AARON SMITH - Finding Hope in Marriage: Glorifying God in Our Unions

Foreign. Hello, my name is Will Spencer and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast. This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world. New episodes release every Friday. My guest this week is Aaron Smith, half of the online ministry Marriage After God.

He and his wife Jennifer have become bestselling authors, podcast hosts and more, helping Christian singles and married couples align their faith in the direction of family in a Christian courtship climate that often feels hopeless. Overwhelmed with frightening statistics of young women leaving church, men failing to launch declining marriage and birth rates, and shocking divorce stories, Aaron and Jennifer take a different approach.

Faithfulness Be faithful to who God has called you to be as a man or woman. We have a loving Father in heaven. Listen to him, follow him, be obedient to him and his commands about becoming and being a spouse and then a parent and let the rest take care of itself. Not only because you can't fix the world and neither can I. It's literally not our job, it's Christ's, and He's the man for it. Instead, we are called to fix ourselves and our lives with his help.

If we're scared to commit, we have to overcome that. If we're resisting the call to righteous and mature adulthood embodied in marriage and parenting, we have to overcome that too. If we're too busy arguing online or scrolling or browsing, we have to get past that to become the husbands and wives, mothers and fathers we can be and reap those spiritual rewards naturally in our hyper politicized, extremely online world of digital fear.

That message probably sounds a bit out of step with the times, and if it does, good, because I don't put my hope in the world, and neither should you. We as Christians have the opportunity and responsibility to put our hope in Christ and our faith in God and be obedient as little children. And because God's word is true, we'll discover, amidst our anxiety, the reality of Psalm 23, which you've heard before. But I'd like to read to you now. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil, my cup runs over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. This is the spirit that I see informing the work of Aaron and Jennifer Smith and marriage after God. There's a peacefulness around it, a promise, a faithfulness that isn't sensational, but it is godly. And it's here to remind us that while the search for a mate is often more difficult and fraught than any other time in history, God's word does not return void.

Again, God's word does not return void so we, as single, courting, engaged and married people, get to make a choice. Whose word will we listen to? Feminism or her son? The manosphere? Will we listen to the mainstream media and Hollywood? Our secular relatives? Our unredeemed parents, if we have them? Romance novels, YouTube videos, or Twitter influencers? Yes, those voices are super plentiful and super loud.

But Aaron and Jennifer's work lovingly guides us away from all of them, turning down the volume so God can speak about his design and desires for us and how to go about fulfilling them. It's a hard message for men and women, yes, or at least a challenging one. But it's the truth. And we're either ready to hear it and die to ourselves forever, men and women to get the rich blessings that are on the other side. Or we're not. And we'll have to stand before God and answer for that. I believe.

So in this conversation, may Aaron's story inspire you. May his words reach you. May the resources he and his wife provide turn your heart. And may you see, just for a moment, the promise that lies for us as men and women Ahead. Because that's what happened for me now, friends, we're not just recording conversations on the Will Spencer Podcast. We're part of a restoration project for Christian civilization in the West. And I need you in this fight with me.

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Thanks so much for joining me on the Will Spencer podcast. Will, thanks for having me, man. Excited. Yeah. I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you. We got to chat, I don't know was that one or two months ago and get to know each other. And I've just really enjoyed and as we talked about before, I've really enjoyed yours and your wife's perspective on courtship, dating and marriage.

It's very hopeful in a time when I think a lot of people are very frightened about their, their marriage prospects. And, and I've really appreciated your approach to being encouraging to men and women who are worried about this set of topics. Let's say thank you. Yeah, it's, it's been on Jennifer and I's heart for as long as we've been married. Even before we were married, I had a big vision for when I was younger. Does it really desire to be a husband?

And being a father came later, of course, as in my desire because that's something that the world didn't really instill in me, a good, good idea of what being a father was like. But the Lord changed that in my heart after we got married and now I got six kids. So. Oh my goodness. Yeah, definitely, definitely working my way up there up the ladder of fatherhood and trying to figure that out. But yeah, we do live in a pretty strange situation. Number seven.

Yeah, well, my kids are begging my, my wife to, our youngest is four months old and they're already begging her to have another one. And she's like, guys, chill. Can we slow this down, please? Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry I interrupted you. It's okay. No, it's a big deal. But there is hope for especially believers like we having a heart of a desire for marriage. The Bible says that that's a good thing to desire, desire a wife.

And, and so I just, I hope to see more and more believers getting connected and not being unequally yoked, you know, not connect, not trying to get attached to the world. And I just trying to say, well, I can't find anyone here. I'm going to go there. But really trust in the Lord. That's what I had to do. I think it's kind of what God wants all of us as believers to do is to trust him with every aspect, aspect of our life, especially our spouses.

Yeah, that's, I'm very fortunate that I have both men and women who listen to this podcast and married couples as well, and so have the opportunity to speak into both sides of this challenge, because I think men and women face slightly different challenges. In some ways, the challenges are very similar. You know, delaying marriage, you know, worrying about am I ready? Right. The general lack of. Lack of seeming lack of partners in the. In the. In the marriage pool.

But I think that there are a lot of people that do have a heart for it. So why don't we start with speaking to the men? So let's rewind the clock back to when you got married, kind of where you were at and the thoughts that. The thoughts that you were having at the time. Obviously, it was a very different climate back then. There's probably not a whole ton of online dating, very different social climate. But you. It sounds like you had some. Some worries, some lack of.

Some knowledge gaps, but you still boldly stepped into marriage. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that yet. Excuse me. It was a totally different time, totally different climate. I don't think it's hard. I say this with respect to people that are single right now, but I don't envy those that are single in the current climate we're in.

But to be honest, back when I was young, adult, young man, wanted to be married, there was no training, there was no understanding, at least from my personal life. I'm sure some people out there have got, you know, had fathers and mothers that. That guided them and gave them really good, clear direction and what to look for and what to think about and what marriage is and what we are as men, becoming husbands one day and then eventually fathers. I. I didn't know what I was doing.

I didn't know what I was looking for. And you kind of get, as a single person, as a believer specifically, but any single person gets thrown into this mix of like, well, you're single, and you have to figure out what it means to be you alone. And at the same time, if you desire to be married, you got to figure out what it means to become a husband one day. And there's all these thoughts of, how do I know if I'm ready? When am I ready? What kind of person am I looking for?

How do I know it's the right person? How do I know when to make pop the question. How do I know? There's all these things and. And I don't know where they came from, all these questions and ideas on how to pursue a person. You know, if you think about history, up until the 21st century, it wasn't that way. It was much simpler of a concept of, well, you are a man, you become a husband. You know, in general, it was rare to just remain a single person. That happened.

And the Bible even talks about that, that some people have different giftings. But I would venture to say that the majority of men and women are meant to be married, are meant to start families, are meant to. That's exactly what God calls us to in Genesis chapter one and two. And then he tells Noah the same exact thing. Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. And that's one of his desires for family. And that's what is one of his desires, is for men.

And so I'm young and I'm thrown into this mix and I'm thinking about it, of course, I'm like, I want to be married, I want a wife. I'm thinking about wanting to remain pure and wanting to wait for marriage, for sex. And so in my mind I'm like, well, I want sex. And that's a big deal to me. And so I gotta get married, I gotta figure that out. And there's. So there's this biological draw which all of us have. Women have a biological clock.

They start recognizing when they're fertile and ready to go and, you know, ready to have children. That's the internal biological driving us, the how God designed us. And it's a good thing. When you're younger, you have higher testosterone. We listen to all these podcasts that talk about men's health and it makes sense. The higher testosterone causes you to do more outgoing things, more adventurous things, more dangerous things, as in going to talk to a woman seems pretty dangerous sometimes.

And then that biological draw that God put in us drives us to seek a mate, seek a wife. But then God desires us to do it his way, desires us to be patient, desires us to be self control, desires to be honorable and wise and all of these things on top of that.

