your spouse to forgive you? A healthy marriage is a forgiving marriage. We offend each other daily, most often unintentionally. But when we recognize our mistakes, our failures, it’s important to say so. Deny your pride and practice forgiveness generously. Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, once said, “Marriage is the union of two forgivers.”

A healthy marriage is dependent on this oneness between spouses. And forgiveness is not always quick and easy, like saying “I’m sorry I was snippy with you, will you forgive me?” There are many times it takes a lot of time and work to get to the place it is genuine and all the layers of the onion around the situation have been peeled back. Again, this might be the time to seek the advice of someone who has experienced these issues or is skilled in offering marriage help.

Do you still care about having sex together? Sex is the icing on the marriage cake. Good meaningful fulfilling sex is the result of a good meaningful healthy marriage relationship.

Keeping sex a healthy part of your marriage is essential to keeping it alive. Unless there is a medical condition that prevents you or your spouse from sharing this experience regularly, you will be wise to pay attention to this God-created and ordained part of marriage.

Yes, sex is a mystery. It’s often challenging.  It isn’t always a fireworks experience. But it is designed to be emotionally bonding, and bonding is like glue in your marriage.

By the way, when I say pay attention to having sex together I don’t mean three or four times a year. To read more about sex in marriage, I’d love for you to read my book, Letters to My Daughters, The Art of Being a Wife. I have an entire chapter on this subject.

Have you started pretending that all is well? When our kids were in high school they started talking about “living in the bubble.” I know they didn’t invent the phrase, but they introduced it to me.

The idea is that many of us live in a Christian subculture, a “bubble.” We can live in the same neighborhoods, send our kids to the same schools, and associate almost entirely with other people like us in values and beliefs.

This isn’t wrong, but it can have a downside. When we live in the bubble we can begin to believe we are doing everything right because we are doing what everyone else is doing. We can easily begin to model our lives on those around us. And it can impact your marriage by leading you to believe your marriage is great because it looks like everyone else’s.

When was the last time you got away for an entire weekend to invest in your marriage? I want to encourage everyone who reads this post to find a weekend this year to attend the best marriage conference I know of—a proven success for over 40 years. Like a regular tune up for your car or regular check-ups with your doctor, the Weekend to Remember Marriage getaway is the realignment every marriage needs, not just once in a lifetime, but repeatedly over the life of your marriage. Every season in your marriage presents new needs. We have friends who go to one of these events every year as a way to get away for a marriage tune-up.

Speaking at these events for nearly 40 years did more to keep our marriage focused on God’s plan for us and our marriage than anything else we did. We learned something new to apply every time too. Nothing is better than repeatedly investing.

The point is there are ways to make growing your marriage and seeing it become stronger over time. The question is, will you make it a priority?

Do you say no to other needs, activities, or tasks so you can have time for your marriage?Despite our modern beliefs, you simply cannot do it all. Your children can’t do every sport or activity and attend the best schools, while you give your lives to your work, your ministry, your mission, your community, your church, or your fixer-upper house.

We live in a world that celebrates everything exceptional and we curate our social media to make ourselves look perfect. But we all have limitations. The best decisions are to practice living within those limitations. Then there is freedom to develop what God has given you rather than striving for what others have.

You may believe you have the energy to juggle it all, but something will suffer. Usually it’s your marriage. You must have margin in your life to invest in each other. When you are both working full time in separate spheres what do you have in common beyond your home address? You must make decisions that favor your marriage, decisions that give it room to grow. No one else can or will do it for you.

Here is the bottom line for all of us: “Search me O God and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts” (Psalm 139:23). We cannot do marriage on our own. It is God’s invention and we need Him to make it work.

Go to Him.

Talk to Him.

Above all, ask His Spirit to help, guide, teach, and lead you in your marriage. Listen closely for His whispers to you. No marriage can survive without God’s specific and direct work in your life and in your spouses. And don’t worry about your spouse; you are only responsible for your part, what God has given you to do. Let God deal with him and his issues and heart.

Here is my prayer for you and all who are Christ followers in marriages:

May you stand strong for your marriage.

May you believe God and see Him work wonders

 in your heart and your spouse’s heart.

May you stand with me and say, 

“No more victories for Satan. Not in my marriage!” 