And so there's no, I don't think there's an easy answer other than I think there are more things that we've added on top of this pursuit of a wife, of a spouse, this understanding of marriage that makes it harder to find a spouse and find a wife and start a family. That is this question of when am I ready? That's a big question. Okay, so is it when you're financially ready? Is it when you're mature enough? Is it when you've stopped sinning in this certain way? Is it when are you ready?

That is such a subjective question. It literally has no black and white answer. There's no. It's just, well, when are you ready? What's your time? What's. And then the other question is like, okay. Then you add on top of that, like, well, this person I'm interested in, when are they ready? Now you have two subjective truths that you're looking for an answer to. And that's a, that's a hard thing to nail down. Is it when you've bought a house? Is it when you've put enough in savings?

Cause we hear these all the time, like, oh, you don't have enough money. You haven't, you know, had enough fun yet. You haven't been. You haven't lived alone yet, you haven't saved enough money. You don't have the career you want yet you don't have. All of these things are completely subjective and to be honest, may or may not have anything to do with God's will for your life and God's desire for who you are as a person. That's right.

So we ask that question to ourselves and then it causes us paralysis. We're like, well, I don't know, maybe I'm not ready, maybe I shouldn't. But in essence, the simplicity of readiness is, it boils down to willingness. It's like, are you ready currently to vow to a single person for the rest of your life? It doesn't matter, because to be honest, you could be ready now.

Have million dollars in the bank account, no debt, you own your own house, you have the career you want, okay, you find a bride and you're like, I'm ready. You get married and you could lose it all the next day. So are you now you're not ready. And so did you make a mistake? Did you? All of those things on trying to figure out what's the right timing, what's the. Those are all subjective and I think they're all ancillary to the reality of marriage. Really comes down to are you willing to commit?

Are you ready to commit? And that has nothing to do with your bank account or the career you have, or if you own a home or if you even have a car. Now some of those things might be good to pursue and be. And as a man, you should be pursuing those things. But my mother in law, before we got married, she was very nervous. You know, I'm fresh out of college, I don't really have a career, I'm doing some youth pastoring.

And she's like, I'm just afraid that you're not gonna be able to take care of my daughter. And I said, well, I said, I can't promise you that for the rest of my life I'm gonna be able to perfectly take care of her. Cause I literally can't promise that I'm probably gonna go through hardships. I said, but I promise you this, that I'm gonna do everything in my power to make sure I can to the best of my ability. Like that. That's the promise.

That's the only promise I can make, is that I'm gonna do the best I can to take care of your daughter for the rest of her life. And that was enough to, like, give her peace. That, like, well, you may not have the money that I wish you had or the. The career that I wish you had or, you know, but your heart is for her. And that's what we should be looking about, looking at is, well, if my readiness should be based on my.

My willingness in my heart, not my bank account or, you know, owning of a home or anything like that. I don't know if that answers your question. That was a lot. No, that. That actually answered my question on the bullseye. Because I interact with a lot of men these days who say those exact things. Well, when I have the right career, when I have enough money saved up, when I own my own home, et cetera, et cetera.

And the tendency is you can't actually control when any of those things will happen. There are any number of things that can happen on any given day that make achieving your material goals bring them closer or make them much further away in an instant. And so I see that men fall into this temptation of waiting until they hit some metric, and then they're ready to settle down and get married. And by that point, they're far older than they could or perhaps should have been.

And so there's this pushing it down the track and, you know, trying to get men to confront that. Like, that's. You're just trying to avoid the responsibility is what I sort of chalk that up to. It's very easy for a man to say, you know, oh, I'm. I'm not ready yet, when inside it's like he knows that marriage is a death to self. He's losing a version of himself forever. Exactly. So it's nice. It's okay. Cool. I thought. I thought I was crazy, but. But it sounds like. It sounds like you nailed it.

Well, and. And that's exactly what it is in reality. Timothy Keller talks about this, and I believe it's in meaning of marriage. He talks about this idea of like who, who you're going to marry doesn't exist yet because you haven't married her yet. You know, like you said, like, you cease to be the, the version of you before marriage will immediately cease to exist because you immediately become one with another person. You're no longer a single entity and you're, you're a unified entity.

And your identity then gets wrapped up in you and her, not you someday with her. And that's right. And the fear, I think a lot of men have and women have the same. They might have a different list of criteria of readiness, but it's the same thing, it's the same fear that holds back. And what it comes down to is if you can ask yourself this question, like, is a spouse going to hinder you from meeting those goals?

Is that what we're really saying is I can't get to my career or my level of savings or my with a spouse? Because all of the statistics say the opposite. That's right. Men and women are more happy on average when they're married. Men and women are more wealthy on average when they're married. They have better savings, they have better satisfaction in life, they have less depression, they're healthier.

Now there's probably individual situations that are different, but the average, across the board, that is true and it makes sense because that's something that God designed marriage to be, is two are better than one. They have a better return for their labor.

And so if we're navigating and our logic is I can't get married yet because I haven't become the person I want to be yet to be married, whatever that may be, definition wise, that identity, then what you're saying is a wife or a husband is going to hinder me from becoming that, when in reality they will most likely, especially believers when they're walking with Christ together, are going to help each other become more like what God wants them to be, not what they want to be. So it's a big deal.

I think we need to be asking ourselves, the single men and women in this world who love God, am I hindering God from doing what he wants through a spouse with me? Because I'm trying to ancillarily, you know, build my self identity before I even find, you know, or say yes to that spouse. So I can, I can hear all kinds of. Yeah, but questions exploding in the, in the minds of young men. Don't worry, guys, we're gonna, we're gonna get to that. We're gonna get to Those. But I wanna. I wanna.

We will. I. I wanna. I wanna throw a curveball and. And see. And see what you think about this. So there's a. There's a feeling. There's. There's an aphorism that I think would describe the. The feeling that I think many men would be feeling. The aphorism is if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Right.

There's a. There's a sense in that, you know, a man traveling alone can travel faster down the road than if he were traveling with either another man or a woman or kids or something like that. So what if a man feels like. Well, but during this time, I can. I feel like I can really go monk mode and grind it out and kind of like make it to the top of that next hill, and then I can run up the hill. And then when I get up the hill, that's when I'll. That's when I'll do that.

What would you say to that guy? Um, I would say that there's a. A yes and a no to that. There's like a. There's a reason it's valuable and there's a reason it's. It's a fallacy. Because if. If in my situation I was, you know, I had my first girlfriend, you know, early adulthood, and broke that off. And that was kind of my catalyst of, like, I'm going to not date, not going to pursue. I'm going to focus on my relationship with God. And so I went into a season of, like.

Because there was all this energy being put out, trying to figure out, like, who's my spouse looking, and it was drawing me, and it felt exhausting. And so I was like, you know, I'm going to do the opposite of that. I'm going to say no to, you know, looking for a spouse right now. And I'm just going to focus my attention on growing in the Lord and becoming a husband, becoming the kind of man that I want to be for a future wife. And that was about three years where I wasn't.

I mean, I had friends. I had friends that were girls. I spent time with lots of people. It's not like I was a hermit, but I wasn't intentionally trying to put my eyes on anyone and pursue that and try relationships and whatever. And then there was. At the end of that three years, there was something that shifted in my heart, and I was like, okay, I want to start looking for a wife. I want to be married. I want a wife.

So it wasn't like it was forever, but there was definitely a short season of me intentionally focusing on my walk with God. But that's often not what people are doing when they remain single. They're often building their own identity apart from marriage. It's not just, I'm pursuing the Lord to get ready for marriage, and then when he is ready for me to start opening my heart up to that again, I'm going to do that. It's a different thing. It's a control thing. Where mine wasn't a control thing.

It was a intentional choice to take my eyes off of this over here and put it on God over here. But then there was a clear moment that I remembered. God was like, it's okay. Start looking. And I'm like, okay. And so I had my eyes open. Doesn't mean I just started dating everyone. But I was like, I'm going to be very intentional in my relationships for the purpose of looking for a wife. So I think there should be.

There's nothing wrong with seasons of I'm going to go alone for the purpose of pursuing Christ. But that for someone who doesn't have the gift of celibacy, doesn't have the gift of singleness, it shouldn't be forever. It should be with a purpose of prepare me for that wife that you're bringing to me or that you're gonna help me be a better seer, a better discerner, a better pursuer, and same for women. So I think on one hand it's, yeah, I can go alone and I'm gonna go faster.

But you might run right past her, right? So it depends on, you know, is your goal at the end of the day, is your goal that. I have a little story talking about parenting. But is your goal to become what Christ wants you to become? Or is your goal to become what you want you to be? Because a spouse is going to get in the way of that 100% of the time. A spouse won't get in the way of you becoming what Christ wants you to be, but a spouse will get in the way of you becoming who you want to be.

And that's where you get a lot of the conflict in marriage. When you rub up against each other and you're like, I want this and they want that, and you neither want the same thing. And that's hard. But when, before we had our first child, before we got pregnant with our first child, we were both in a place where we didn't want any kids. We're Christians, we're Married. We loved God, but we also were very honest about our selfishness. And we had a. We had hearts against having kids.

And there was this opportunity that we were part of a marriage ministry, not leading it, but we were just in a marriage ministry in our church. And there was a need for someone to replace the pastor that was doing that. And so I had been asked to interim pastor this marriage ministry. And I was like, okay, sure. Because, like, I have a gifting of teaching. I can. I can speak, I can share the things that are, you know, to get everyone on board and. But I'm sitting there and I'm.

I just go to the Lord. After one of the nights that we met, before I started doing it, I was like, God, how am I supposed to. There's a bunch of people here more, you know, older than me, married longer than me, have children. Like, how am I supposed to do this? I don't feel at all adequate to do this. And I remember praying, and I was like, I just need to know. Like, I feel like I don't even know enough of you.

And I remember I didn't hear the audible voice of God, but he clearly was sharing with me. He said, if you want to know more of me, he said, there's a side of me that you'll never be able to know unless you become a father. And I was like, huh? And it was in reference to wanting to, you know, lead well and be able to understand and relate to the other people in this church and in this marriage ministry. And God, in a single moment, changed my heart from. I don't want kids. That seems too hard.

That's not the right thing to. I. If I want to know the father heart of God, I need to become a father. It was an instant. And what's crazy is God had worked on my wife at the same time. And so when I went and told her what I said, she's like, I've been feeling the same thing. I was like, crazy. So there's times that, like, marriage does something for us that is very unique. God designed it in a very unique way that it helps us become what Christ wants us to be.

There's things that we can't experience and understand without it. It doesn't mean that every single. Like I said, there's a very rare occurrence, rare occurrence that Paul talks about where there are some that are gifted with singleness, and all they worry about is the Lord and the work of the Lord and missionaries doing mission work, and there's plenty of place for that. But the Majority of us need a spouse. God wants to fill the earth with children who know him.

He wants husbands to learn sacrifice and unconditional love. And he wants wives to learn submission and service and compassion and how to raise children. And he wants husbands to become men who teach their boys what men are and women to teach their girls what women are. And this is, this was God's plan from the beginning to populate the earth, to make government, governments to is, is the family unit and how it operates.

And so just like God was like, you want to know the, you know, the side of me that's a father and like as, and you, you've known me as my child, you know, as a, as a son. But you don't understand what it means to be a father unless you become a father. You don't understand what it means to be a husband and to lead a family unless you become a husband. And I just had an encouraging conversation with my wife who, I mean, we had our sixth child and it's legit. It could be hard.

It's a struggle at times, I bet. Not just keeping six children alive, but raising them to be wise, discerning, godly humans. It's nearly impossible. And I was explaining to her, I said, you know, because she was just saying, this is so hard. And I was like, you know, it is. I was like, we're not enough. We need Jesus to help us do this.

And then I said that the most powerful and most successful by the world's standards, people in the world often have failed in many ways or in every way in their marriages and families. I was like, so what that tells me is having a family is harder than starting a space exploration company. It's harder than starting an electric car company. It's harder than starting a multi billion dollar company and running it and having tens of thousands or millions of employees.

Having a healthy family is the hardest thing to do on the planet.

Being a husband and dealing with the heart of a woman and still being a godly man and then also still managing friendships and relationships and then all of these things and then at the same time leading them to Christ and then still dealing with your own sin and your own confusions and the lies that you believe and feelings of failure and all of those things and then still trying to move forward and create something that's valuable and worthy. It's the hardest thing.

It's the hardest thing in the whole world. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for everything that you just said. That is a clip that I hope people will Go and back up and just listen to that entire last segment because I think it contains a lot of very wise advice, particularly for young men and aspirational fathers to hear, to come out of what might be unconscious, selfish attitudes. It is very easy to remain a single man and to only have to care for one guy.

It is easy to be able to manage your own time or not manage your own time or manage your own money or not manage your own money when you're responsible to no one and not accountable to the person sleeping next to you, who sees things very differently and sees into and through you as well. Because men and women are quite insightful about each other. And so it's easy. It's very easy for.

For men to hide and remain in kind of a boyish state and avoid stepping into learning about the father, heart of God, learning that true side of God's character, you know, by staying a boy and not becoming a man. And it's also. It's also very timely. You're. You seem like a very smart man, so you're probably not on X. Are you on X at all? I am on X, actually. Oh, okay. I mainly use it for. We post our prayers on there, but I mainly use it for news.

Okay. So perhaps you've seen that Mr. Andrew Tate is back in the news. Have you seen that? Yes, I periodically see stuff about Andrew Tate. Yes. Yeah. So. Particularly him. But really, this whole dialogue about masculinity, by the way, it doesn't mean you're not smart because you're on ex. I just wanted to clarify. I'm not doing a backhanded. So. So he's popped into the news again. I don't know, probably because he started some political party in the uk, I'm not sure. But so particularly in.

In. In. In my world of Christianity, that dialogue has exploded the past, say, 48, 72 hours about masculinity and what it means to be a man and Andrew Tate and why he has this appeal to young men. And. And I. I wanted to highlight that particularly because there have been several very, very valid, very powerful, and I think, even devastating critiques of him, like how can you talk about what it means to be a man as if.

As if you're an authority figure, if you haven't stepped into the most basic responsibility of being a man, which all throughout history has been recognized to be a husband, a man to one woman, and a father to more than one child. Right. A child or one child or more. Right. How can you talk about what it means to be a man when really you're just a giant overgrown boy with your toys and cigars and there's nothing wrong with fast cars and a good cigar.

However, isn't there this other side of what it means to be a man that it seems that he's. Maybe he sired children, but that doesn't make him a father. Right. And he's certainly not married. And so I think what you, everything that you just said right there speaks so powerfully into something that I think culture has suppressed in men to some extent. And I want, I do want to get into that, but that also men suppress in themselves.

And let's not, we shouldn't be pointing all the fingers like culture did this, the post war consensus, whatever, right? No, it's like you've got some sin, bro. You've got some fear and some, and some hiding that you're doing as well. And, and men shouldn't, men must be called to overcome that within themselves. And so I heard in what you said a very powerful call to do that. Yeah, and you're right there. And there's, you know, people like Andrew Tate and there's, he's not the only one.

There's a, there's a bunch of people that are, are feeding into the false masculinity and there's a, I think it's in, in a way it's, it's two things. It's feeding into our natural flesh. There's this strong desire in us to be men, to be masculine. But then there's a, on this, on the second thing, there's a desire to have no responsibility and to only care for ourselves. That's the, the sinful flesh.

Like you said, you can run faster, like I can, I can spend all the time getting exercise in and eating well and, and starting my career and building wealth and investing. And it's so much easier to do all of those things over here. But it also, I think it's also the reason it's so attractive is not just because our, our sinful flesh wants that.

The no responsibility, the good looks, the, the, the rock hard abs, the, you know, the homes and the cars and all that lifestyle, but it's, it's also, in a way, it's a, it's a retaliation to the current culture over the last, you know, however many decades of the emasculating sense that men get from culture. And so I think there's a lot of men that are gravitating toward that because it's a way of fighting back against how they've been made to feel like not a man. So the fighting back part is.