 

Lord, give us women courage to believe You,

 in every circumstance,

every day.

Amen!

 

For more help on building oneness in marriage, click here .

For more help on conflict in marriage, click here.

For more help on romance and sex, click here .

For more help on working on a troubled marriage, click here .

For information on the Weekend to Remember marriage getaway, click here.

To order a copy of Barbara’s book, Letters to My Daughters, click here.

The post 9 Questions to Help You Take an Honest Look at Your Marriage appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

Friends & Family February 2022

Happy shortest month everyone!

As the days continue to speed by, this month’s letter to all of you is more of a deep dive into what I’m learning in my online class at Dallas Theological Seminary.

But first here are two of my favorite photos from the Love Like You Mean It cruise we went on earlier this month. The first is with an Ethiopian-American couple who live in the DC area with their four kids. They have loved learning about marriage and family from our ministry so it was a treat to spend an evening with them. The second is a rainbow out our cabin windows which was gorgeous to see and so meaningful to be reminded of God’s love for us.

My class this semester is on the history of doctrine, which sounds terribly boring and dry, but what I’m learning is compelling and truly important to believers today. So stick with me for a few minutes and marvel that God has managed through broken sinful humans to keep the truth of His Word and His character pure and clear for generations.

This month I learned why the Church, meaning the universal body of believers around the world, wrote and adopted creeds and statements of belief. The story goes like this:

In the days, months and early years after Jesus’ ascension and Pentecost, the rapidly growing baby church all believed what they had seen: Jesus was a real human who they saw and touched; He really suffered and died and therefore He had to be God because He rose from the dead. Hundreds were witnesses, so no one questioned it.

The apostle John says it plainly: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life …” (1 John 1:1-2).

It wasn’t just the 12 who saw and touched Him! Paul records that Jesus appeared in His resurrected body to over 500 believers at one time, and who knows how many others saw Him at other times that weren’t recorded.

But eventually new converts began asking questions no one had asked before. And so those first-generation disciples—like Ignatius of Antioch in Syria, a disciple of the Apostle John—began to write explanations for why we believe Jesus is God, who existed eternally with the Father.

Okay, pause on this one. Can you even imagine what it would have been like to be a disciple of John? The real John of the Bible who saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain and saw Moses and Elijah! And how did he know the two who showed up with Jesus were Moses and Elijah? And John was in the boat when Jesus calmed the storm, when Peter walked on water, when Jesus fed 5,000 people … John saw it all. Literally. If I was discipled by John, I would have a thousand questions. And I would have believed everything he said.

Back to the story. From those early days to today, we believers need words to communicate our faith to others. As a result, creeds (or statements of faith) were written for the purpose of uniting the church in our beliefs about God.

Jesus prayed before He was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane that God would keep us and that we would be one even as He and the Father are one. When the body of Christ all believe the same truths, we are united in our faith even if we practice our beliefs very differently.

This month one of the concepts we studied was the Trinity, which is present throughout the Scriptures, even though the word trinity is not in the Bible but was coined to explain our three-in-one God. For example, when Jesus instructed His disciples to “baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19), He clearly listed all three members of the Godhead in equality. Nowhere is the deity of Christ or the Holy Spirit denied in the Bible. Thus the concept of the Trinity is clearly revealed in Scripture and the church Fathers defined it for us.

Concepts like the Trinity were eventually worked into creeds or statements of faith. Perhaps your church, as did mine growing up, recites one of these creeds during Sunday morning worship. The Methodist church, even with its increasing drift toward liberalism, still recites the Apostles Creed every Sunday. I was so surprised and interested to learn the earliest form of what became the Apostles Creed was first written in Rome and called the Old Roman Symbol. This was sometime between 200-300 A.D. It was a statement all new Christians memorized and stated before baptism.

The final wording of the Apostles Creed was adopted in the fifth century and has remained unchanged since. Which is truly remarkable … that almost two thousand years later churches worldwide are still professing the same beliefs, the same creeds as did those in the ancient church. Others from that era are Nicene Creed written in 325 A.D. which established the equality and unity of the Father and the Son; and the Constantinople Creed from 381 A.D. and the Chalcedonian Creed in 451 A.D., both of which added sentences declaring the deity of the Holy Spirit.

Following these there was no change in our major creeds for over a thousand years. Another remarkable providence of God.

If you are like me, you’ve never seen some of the lesser-known creeds unless your church repeats them or you learned them in a catechism class as a child. So at the end of this letter I’ve had our designer Julie create a few of them for you to print and keep to read for a quiet time or a prayer. The words are beautiful and inspiring and worthy of our attention since they are reflections of the God we serve and love.

Two weeks ago we had ice and snow and now the early daffodils are blooming! Such is the on again, off again nature of this season. As I type this a front has blown through and the temps dropped from the low 60s this morning to the low 40s now with lows tonight in the 20s. My desk is built below a window in our laundry room and the cold air blows through the cracks around the window so I need a cozy blanket to stay warm. I love the changing seasons.

I hope you will enjoy reading these beautifully written creeds of the faith and that you will join me in giving thanks for the wonder of God’s work through the ages.

Till next time in March!

Ever His,

Barbara

Click here to download your copy!

The post Friends & Family February 2022 appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

Friends & Family #14

Happy shortest month everyone!

As the days continue to speed by, this month’s letter to all of you is more of a deep dive into what I’m learning in my online class at Dallas Theological Seminary.

But first here are two of my favorite photos from the Love Like You Mean It cruise we went on earlier this month. The first is with an Ethiopian-American couple who live in the DC area with their four kids. They have loved learning about marriage and family from our ministry so it was a treat to spend an evening with them. The second is a rainbow out our cabin windows which was gorgeous to see and so meaningful to be reminded of God’s love for us.

My class this semester is on the history of doctrine, which sounds terribly boring and dry, but what I’m learning is compelling and truly important to believers today. So stick with me for a few minutes and marvel that God has managed through broken sinful humans to keep the truth of His Word and His character pure and clear for generations.

This month I learned why the Church, meaning the universal body of believers around the world, wrote and adopted creeds and statements of belief. The story goes like this:

In the days, months and early years after Jesus’ ascension and Pentecost, the rapidly growing baby church all believed what they had seen: Jesus was a real human who they saw and touched; He really suffered and died and therefore He had to be God because He rose from the dead. Hundreds were witnesses, so no one questioned it.

The apostle John says it plainly: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life …” (1 John 1:1-2).

It wasn’t just the 12 who saw and touched Him! Paul records that Jesus appeared in His resurrected body to over 500 believers at one time, and who knows how many others saw Him at other times that weren’t recorded.

But eventually new converts began asking questions no one had asked before. And so those first-generation disciples—like Ignatius of Antioch in Syria, a disciple of the Apostle John—began to write explanations for why we believe Jesus is God, who existed eternally with the Father.

Okay, pause on this one. Can you even imagine what it would have been like to be a disciple of John? The real John of the Bible who saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain and saw Moses and Elijah! And how did he know the two who showed up with Jesus were Moses and Elijah? And John was in the boat when Jesus calmed the storm, when Peter walked on water, when Jesus fed 5,000 people … John saw it all. Literally. If I was discipled by John, I would have a thousand questions. And I would have believed everything he said.

Back to the story. From those early days to today, we believers need words to communicate our faith to others. As a result, creeds (or statements of faith) were written for the purpose of uniting the church in our beliefs about God.

Jesus prayed before He was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane that God would keep us and that we would be one even as He and the Father are one. When the body of Christ all believe the same truths, we are united in our faith even if we practice our beliefs very differently.

This month one of the concepts we studied was the Trinity, which is present throughout the Scriptures, even though the word trinity is not in the Bible but was coined to explain our three-in-one God. For example, when Jesus instructed His disciples to “baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19), He clearly listed all three members of the Godhead in equality. Nowhere is the deity of Christ or the Holy Spirit denied in the Bible. Thus the concept of the Trinity is clearly revealed in Scripture and the church Fathers defined it for us.

Concepts like the Trinity were eventually worked into creeds or statements of faith. Perhaps your church, as did mine growing up, recites one of these creeds during Sunday morning worship. The Methodist church, even with its increasing drift toward liberalism, still recites the Apostles Creed every Sunday. I was so surprised and interested to learn the earliest form of what became the Apostles Creed was first written in Rome and called the Old Roman Symbol. This was sometime between 200-300 A.D. It was a statement all new Christians memorized and stated before baptism.