Is really interesting because I think a lot of people really lean into that argument when talking about him. It's like, oh, this is. You know, I like Andrew Tate because he's pushing back on. What do you. The longhouse, the gynocracy, the gynocratic social order. There are dozens of. Feminism. Exactly. Yeah. There are dozens of different labels for all of this. And like, okay, like, I get it. You know, I, I came up and into and through the manosphere as well.

I get the outrage, and I've studied it and I, And I understand it. But, you know, at a certain point, even. Even anger becomes boyish irresponsibility. Like, it's so much easier to get super angry on the Internet at whoever it is this week. You know, this week it's whatever, it's feminism. And last week it was, you know, the H1B thing over the immigrants and the week before that, the week before that. It's so much easier even to do that than it is to say, you know what?

I'm going to delete these apps off my phone and I'm going to lean into scripture and into prayer and go to church. And I don't care whether you think your. Your pastor is masculine enough. It doesn't matter. The Bible doesn't come with an asterisk on the COVID of it that says, only read this and only go to church if you know your. Your pastor can deadlift enough. Right.

And so, like, this boyish irresponsibility that men just get sucked into, I think is rather than slow, gradual change, it's dramatic escape. I'd rather get outraged about this today and fight back against whatever it is. Like, feminists talk about the patriarchy, you know, and, and the, The. The manosphere guys or whatever, talk about feminism. Like, well, what about you, bro? Like, what are you actually doing to live into who and what God has called you to be?

Like, right now, you are a combination of your. Both your choices and your circumstances. You have limited control over your circumstances. Like, we don't get to choose what era we're born in. We don't get to choose, you know, a lot of other dynamics, right? But you still get to make choices in relation to those circumstances that move you closer to who God has called you to be, take you backwards or get you nowhere. And that's the part.

That's the part, like, I get the anger, but, like, you still have to act well. And like I said when I was Saying how I almost didn't have any answers, stepping into trying to become a husband, figuring out dating and what that looked like. I don't think many people have answers on what it means to be a man. And so we're naturally going to gravitate as a human being, as a creature that God made, towards something that's going to feel like that answer.

And as John 1, I mean, not John 1, I think it's Romans 1 and 2 talks about that we trade worship for the creation. We worship the creation rather than the Creator. And so we're going to constantly look for in creation that thing that we feel like is going to fulfill that answer rather than the Creator himself, who's going to guide us to the correct answer. And so that often leads us to define things like success or manhood or, you know, whatever you name it, with our own definition.

And so Andrew Tate, you know, he. There's a bunch of stuff that he said before that I'm like, oh, that's, you know, that lines with my conservative views, and there's a lot of stuff that doesn't align with my Christian views. But at the end of the day, you know, how are we defining success? Are we defining it the way the world wants to define it, or are we defining the way Christ wants to define it? And so I, I, it's. It's a hard thing.

I. My whole life I've struggled with this idea of, like, what's my identity? What, you know, am I a man? And the, the more I get older and the more I have children, and the more I, you know, go through hard things with my wife. And at the end of the day, I'm. I have this conversation talking about how this is the hardest thing we'll ever do. I just think, you know, I'm doing something hard.

I'm doing something that is so worth it and worthy and, like, seeing my kids become individuals and have their own thoughts and have their own ideas, and my son pulling out scripture out of nowhere to tell me, and then them coming to us when me and my wife are having a conflict and saying, hey, have you prayed about it? Let's pray, and encouraging us to do the right thing in the spirit. I'm like, man, that's amazing. And so I would want that for anyone.

And it doesn't mean they're going to be perfect at it. Doesn't mean it's going to be easy. No. In fact, it's going to be the hardest thing they ever do. It's going to be the most rewarding thing they ever do if they continue to follow Christ in it all, Take that next right step, because no one told me what steps to take. No one showed me the right path. Almost all of us have probably terrible examples from our own parents because they're also sinners and they also weren't shown the way.

And so we're constantly trying to find out what is success, what is manhood. And it all comes down to is, what if our identity is found in Christ, then we're going to go to Christ for those answers. If our identity is found in ourselves or in the world, then we're going. Going to scour the Internet for him. You were talking about Andrew Tate on Twitter, and there's another. There's an account. I don't follow Andrew Tate, but there's an account I do follow called.

I think it's Gigabased dad or something like that, or Gigabased Husband. I think I may have seen that one. I love it. He posts the funniest things, but he posts like, this is real success. And it shows a woman who's actually a friend of ours who has. I think she's got like nine kids with one on the way or something like that. And I'm like, yeah, like, that is because. And then he says, like, you know, you want to be a radical in 2025. It's like, you know, get married, have kids and go to church.

It's like, yeah, like, that is radical. It's radical to, you know, we go places and people see how many kids we have, but then they. It's more than that. They see that they're well behaved and they come. They're like, your kids are so behaved. I'm like, well, it takes a lot of energy at home to figure that out. It doesn't just happen. It's not like they're just perfect kids. They're not. They're kids.

They have issues and struggles and we have lots of conversations, lots of Bible time, lots of sitting down, lots of con, you know, all of those things to get there. But the world looks at it and is like, that's crazy. You know, you just, you know, you just threw your life. I'm like, no, this is my life. This is what I want. Didn't always want it, but I've learned that it's the best thing ever.

And even all my decisions, like, with business and it's not around making more money, it's like, what can I build that I can leave to my kids if they want it? It's all coming down to legacy and handing down. I think it's Proverbs that says a wise man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. Not just his children, but his children's children. Like, I'm, you know, my inheritance I want to leave, most importantly is an inheritance of. Of salvation. The gospel. I want to.

I want to point them to Jesus. That. So I want that to keep going from generation to generation. But I also am trying to, you know, best I can figure out how to have something to hand to them if, if they want it. They may not want it, but it'd be cool to have it to give to them if they wanted it. Yeah, I mean, I, I appreciate what you said about leading your family to Christ, because I think that might actually be the hardest thing on earth, in a sense.

Well, because the way is that the gate is narrow, right? Like, go through the narrow gate. It, It's. It is a very narrow gate. In fact, sometimes, like if you read Pilgrim's Progress by John. John Bunyan, that many times, classic stories as. What's that? Yeah, we. We've as a family, gone there a bunch of times. Yeah. So, you know, like, that story is exact. Is about exactly how narrow the gate is. Right. Over the course of the lifetime of a believer. And so, you know, I've done hard things.

I've climbed mountains and sailed oceans and, you know, I've. I've done that stuff, like physically hard, literally dangerous, like life at risk stuff. And I don't mean to underplay that. And there are men that do that for a living. Right. With bullets are flying at them, targeted at them. Right. And I don't mean to underplay all that.

And there is something to be said for being a man who can lead other souls to heaven right through the narrow gate over the course of 18 or more years, actually, really their entire life or your entire life as it, as it pertains to them, like, how long are you alive? And getting yourself there as well. That is the kind of task that requires daily discipline, daily focus. And you can do it from when you can do it from the beginning until the very end.

It's not something that is going to naturally go down over time. It's something that increases over time or God willing, should. And like, not to underplay the significance of the weight of that responsibility that, in a sense, never ends. Like, you can launch your kids off, you know, in a good direction. They can, you know, whatever, go to college or they can get married and set off on that road.

But again, if you, as a husband and father and leader should fall off at some point later after they're gone. You know, that can in some sense can compromise their own example. And there are lots of stories about that. And so I think we, I think as, as Christians, we haven't added, like, the secular world doesn't know how to think in those terms. It doesn't know God. It doesn't see heaven. It's not something that it's oriented towards. But as Christians, we're obligated to think in those terms.

As fathers, we're obligated to think in those terms. And that's what makes me a little disappointed. By the way, so many Christians are so excited. Christian men are so excited to follow Godless. You know, in many ways, Antichrist leaders like, well, what does a man look like? He looks like that. No, he doesn't look like that at all. Right. That's what a male looks like. But does. Is he going to lead anyone to anywhere other than off the cliff? No. So why are you following him?