The final wording of the Apostles Creed was adopted in the fifth century and has remained unchanged since. Which is truly remarkable … that almost two thousand years later churches worldwide are still professing the same beliefs, the same creeds as did those in the ancient church. Others from that era are Nicene Creed written in 325 A.D. which established the equality and unity of the Father and the Son; and the Constantinople Creed from 381 A.D. and the Chalcedonian Creed in 451 A.D., both of which added sentences declaring the deity of the Holy Spirit.

Following these there was no change in our major creeds for over a thousand years. Another remarkable providence of God.

If you are like me, you’ve never seen some of the lesser-known creeds unless your church repeats them or you learned them in a catechism class as a child. So at the end of this letter I’ve had our designer Julie create a few of them for you to print and keep to read for a quiet time or a prayer. The words are beautiful and inspiring and worthy of our attention since they are reflections of the God we serve and love.

Two weeks ago we had ice and snow and now the early daffodils are blooming! Such is the on again, off again nature of this season. As I type this a front has blown through and the temps dropped from the low 60s this morning to the low 40s now with lows tonight in the 20s. My desk is built below a window in our laundry room and the cold air blows through the cracks around the window so I need a cozy blanket to stay warm. I love the changing seasons.

I hope you will enjoy reading these beautifully written creeds of the faith and that you will join me in giving thanks for the wonder of God’s work through the ages.

Till next time in March!

Ever His,

Barbara

Click here to download your copy!

The post Friends & Family #14 appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

Friends & Family 22.2

Happy shortest month everyone!

As the days continue to speed by, this month’s letter to all of you is more of a deep dive into what I’m learning in my online class at Dallas Theological Seminary.

But first here are two of my favorite photos from the Love Like You Mean It cruise we went on earlier this month. The first is with an Ethiopian-American couple who live in the DC area with their four kids. They have loved learning about marriage and family from our ministry so it was a treat to spend an evening with them. The second is a rainbow out our cabin windows which was gorgeous to see and so meaningful to be reminded of God’s love for us.

 

My class this semester is on the history of doctrine, which sounds terribly boring and dry, but what I’m learning is compelling and truly important to believers today. So stick with me for a few minutes and marvel that God has managed through broken sinful humans to keep the truth of His Word and His character pure and clear for generations.

This month I learned why the Church, meaning the universal body of believers around the world, wrote and adopted creeds and statements of belief. The story goes like this:

In the days, months and early years after Jesus’ ascension and Pentecost, the rapidly growing baby church all believed what they had seen: Jesus was a real human who they saw and touched; He really suffered and died and therefore He had to be God because He rose from the dead. Hundreds were witnesses, so no one questioned it.

The apostle John says it plainly: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life …” (1 John 1:1-2).

It wasn’t just the 12 who saw and touched Him! Paul records that Jesus appeared in His resurrected body to over 500 believers at one time, and who knows how many others saw Him at other times that weren’t recorded.

But eventually new converts began asking questions no one had asked before. And so those first-generation disciples—like Ignatius of Antioch in Syria, a disciple of the Apostle John—began to write explanations for why we believe Jesus is God, who existed eternally with the Father.

Okay, pause on this one. Can you even imagine what it would have been like to be a disciple of John? The real John of the Bible who saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain and saw Moses and Elijah! And how did he know the two who showed up with Jesus were Moses and Elijah? And John was in the boat when Jesus calmed the storm, when Peter walked on water, when Jesus fed 5,000 people … John saw it all. Literally. If I was discipled by John, I would have a thousand questions. And I would have believed everything he said.

Back to the story. From those early days to today, we believers need words to communicate our faith to others. As a result, creeds (or statements of faith) were written for the purpose of uniting the church in our beliefs about God.

Jesus prayed before He was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane that God would keep us and that we would be one even as He and the Father are one. When the body of Christ all believe the same truths, we are united in our faith even if we practice our beliefs very differently.

This month one of the concepts we studied was the Trinity, which is present throughout the Scriptures, even though the word trinity is not in the Bible but was coined to explain our three-in-one God. For example, when Jesus instructed His disciples to “baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19), He clearly listed all three members of the Godhead in equality. Nowhere is the deity of Christ or the Holy Spirit denied in the Bible. Thus the concept of the Trinity is clearly revealed in Scripture and the church Fathers defined it for us.