And that's the part that I find, you know, sad. We talk about this in our book, Marriage After God, the which, which I. Have right here, Marriage After God, available now on Amazon. It is, yeah. And thank you for that. We talk, we talk about just the, you know, the stepping stone of growing into manhood and, you know, marriage being a huge part of that.

Again, that doesn't mean single men who are in ministry aren't men, but it's a natural and ordinary, normal way that God brings men into maturity is through marriage. But it also becomes a starting place. If you look in Timothy and Titus, Paul's instruction on how to choose elders and deacons in the church starts with men who are of one wife. The wife is loved and is also respected, has children. So those.

And then he says, he's like, because how can a man want to manage the household of God if he cannot manage his own home? So our homes, like you were just talking about being able to lead my children, if I can't lead my children to know the Lord, what business do I have going away from my house and going and doing that with full grown adults who have a lifetime of brokenness, a lifetime of lies, a lifetime of things that you have to work through.

When I can't sit down with my child who's having an emotional breakdown and help him to understand what the scripture says and what God says and what God says of him and who he is, and how can I go and tell another man how to respect someone and love someone and to treat someone as their own body.

If I'm not doing that to my wife, if I'm not loving her as Christ loved the church, giving himself of her, washing her by the water with the word that she may be presented to him spotless and blameless. And it's not talking about me presenting my wife to him. It's about Christ presenting the church to God spotless and blameless.

But if I'm not doing that in my house with my wife, if I can't walk with her in forgiveness and understanding, if I can't learn patience and even most of the time, repentance. I messed up. I'm so sorry. I need to change in this area. I'm going to change. If I can't do that in my home, what business do I have going and doing that in church? There's a quote I have in the book that says, don't sacrifice your marriage on the altar of ministry. Don't sacrifice your family on the altar of ministry.

This quote, unquote ministry. I'm doing the Lord's work over here, but I refuse to do the Lord's work in my home. And that's backwards. That's absolutely backwards. Because I have six children who are to be disciples in my own home. If I cannot disciple them, what business do I have leaving my house and going discipling other men at all? I have no business. I'm sacrificing my children for the sake of someone else's life. Now, God loves that person.

And that's me saying, God, I don't think you're capable of bringing someone else into that man's life to disciple him. I need to do it. I don't trust you to do it. So I need to leave my family and let them flounder over here. Now, the point is we should be able to do both. I should be in my house, I should be practicing those things here daily. And then I have that energy and that overflow that is going to go into other people's lives. So it shouldn't be an and, or it should be an and.

Like, I do this here so that I can do it there. I have an example here so that my example holds up there. I'm practicing what I preach here so that when I go preach it there, I'm like, hey, you know, I just had this conversation with my son, and they're like, oh, wow, you know, we can't separate our ministry from our families. Our families are our. They're our closest and nearest neighbors.

And so if we're to love our neighbors as ourselves, if we're to minister to our closest neighbor, and like the Good Samaritan story, Jesus asks, who's the neighbor? And they're like, well, I guess the one that helped. Like, there you go. So our responsibility is definitely by proximity. So our most responsible energy, or what we're most responsible for, is what's closest to us. It's our wife, our children, our church, our neighbors. And then it trickles out from there, always.

It doesn't start out in Africa and then come back this way. It starts the other way. Right, right. Well, do you want to spend a moment talking about your book Marriage After God, which you wrote with your wife, and sort of what the book is about and the inspiration behind it? And you want to talk about this for just a moment? Because I have wanted men and women to know about this book because it's. Yeah, please jump in. Well, it came out of. My wife and I, years ago, did a marriage retreat.

We called it Marriage After God. And we had 12 couples come. It was super difficult. We'd never done a retreat before. We haven't done one since. 12 couples. A lot of people. Yeah. But it was awesome. And that the curriculum that we came up for that kind of turned into this book. And so even though it's not something that we continued to do, we're like, you know, people love this. This was awesome. Let's turn into a book. And so that's where Marriage After God came from. And essentially, the.

The premise of the entire book is what we were just talking about, that your marriage is your first ministry. And not seeing it. Seeing ministry as something that happens elsewhere, or not seeing ministry as something that has, like, got this specific category of, like, well, worship leader, executive pastor, you know, you name the handful of ministries that many people think are the only ministries. And so, because there's this.

This fallacy that we have as believers is like, well, I'm not that. So therefore, I'm not in ministry. And actually, this is a. It's a detriment that many people in quote, unquote ministry say is like, oh, if God calls you to ministry, then you're like. When you say that, what you're saying is, I'm not in ministry if I'm not doing what you're doing.

And we wanted to break that mold and say, you know, the Bible actually teaches that every single person, even who you would think is the weaker link, the weaker person in the church, it says they're indispensable that's right. So no minister, no person who's in, quote unquote, full time ministry should tell anyone that they're not in ministry. If they believe in Jesus Christ, if they are a born again Christian, they are ministers of the Gospel.

The Bible calls us priests, all of us, not just this guy on the stage, not just this person, you know, behind the, you know, the computer screen over here. We're in ministry. We, we are ministers of the gospel, each one of us. And it's been a, it's been a, a, a very bad thing, I think, in general, across the board. And it pro. I don't know when it started, maybe back when Constantine instituted the national church, maybe.

I don't know if, but we're trying to break that and say, you know, you are in ministry. If you, if all you ever did was minister to your home and your, your wife and your children, that's that you're going to be told, well done, good and faithful servant. You're going to stand before the Lord and be like, I gave you this woman and I gave you these children and you were faithful with them.

But what happens is when you start thinking that way, when you start seeing your life and saying, oh, I'm a believer, I'm in ministry. And oh, I have this wife. I'm, she's someone I minister to. Oh, I have these children, I minister to them. Oh, I have a neighbor, I minister to them. And so we talk about, in the book, we talk about one of our favorite things in the book is the tool belt. And the tool belt is every Christian has it and it's what God gives each one of us.

It's our unique tools that he's equipped each one of us with by the power of His Holy Spirit and His guiding in our life and all the experiences that we've gone through to be used for his glory. And so we. In the toolbox, there's experiences like, will you have experiences that I don't have. You mentioned sailing. I don't know if you actually sailed or if you were in military or whatever, but I've been on a boat. I've never gone across the ocean.

Our testimony, every single person has their own testimony of how God took them from the muck and the mire and put them on solid ground. How Christ met them and did a work in their life and they received Jesus. The other thing is our gifts and our talents, each one of us. I can podcast and we write books. That's a gift and a talent, but that's not everyone's gift and talent. I'm not the only person that's ministering to the world through my books.

My books have not reached even a percent of the world. But there are people that have other gifts. We talk in the book. There are people that are really good at baking. And I'm not saying that's the only gift that someone might have, but some people have a really excellent gift of baking. They may not even have a business with it, but we had friends that dropped off, you know, they would always. They would drop off a pastry and a letter and remind us that they're praying for us.

Some people are really good, you know, with hospitality and hosting and cooking and bringing in their neighbors and sitting down and having a delicious meal and using that as an opportunity to tell them about Jesus. And then the last one in the tool belt is resources. We all have different level of resources that God's entrusted to us. And so we tell believers. The story of this book is, you're in ministry. Here's what God gave you to minister with.

And you don't need to see yourself as inadequate. Stop seeing yourself as like, well, I'm not them, so therefore I'm not in ministry. No, you are. Break that. Take the glasses off. Take the blindfold off. You are if you believe in Jesus, if you're a born again Christian, you're a part of his building, you're a part of his work. You are what he's doing in the world, and your family is what he's doing in the world. And he wants to work in us and through us. And so.

And we use the marriage as a catalyst to talk about this concept. And so it starts with your spouse and then your children, and then trickles its way out into the world. And it's how God has always intended it from. From day one. Well, I should say day six, right? I mean, that's that it sort of brings the depth of responsibility into. Into sharp focus. Like, you're no longer just a. You're no longer just a man. You have. You have a ministry.