Concepts like the Trinity were eventually worked into creeds or statements of faith. Perhaps your church, as did mine growing up, recites one of these creeds during Sunday morning worship. The Methodist church, even with its increasing drift toward liberalism, still recites the Apostles Creed every Sunday. I was so surprised and interested to learn the earliest form of what became the Apostles Creed was first written in Rome and called the Old Roman Symbol. This was sometime between 200-300 A.D. It was a statement all new Christians memorized and stated before baptism.

The final wording of the Apostles Creed was adopted in the fifth century and has remained unchanged since. Which is truly remarkable … that almost two thousand years later churches worldwide are still professing the same beliefs, the same creeds as did those in the ancient church. Others from that era are Nicene Creed written in 325 A.D. which established the equality and unity of the Father and the Son; and the Constantinople Creed from 381 A.D. and the Chalcedonian Creed in 451 A.D., both of which added sentences declaring the deity of the Holy Spirit.

Following these there was no change in our major creeds for over a thousand years. Another remarkable providence of God.

If you are like me, you’ve never seen some of the lesser-known creeds unless your church repeats them or you learned them in a catechism class as a child. So at the end of this letter I’ve had our designer Julie create a few of them for you to print and keep to read for a quiet time or a prayer. The words are beautiful and inspiring and worthy of our attention since they are reflections of the God we serve and love.

Two weeks ago we had ice and snow and now the early daffodils are blooming! Such is the on again, off again nature of this season. As I type this a front has blown through and the temps dropped from the low 60s this morning to the low 40s now with lows tonight in the 20s. My desk is built below a window in our laundry room and the cold air blows through the cracks around the window so I need a cozy blanket to stay warm. I love the changing seasons.

I hope you will enjoy reading these beautifully written creeds of the faith and that you will join me in giving thanks for the wonder of God’s work through the ages.

Till next time in March!

 

Ever His,

Barbara

Click here to download your copy!

The post Friends & Family 22.2 appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

The Barbara Rainey Podcast: Letters to My Daughters

Good morning, dear friends! 

This week has been busy getting back “in the swing of things,” after Dennis and I got home from FamilyLife’s Love Like You Mean It Cruise. It was a great week of seeing old friends, meeting new friends, and seeing God move in a mighty way, but I’m glad to be home! 

I wanted to drop you a quick note today to let you know a new episode on the podcast has been released. In this episode, Dennis and I talk about my book, Letters to My Daughters, and how it came to be. What started out as a few emails to my new daughters-in-law, turned into a book that contains those letters and many life lessons I’ve learned along the way of being a wife.

I hope you take some time for yourself today and listen to this episode and hopefully find encouragement that you are not alone! We all have struggles and hard days, but I am living proof that with Christ as your center, you can do anything He has called you to! 

You can find us on any of the popular podcast platforms. 

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Play

 

Praying for you this day,

Barbara

P.s. Letters to My Daughters is still available on Amazon. And it makes a great wedding or shower gift. A friend just sent me this photo last week!

The post The Barbara Rainey Podcast: Letters to My Daughters appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

A new episode of The Barbara Rainey podcast is here!

Good morning, dear friends! 

This week has been busy getting back “in the swing of things,” after Dennis and I got home from FamilyLife’s Love Like You Mean It Cruise. It was a great week of seeing old friends, meeting new friends, and seeing God move in a mighty way, but I’m glad to be home! 

I wanted to drop you a quick note today to let you know a new episode on the podcast has been released. In this episode, Dennis and I talk about my book, Letters to My Daughters, and how it came to be. What started out as a few emails to my new daughters-in-law, turned into a book that contains those letters and many life lessons I’ve learned along the way of being a wife.

I hope you take some time for yourself today and listen to this episode and hopefully find encouragement that you are not alone! We all have struggles and hard days, but I am living proof that with Christ as your center, you can do anything He has called you to! 

You can find us on any of the popular podcast platforms. 

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Google Play

 

Praying for you this day,

Barbara

P.s. Letters to My Daughters is still available on Amazon. And it makes a great wedding or shower gift. A friend just sent me this photo last week!