I remember the first time my friends who baptized me, you know, they. They were asking me about my podcast, and they referred to it as a ministry. I'm like, I haven't opened ministry yet. I'm not in ministry. I said that like, well, no, that's. That's just, you know, sort of that's what you're doing for the world. That's how you're. How you're bringing the gospel, you know, to the world. That's how you're ministering to people.

It's not that you're a priest or you're a pastor or anything like that. It's. That's just the term for that. And it was like, that's very. That was a very interesting little nugget they gave me because it helped me think about what I do in an. In a new way. And I think for believers to think about all of their responsibilities in the world and.

Which includes at home and out in the world as ministry in maybe not in a formal sense, but in the sense like, this is your opportunity to bring the gospel out, you know, and to embody it in a fallen world and inside the walls of your home and outside at work and the other. Other spheres that you move through. I think it creates a greater sense of responsibility to behave and to think and to move in a godly manner when you. When you think of it that way. Yeah, and. And it's true.

It's. If you think of. We were just talking to the kids this morning about that. We were talking about the word dispersion. And there's, you know, God dispersed the people at the Tower of Babel because he wanted them to spread around the world and he confuse their languages. But there was a dispersion that happened in the New Testament after the resurrection of Christ when the persecution was just increasing, increasing in the church and with the Jews, that Christians were being spread out.

They had to flee. They were being pushed away. They were being killed. And so there was all these Christians fleeing away from Israel and from Roman occupation. And that was how God spread the word. He put his word in them and then spread them out. And so these Christians over in Asia, where these people in Asia had never even heard of Jesus. This thing was taking place, you know, thousands of miles away. And they're just living their lives, doing what they do.

And all of a sudden this refugee family shows up and they're like, oh, we had to flee because we believe in this man that died and rose again from the dead. And they're like, what? And then you have this. You have this family, put it that way. Then you have this another family that got sent to, you know, Italy and then another.

And you have all these people now filled with the Holy Spirit and a little bit of the knowledge of God, because the Bible wasn't even, you know, in the hands of people for 100 years or so after Jesus was ascended into heaven. And so you see these. This was God's plan from the beginning, that his word would be spread not by professionals, not by people. Professional, quote, unquote, ministry, which there are those people. I'm not putting that down.

Like, there's like, the Bible talks about this, you know, supporting your. Those who teach you and sharing all good things with them. And some. And those that teach are deserving of a double portion. And those are good things. But that wasn't God's intention for the spreading of the gospel, the spreading of the gospel. His intention was the church at large. You, me, anyone who names the name of Jesus and us being in our place.

So will you have an influence in your location, where you're at, not just online, but in your own, wherever you live? You have an influence that I will never be able to have because I'm not there. I have no proximity to Will and who Will has proximity to. And so God has his church where you're at. God has his church where I'm at, and that's his plan.

And you know, what, if, again, I go back to this, but if people recognize that their children are part of the church and their disciples, and that's how we're raising them, the church is growing. My intention is like to raise up six children who know the Lord. Like, okay, there's six people in the body of Christ. And so you have not just multiplication, but fruitfulness in that multiplication. So that happens in our homes with the way we see our families and the growth of them.

And then it happens in our lives when we recognize, like my career or my job or my neighbors. These are not just people here for me to avoid or have a good conversation with, but they're hopefully people that will enter into the kingdom of heaven through my influence in their life. You know, I may just be a planter or I may just be a waterer, but my prayer is that the Lord brings an increase in anyone's lives around me. I love that.

That way of thinking that we're called to care for, we're called to steward or to shepherd. More than what might be obvious, that there are opportunities for us to guide and to lead that again, men are called to step into. You're called to step into that role. You might not be called into the role of a deacon at your church or an elder. You know, that. That might not be. That might not be you, but certainly there are.

There are ways in which you can step into that role every day if you choose to approach it that way. Yeah, you choose to approach whatever. Whatever you do. Whether it could be your bowling league, you know, maybe. Maybe you're very Passionate about that. And you have some leadership role at your bowling league that is the opportunity to faithfully steward and shepherd people.

Now it doesn't mean you're going to get up at the next tournament and you're going to give a sermon, you know, but it's the opport, it's the opportunity to plant seeds. It's the opportunity to embody and witness as the gospel. And you bring that home with you as well. And it, it never turns off. There's never a moment, there's never a moment where, in a, in a man's life or in a woman's life for that matter, where it's like, okay, like we're in a free for all sin period for the next hour.

Yeah, you know, God's gonna look the other way. It doesn't work that way. Well, and I, I think there's a kind of going back to this idea of manhood and like this boyishness of not wanting to step into any responsibility, this fear of like, well, I don't want to be responsible for that, you know, so if I'm not, I'm not the pastor. I don't need to be responsible for anyone's salvation or anyone's knowledge of God. I'm just me. I go to work and I come home and then I come.

Yeah, I love to receive and I love to hear, you know, the message and I feel good. I'm just going to practice being a good person. But there's a responsibility. I want to encourage all your listeners to go read first and second Timothy and Titus and look at the qualifications for an elder. Like again, not everyone's going to be an elder. Not everyone's going to be a deacon. Not everyone's going to have those official roles in the church.

Official, okay, but go read the qualifications and tell me which ones are not good to be walking in. Whether you're an elder or not. Tell me which ones. You're like, oh, I can be a drunkard because I'm not an elder. Oh, I can be, I can, you know, be given to ill gotten gains and trying to be a pursuer of wealth because I'm not an elder. Oh, I can have children that, you know, don't need to know. My children don't need to know the Lord. I don't need to disciple them.

Well, because I'm not an elder. You know, you look at all the, all the qualifications of an elder and there are things that men should be walking in regardless of their position in any church anywhere. And so I tend to point people down, be like, well, you may not be in any official role in any church, but you are officially a minister in the body of Christ. And so you better be thinking about that good and hard about how you're walking. The Bible is very clear about that.

So I can hear out there in the Internet, all the guys listening, saying like, okay, well you know, you and Aaron have banged on men. You've talked about responsibility and you've talked about, you know, growing up and you've taken shots at my heroes and you know, accountability, all that. Yeah, okay, fine, hear it. And they're probably saying, well, okay, so what about the women? I look around, this is them speaking.

I look around and I see feminism and I see girls putting off marriage and they're into online dating and then men are disposable and you know, they don't follow the Bible and they're leaving churches. And I want to acknowledge all of that topic set which I think articulates very real concerns that men have.

And I want to start talking about the female side of this equation because it is true that a man's income, I think this is, I think you mentioned earlier, that's been statistically proven that a man will earn more than with a wife to care for at home, to take care of and manage the home front. Then two, then two working couples will earn together, right? And I've, I've seen this in various families that I've met, you know, I met the strangest thing.

I, you know, a multi, multi million dollar millionaire father, very giant mansion, etc. Private plane. Like the guy, the guy was set, his wife had stayed home to raise their, their, their three kids and the wife had made this sacrifice. The husband had, you know, gone from a low level salesman to the CEO of a company which he founded and the wife was raising the daughters to be feminists and have their own careers. And it was like, yeah, exactly. So, so this is a real thing.

And so I want to speak into a little bit, a little bit about this as well, because particularly your books, they're not written by Aaron Smith, they're written by Aaron and Jennifer Smith. So clearly you found, you found a wife, six kids you've mentioned who's on board with this or you've created this together.

So I want to talk a little bit about the, the, the female side of the equation as well and, and hopefully speak some reality and also some hope into men and give some guidance to the women who are listening also. I'll say this, that wherever there are Women. And wherever there are Christian women, there's going to be marriage material. I'm just going to say that.

And I think we need to change our expectations, because I think we set ourselves up with wrong expectations that are going to shift and change after marriage. And so that's one thing. But on the women's side, someone once told me, read your own mail. And so the point is, we like to, as husbands, look at Proverbs 20. Proverbs, not Proverbs, Ephesians 5:22. And we like to go say, wives, look what Ephesians 5:22 says, says, Submit to your husbands and everything. That's not my mail.

God wrote that to wives. Wives are to read that. Wives are to look at that, and they're to submit themselves to the Lord in that as they obey it. That's their mail. It's not my job to go tell my wife what their mail says and read it for her. I need to read my mail. Husbands likewise, love your wives, as Christ loved the church. That's my mail.

And so I just wanted to start with saying I don't have much of a. I don't know what the terminology is, but my intention is not to try and convince any woman what kind of woman she needs to be. She's to seek the Lord. The Bible is very clear about what a godly woman looks like. And so she gets to go in the word of God and she gets to submit herself before the Lord, as I would tell any man to do, and say, lord, am I becoming and operating like the woman you want me to be?

That's what she gets to do. And the word is not unclear at all. And I also say this, that there is, out of all of the Bible, gosh, what 20 verses geared towards women and how they should behave. And then the rest of the Bible is men how should behave. Right. Amen. So, yeah, there's that. A lot of what we're seeing in the world is because of men being boys. And I'm blaming everything on men. I'm just saying men not leading well, husbands not loving their wives well.

And then women, these wives, becoming angry and bitter and saying, I want something different for my daughter, to protect her from this kind of man. And so then they. They lead their daughters in that way. And so my. I would have an encouragement for any of the older women, older wives that are. That listen to this podcast to recognize that they have a major role. Titus talks about this and these older women leading younger women to be godly women and to love their Husbands and to. To teach.

Well, it says. And so we need older men to do the same thing. We need elder men and elder women to recognize that they're not irrelevant as the culture has made them feel, that they're more relevant than ever. Because we need the wisdom and we need the history and we need the tenure and we need the dedication and the faithfulness of these older men and women who love God, have walked out their faith over the history of their marriages to find these young women and say, what are you doing?

This is right. This is what's right. Here's what you should look for. Here's how you should behave and encourage them in what's right. And so I think we're missing a lot of that in our culture. I don't think for a fact we're missing a lot of that. We're all raised. I don't know how old you are, but I just turned 40 last April, and I just grow up. And I had a few men in my life that spoke in my life and mentored me. But I'm just looking back and I'm like, where are all the older men?

They all got older and they're like, I want to retire and I don't want to focus on anything. Instead of seeing themselves like, I have a ministry to all these younger men. And then we were also told that old is old news and we need to. We want youth pastors that are our age and our peers. We want leaders that are just like us. Rather than looking to the older generations, looking to the people that have walked out faithfully for decades, generations, we've substituted elders for peers.

And I just think that's been a detriment to our society in a big way. Thank you for saying that. Oh, my goodness. That has been something that I've observed since long before I came into the Christian world. Just in the world of men's work, you know, men's retreat, stuff like that. One of the things about going into those environments, again, this is long before I was a Christian.

One of the things about going into those environments is that there were men who were elders, meaning these were older men, you know, 50, 60 plus, who carried themselves with a sense of gravitas that you felt, this is an older man, right, who has lived, who has achieved, and who has wisdom to pass on and isn't going to tolerate me being a boy or me being irresponsible or anyone like that. And the weight and the gravity that lent to the proceedings was like, this has been missing.

Where are the Older men. And when I say older, I mean 65. 60. 65 plus. Yeah, right. Genuinely, legitimately. They've lived, they've internalized, they've digested and they've metabolized life and they've made something out of it, and they're going to show up and they're going to take control of the situation.

One of the, One of the stories that I always tell or sort of one of the observations I always make about men is that, you know, young men get so fired up and think that they're super powerful and they're the most powerful thing in the universe. And I'm like, okay, let me show you the limits of that. So imagine that you have a line. Listeners have probably heard me say this before.

So imagine you have a line of, like, Braveheart warriors, like on the side, one side of the field, their faces are painted and they're howling. You know what I mean? They got their. They've got their swords and they're ready to do a charge across the battlefield. Okay? They're all fired up, right? You have to. There are two things, two things to think about.

One, if you were to take a beautiful woman, shoeless, in a long flowy dress, and just walk her across the battlefield in front of them, you'll watch all of them just go. All that energy will just. Will just bleed out, right? Just. It'll just shut off.

The other situation, though, is you take a wizened old man, 85, 90 years old, with a walking stick, and he just crutches, you know, with his bad leg and kind of withered body out into the middle of the field and just looks at all the men, just looks at all of them. I don't approve of any of you. You'll watch them all shut down and turn around and go home. Where are those men? Those men are not around and they haven't been around for a while.

And, and, and I, I appreciate your observation as well, that there are no older women. And that I think is probably the. One of the larger problems that isn't discussed is, you know, whatever may have happened three or four generations back with someone's dad as a result of feminism, fine. I still do believe that women, you know, from the 19, the baby boomer generation onwards, essentially, they made their choices.

You know, the, the wealthy family that I talked about earlier, the dad was a lovely man, very kind, very gracious, very generous. And the wife was still discipling her daughters to go there, to go their own way and had no reason to do so. She was she seemed to be quite upset about the sacrifices she had made and didn't want her own daughters to make those sacrifices for, you know, generational wealth.

So I do want to highlight that women have made their own choices to abdicate in their roles of training the younger generations, both men and women have, and not just the baby boomers. That's echoing now down through the generations. Yeah. And I also want to point out there are older men and older women that are doing this, correct? Yes. As long as they're gone. And I want to ask them to continue to do it.

But I also want to call out any older men or women that are listening and say, this is something that you should be doing. And if you don't feel qualified, if you don't feel adequate. First of all, we all feel that way. Always. I don't, not at all. But maybe, maybe there's just, there's a way we're walking that makes us feel inadequate. Like we're not dedicating our life to the Lord. We're not walking with him.

We're not abiding in the vine, you know, as a, as a branch who needs to be, you know, provided all the sustenance to make fruit. And so we just, we need to see that. I just, I've been praying that God would just invigorate. I'm just, I'm praying for my church.

You know, I pray that God invigorates and revives the men on my church and myself and just fills us with just more of his spirit and a desire to not just raise our families to know God, but to lift each other up and to serve each other and then to do that outside of our homes. And yeah, so I pray that I would continue on so that as I get older I will see myself like that and not take no guff, you know, just call boys to be men.

Well, you know how, you know how older men get there, how they get to that state? Like you get to be an 85 year old man who calls, you know, who calls boys out on their guff and that they listen. You know how, you know how you get there? No, tell me. By taking responsible. By taking responsibility. There you go. The man, the man who has gotten to that stage is a man who decided, I'm going to take responsibility for everything around me.

Like it's all on my shoulders and I'm going to do that successfully and I'm not going to point fingers and I'm just going to take it on. I'm going to grow and by the time he gets to 85 years old, the amount that he's accomplished, and you can feel the depth that life has carved in him. It carves grooves in us, right? And you feel that whether you see the scars or not in a man, you can feel them. And those are the. Those are the things that call young men to attention.

But we don't have fathers anymore. We have older brothers. Andrew Tate is not a father. No one in the manosphere was a father. They were all older brothers. And it's very much like Lord of the Flies. We're all being where we're a bunch of boys marooned on an island, being raised by older boys. Instead of a father, God the father and a father, father and father figures coming in and being like, this is just. No, this is not happening. And I think that there's a real need for that. Absolutely.

We need more men to be godly men. So I did want to touch on another one of your books. We've talked about women a little bit. You have 31 prayers for my future wife. You also sent me 31 prayers for my future husband. I gave that one as a gift because I don't need it. But let's talk about this, because we talked about the things that men can do to. To be ready to commit. Not to wait, but to be ready to commit. We can.

We talked a little bit about men despairing, a little bit about the marriage options that are out there, the lack of fathers, lack of mother figures and all of that. And yet we have God the Father in heaven, who is there for us to pray and make supplications to. And we can pray for a wife. But I found that the prayers in this book, prayers for my 31 prayers for my Future Wife, we're far more specific and powerful. So maybe you can talk about this book and its companion as well. Yeah, the.

The Prayers for Future Husband and Wife books came out of exactly what I did and my wife did before we were married, before I even started courting her, dating her, and spending time with her, I was. Spent years writing prayers out for my future wife. You know, asking God, you know, when is she going to be here praying? When I was, you know, spending time with a woman that I was interested in, a female that I was interested in, be like, lord, is this person the one? Is this who you have for me?