The post A new episode of The Barbara Rainey podcast is here! appeared first on Ever Thine Home.

Your Marriage Is Worth Fighting For: 9 Truths to Remember

When you see marriages around you dissolving, it’s normal to start wondering how yours is going to make it. It might be your parents’ marriage that didn’t last, or your brother or sister’s. Maybe you know a couple who wedded the same year as you and now you’ve witnessed their dramatic nasty divorce. You might keep up with media announcements to see famous marriages broadcast their woes and affairs oh so publicly.

No doubt, right now you can name family members, friends, ministry leaders, and church leaders who are struggling or have even announced their intentions to end their “wedded nightmare.” Perhaps your marriage is the one struggling.

Sadly, there are so many stories, and the themes so familiar, that we’ve become mostly numbed over. We can only absorb so much bad news in this world, and there is a lot, so we turn the page, scroll on down to something happier and less depressing.

Collectively we ask the same question of ourselves: If this marriage couldn’t survive, what hope is there for mine? 

​But bad news about marriage can be a good reminder, a wake-up call to pay attention to our own. Hearing about a dissolving marriage can motivate us to look within our own and take an honest assessment. And if your marriage is shaky, know this: I have seen many marriages miraculously resurrected. As a result, I have learned some very important truths I want to share to encourage you because:

YOUR MARRIAGE IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR!

The enemy of our souls, Satan himself, would love nothing more than to use your fear about someone else’s divorce to suggest to you that your marriage is beyond redemption, too.

Don’t listen to the whispers, the lies the deceiver loves to tell you. Instead focus on what is true. Here are nine truths about all marriages and the common pathway to dissolution.

1.No one is exempt from marriage failure, even those in ministry. Dennis and I have felt the bullseye on our backs many times through the years. It is by perseverance, lots of hard work, repeated repentance and forgiveness, and God’s work in our hearts that we have survived and are thriving. 

2. No marriage dies suddenly overnight.The only way a marriage ends instantly is when one spouse dies.

3. All marriage deaths begin as slow leaks, small compromises, little sins ignored, or forgiveness dismissed as “It’s no big deal.” The cancer that kills marriages begins almost invisibly in easy-to-overlook moments that seem harmless but gradually erode the foundation of the relationship. The decision to end may be sudden, even dramatic. But the disease was present long before the outward signs of emotional distance, empty communication, pretending to be happy, or infidelity became visible. ​

4. For a marriage to make it, feeding and nourishing the relationship can NEVER stop. Marriage is a living relationship. When you stop paying attention to its health … when you assume that “all is well” … your relationship begins to unravel or unwind. Just as most of us schedule annual physical checkups for our health, and undergo preventative screenings, so marriages must have regular checkups–spiritual and relational health evaluations–to detect small cellular level malignancies.

5. No spouse is perfect.It’s too easy to proclaim the faults of your spouse.

I’m not perfect and neither is my husband. We are sinful, selfish, and desperately need the gospel in our lives every single day.

In the last four years of our marriage we have struggled through some rough waters. So much life change happened all at once and it impacted both of us very differently. We both felt unheard, unappreciated by the other.

I’m confident our enemy the devil was watching, sharpening his claws, eagerly watching for the stress to create cracks and for one of us to give up on the other. And know that we both felt the temptation to quit.

It was real. The season was a hard one. But giving up was never an option. We weren’t leaving those vows of long ago now no matter how miserable we were in the present.

Why? Just as a lasting marriage requires both the husband and wife to take responsibility for nurturing each another and feeding the relationship, both must also own responsibility to quickly admit faults and ask for forgiveness. Therefore, both have responsibility before God for any marital demise. When marriages fail both spouses are guilty and both are victims of their own sin and the sin of their spouse. Romans 3:10 declares, “There is none righteous, not even one…” and Romans 3:23 adds, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

6. As long as both spouses have breath, and neither has remarried, God can heal and restore. But He must have at least one humble broken heart before Him, one spouse who is willing to do whatever it takes.Tim Keller gave a great sermon that would be worth listening to for his encouragement for those of you who feel married to a spouse who isn’t investing as you would desire.

7. To say a marriage is beyond repair is to say God is not all-powerful. It is to say in God’s hearing (for He hears every word and knows every thought) that the miracle of the cross, the resurrection of a dead Jesus to life again, isn’t enough for this marriage of yours. If Jesus can defeat physical death, He can most certainly raise your dead marriage to life.