I like this about her. I like this about her. But there's this. And so when I proposed to her, I read some of the prayers that I had written out for My future wife. And I told her, I said, you're that person. You're the answer to these prayers. And so years later, after starting this ministry, our first books, we. Our first prayer books that we came out with were for husband and wife. You know, of course, because we were married and we were writing for that audience.

But when we came out with the future prayer books, based off of this concept of like, well, why don't we help people pray for their future spouse like we did, they quickly became our most popular books. And we've sold way more books of these.

And it makes sense because there's a larger audience, I think, of single people than there are of, you know, trying to get a husband and a wife on the same page, sadly, is harder to get than getting a single man who is interested in praying for his future wife or a single woman who is interested in praying for her future husband. But the fact that people are doing that is really awesome. And we also. If you.

I don't know if you've read the book yet or not, but a lot of the prayers, they have, in a big way, cause you to be introspective about yourself because you start praying for something or this future person you have not met yet, probably, and you're like, wait a minute, am I that? And so you start praying for yourself as well, and you start asking yourself, like, I'm praying that this woman will be a good steward. And being. Staying out of debt. Am I, you know, spending up my credit card?

Am I, you know, setting myself up for failure, for marriage, where I'm going to be like, hey, we're married. And guess What? I have $45,000 in consumer debt. Good luck helping me pay it off. Now, like, you start praying for these things for another person, and it very quickly becomes a mirror. And that's one of the powers of prayer. You step into the throne room of God and you're talking to him, especially when we're praying about other people.

Often the Holy Spirit's like, great, now let's look at you. You're like, oh, like, I want that person to be, you know, nicer and more generous. And the Holy Spirit's like, well, you know, how generous are you? How nice were you in this situation? Not in a condemning way, but in a sanctifying way. So prayer does that when we come to God. It opens the door of God being able to show us and reveal to us things that are in our hearts that we didn't realize were there. So that's one of the special.

You know ways these books work is it's not to replace prayer. We even say that in the book. It's, it's literally, it's a, it's to be a catalyst, it's to be a help along the way type thing.

And our heart is that when people use these books either for their, you know, who they're engaged with, because a lot of engaged couples get these books and they'll use them leading up to what, their wedding and then they'll actually trade them and because you can write your own prayers in there, but a lot of single people using them and just getting testimonies over the years of women and men saying, I was praying for my spouse before, but now I'm realizing God wanted to prepare me and I wasn't

ready in the sense of spiritually. I had this wrong perspective, I was looking for the wrong things. And when I started praying for my future spouse, I started realizing that God wanted to work on me. God wanted this to change in my life. And so that's our heart for it is that God uses them to help prepare the person to become a wife or a husband. Because again, you can't change anyone. You can only work on yourself. So that was the thing that I had reading through many of these prayers.

It's like, okay, if God were to answer my prayer and bring me the kind of woman that I'm praying for, am I the kind of man that she getting. Wait a minute. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And there were some really, there were some really uncomfortable moments like, okay, I guess I gotta go work on that. Right? And, and the woman I gave the prayers for my future husband book had the same, had the same experience of, of seeing herself reflected in that.

And it's, and that's, and I think that's a, that's an important lesson for, for men to learn is that like, is that women do have their own, they have their own responses to sin. Maybe they're not as upfront about it, maybe they talk about with each other. But like, you know, you mentioned earlier about how it can seem almost life threatening to go talk, to go talk to a girl. Right? That's a, it seems like a dangerous thing to do. And I think part of it, especially nowadays. Exactly, exactly.

And I think part of that maybe I'll try and talk my way around this. But it seems almost like there is, there is this nature of the feminine that comes across as perhaps perfect in a way in itself. I don't know that I, I don't know. I have to think Harder about that, but also to recognize that women would read those prayer books and, and recognize that even inside themselves that no, they're just as human as men are, but that, that, that maybe that doesn't strike men in the same way.

I'll have to do more thinking about this. I, I, I think I would put it, and this is a generalization of course, but I think often men are very aware of their own shortcomings and women are also very aware of our shortcomings. So. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So just real quick, do you and your wife talk about the ministry that you've built together?

Are you surprised that this has become the thing it is because it didn't sound like way back when that you set out to be this kind of creator or to build this life for yourselves. But it seems like it's, you know, God has offered you the opportunity, he opened the door, you walk through it, and it's been quite successful for you and your family. Is this surprising or does it kind of make sense to you or does it take both of you by surprise? It's not surprising anymore.

There's definitely been moments of like, what, like, how did this even happen? Like, how are we, like we, at one point for, for several years actually Hobby Lobby was buying a bunch of our books and we were in every Hobby Lobby store in the country. And so when that happened, I was like, how, like, how is this even happening right now? And we were like one of the, I'm pretty sure we, the, we were the first self published books that they ever put in their stores.

And so things like that are, it's like, okay, God, you're, that's crazy. Thank you. I didn't deserve it, but you made this happen. I couldn't have done it because I had nothing, nothing directly to do with it. They just reached out and said, hey, we're interested in your books. And we're like, I'm like, okay. But so there's been moments like that that have been surprising. I tend to be the kind of person that doesn't think too hard about too much stuff.

So I kind of like, what I mean by that is I'm here now and I'm just taking the next step forward. And so in the Marriage After God book, we talk about this in the sense of it's where I'm at today. The yes that I'm at today started off with a yes 20 years ago, and then another little yes after that and another little yes. So God's always leading us somewhere. If we're Looking, we're paying attention to it. And often it's just. It's a series of yeses to God. It's like, yes, I will do that.

Yes, I'll do that. Yes, I'll do that. And so we didn't get married. And I didn't say to my wife, like, let's start a marriage ministry. We had, to be honest. We almost got divorced four and a half years into marriage. We were done marriage. So this came out of that. And so when we started saying yes to God of like, yes, well, I'm going to humble myself and stick it out with. Even if it doesn't turn out the way I want, I'm not going to give up on my bride.

We said yes to certain jobs that gave us certain talents to do these sorts of things. My wife has always had a talent for writing, but I asked her one day, I said, hey, we're dealing with some stuff. Would you be interested in having me set you up a blog and you just process some of this stuff in writing? She said yes to that. That was another small yes. And it wasn't like I had a plan of any of this.

It was just, I was building websites and I wanted to practice building a blog, and I thought it would be a cool idea that she would write on it about things that we were going through and things that God was revealing to us. So it's a series of small yeses that build into big yeses. And it just proves what the Scriptures say, you know, you're faithful with small, with the little, and you'll be faithful with much.

If you're faithful with, unfaithful with a little, you're not going to be faithful with anything. And so in some sense, yes, I look back and I'm like, I don't. This was never the plan, but here we are. So what does it look like tomorrow? I have no idea, but here I am today. Well, the Lord directs our steps, right. And sometimes he has better things in store for us than we would plan for ourselves. Yeah, I would never have planned this for me. Exactly.

Yeah. Well, I. I want to thank you for your ministry and. And for your writing and for your books and for your time as well. I've certainly been blessed by things that you and your wife do, and I've been looking forward to having this conversation because I think many more men and women can be blessed by them. Especially because it does seem that there's, like I said, a lot of hopelessness out there, a lot of worry, a lot of fear. Despair, anxiety and I don't believe that it has to be that way.

So between your marriage After God books and your prayers for your wife and husband books, I think you provide and will provide a lot of hope for for people that are wondering about their destiny and future in marriage. Thank you. That's what I hope to point people to Jesus and that's all he is our hope. So amen. Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do? They can find us pretty much on most social media platforms.

Arrange after God and marriageaftergod.com is where they can find our blogs and our podcast. I have a podcast called Marriage After God. If you just Google Marriage After God to be honest, you'll find all of our stuff. Great. Yeah, I'll be sure to send them your way. Thank you so much for your time Aaron. Thanks Will. Glad to be here. Sa.