Beware, my sisters, of declaring God weak. The inspired Word of God says, “Nothing is too hard for God” (Jeremiah 32:17). God’s Word is more true than the state of your relationship with your spouse. Hundreds of couples have attended Weekend to Remember marriage getaways with divorce papers in hand only to tear them up at the end of the event. One couple who just attended recently said, “We loved each other but hated our marriage and didn’t know how to fix it. The conference saved our marriage.”

8. Marriages are often full of pain and loss. All marriages suffer regularly from mistakes, sin patterns, poor choices, and challenges with health, jobs, school, parenting circumstances, extended family issues and a lot more. Some of you are married to unbelievers, which is hard in different ways.

All suffering is real and painful. I’ve experienced it as, have many of you. But there are other kinds of marriage pain. Some marriages face abuse, addictions, or dangerous situations. Submitting to physical abuse is not God’s will. By all means, get help and talk to wise mature counselors, a trusted pastor, or the elder board at your church. 

9. Separation and the threat of divorce are sometimes needed to force the seriousness of the situation to the forefront. Spouses need humility, wise counsel, and good support before making this decision and while carrying it out.

Sometimes we can see signs of neglect in someone else’s marriage. But more importantly you need to be able to identify these signs in yours. The best way to know if your marriage is in danger is to do an evaluation. And that will arrive in your inbox next Monday. Watch for it!

Ask God to give you eyes to see what He sees and already knows is there in your relationship.

Here is a prayer you might want to pray to the One who created you and your spouse and who imagined the idea of marriage in the first place.

 

Oh God who sees in secret,

Remind me that You see all.

You know

every heart, every motive,

every thought before it is even known

or spoken by me.

 

You know

the fears I try so hard to cover up,

the anxiety that drives me, prevents sleep,

the loneliness I thought went away with “I do.”

 

You know

all the sins I pretend are not that bad …

all the habits, the loves

that I don’t want to give up.

All the things that bolster my identity;

my ministry, my friendships,

my spending.

 

And You know

all that will truly satisfy my soul.

Give me peace, sweet sleep, greater rest in my marriage.

 

Help me not look to other marriages

except to be warned or to mimic the most godly and wise.

Help me look to You

the One who formed our union,

the One who knows the plans You have for us.

the One for whom nothing is too hard,

 

Help me surrender daily to You

and trust all Your ways.

May the challenges we find ourselves in as husband and wife.

guide us to You,

increasingly every day.

 

Amen.

 

Be brave, my sisters.

God sees you and loves you and wants to give you all your heart longs for. Will you trust Him and His timing even it seems impossibly difficult today?

 

For more help on building oneness in marriage, click here .

For more help on conflict in marriage, click here.

For more help on romance and sex, click here.

For more help on working on a troubled marriage, click here .

For information on the Weekend to Remember marriage getaway, click here.

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How to Romance Your Man

Many romantic novels and movies seem to follow a common theme. A handsome, intelligent, adventurous, single man unexpectedly meets a beautiful, equally intelligent single woman under improbable circumstances—often in an exotic foreign location or in a lavish historical setting.

Their personalities may clash at first, but eventually they fall madly in love … often in just a few days. While this love is often impulsive and always new—never mature—in most cases the story ends with the unspoken assumption that they will live happily ever after.

Okay, wait.

How many romance novels or films feature a faithful husband and wife raising children, packing lunches, cleaning up messes, mowing the yard, going to work, serving at church … and, oh yes, enjoying passionate romance on a regular basis?

Not many.  I’ll grant you that Hallmark television romances—which I never watch but friends of mine do—often include happily-married couple. However, they are almost always secondary characters. The audience is more interested in the fantasy “boy meets girl” romance.

Obviously not many real couples live like the made-up characters in the movies and books. Who can maintain that level of intensity? Or adventure, intrigue, and surprise?

Everyone must come down from the high of new love and make the transition to everyday romance. But there really is something to learn from first love, too. It’s important to work at renewing some elements of those beginning lovestruck days.

Even Jesus talked about this when He told the Christians at one church that their love for Him had grown cold. His solution to rekindling their love? “Do the works [or deeds] you did at first” (Revelation 2:5).

Couples in the beginning season of romance are often so focused on pleasing each other that they devise ingenious means of capturing each other’s attention. They create endless ways to say, “I love you.” Their courtship is marked with creative notes and gifts, interesting dates, surprise parties, and much more.

But at some point complacency sets in to a relationship, and creativity often goes out the window—or is refocused on the children.

The ability to imagine and create sets humans apart from the animal world. It’s a connection to God Himself. He gives you the ability to use your mind to think of something that is different or distinct and then express that idea in some kind of action.

In an article titled “God Is Not Boring,” John Piper suggests that using our God-given imagination is a Christian duty. He writes, “Jesus said, ‘Whatever you wish that others would do to you do also to them’ (Matthew 7:12). We must imagine ourselves in their place and imagine what we would like done to us. Compassionate, sympathetic, helpful love hangs much on the imagination of the lover.”

The application for rekindling romance in marriage is twofold:

Express your love to your husband in the ways he enjoys. And love isn’t just expressions of affection. It’s also expressed in the ways we treat our men … with kindness and patience, with respect and belief. It’s also expressed in our words. Do we speak with love or with criticism and contempt?

A favorite quote of mine is from author Madeleine L’Engle who wrote in her book, Walking on Water, “to love anyone is to hope in him always. From the moment we pigeonhole him, and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him, and he ceases to become better.”

Use your imagination and creativity like you did in your dating and early married season. And you don’t have to create public exploits to wow your friends or his when you tell the stories. The best love is private and safe, the kind that generates security and peace within the walls of your marriage and your home.

Still, men and women are very different. We are opposites God made for the purpose of completing one another like two puzzle pieces. One of the challenges when it comes to romance is that spouses usually spell romance differently. For example, men usually spell it S-E-X while women spell it R-E-L-A-T-I-O-N-S-H-I-P. But not always … I often hear from wives who are more interested in sex than their husbands.

The point is you will both view romance and love differently. So your challenge is to find ways to nurture the relationship side and the intimate side of your relationship.

One key is thinking of creative ways to spend time together. When the weather begins to warm, invite him to go on short walks in the evening with you with or without kids. If he has evening tasks outside in his garage, work room, or the barn, join him to get time with him where he is most comfortable. Men are often more willing to talk if they are doing something they find interesting or relaxing. They don’t often respond well to, “Let’s sit on the couch and talk!”

As you find ways to get more time together, add small creative acts like leaving him a voicemail, sending a text, or writing notes for him to find, (see our newest designs here). Take him coffee, ask how you can help him, be kind and interested in him as much as you once were.

Make it a point to thank him verbally to his face for something you appreciate about him. Or something specific he does that helps or encourages you like his work, his leadership, his faithfulness, or his way of serving you and your children. Naming the good in people—your  husband and your children too—always calls out more of those qualities.

Ultimately, if you know your man and know he would like this, imagine new ways to give yourself to your husband sexually. Depending on your level of comfort and your husband’s level of interest in bedroom creativity, plan a special love feast for his birthday or your anniversary.

The only guidelines for your creativity are that it be pleasing to your husband, not offensive to either of you, and within the boundaries of Scripture.

One last thought. In some ways, renewing romance is like baking a cake. Every cake has some ingredients in common; such as flour, sugar, eggs. But there are also many variables that affect the baking. Oven temperature, altitude, humidity, and the inevitable mistakes of inaccurate measuring, incorrect ingredients, or inadequate equipment affect the final product.

Similarly, every marriage contains a host of romantic variables. Husbands and wives bring different thinking patterns and past experiences. Every spouse has experienced disappointment, failure, and rejection in life, related and unrelated to romance and sex, that influences the ability to take further risks. Many marriages deal with repeated health issues for one or both spouses. All couples have different personalities, values, desires, and goals.

Romance is a lot more complicated than baking a cake, but every marriage has the ingredients to make it work if we follow God’s recipe, the Bible, in learning how to love well.  

Renewing romance in your marriage means taking the time, exercising your imagination and being willing to “love your neighbor as yourself”—and your nearest neighbor in this case just happens to be your husband.

May you enjoy a Happy Valentine’s Day this year as you focus on practicing love as God taught us in His word

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