Seasoned With Salt: Biblical Marriage Communication That Builds Instead of Breaks

Colossians 4:6

 6 Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. (NIV)

Paul’s teaching is that our words should work like salt to make conversations taste better to everyone. But in marriage, emotions run deep. Both joy and pain delve to a place of transformation. We become different people whether from the exuberance of love we experience or the acute pain of being hurt by someone we love, who by the way, promised to love us for better or for worse. And the transformation in those painful moments can see us becoming someone we never want to be. Our words do not salt the conversation. Instead, they are poison carrying the power to kill and crush the other person. If we do not learn how to communicate in a positive way in the hardest moments, pain will build upon pain until we can no longer endure.

Here is our command for all conversations:

Ephesians 4:29

 29 Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. (NIV)

Not one single word should come forth unless it has been refined in intention and desire so the goal is for the benefit of those we are speaking to. Agape love must dominate our approach to argument and discord. Agape is doing what is best for the other, even if it means personal sacrifice. When the potential for strife becomes evident through raised voices, sarcasm, or shutting down, then our desire must be to benefit and bless the other not to protect and grasp tightly to what we want. The difficulty of this is immense. We need the Holy Spirit.

Preparing for the battle each and every day

Most of what we need to communicate better in arguments is work that must be done prior to any disagreement. There is a spiritual war. In a class I teach, a participant said, “The devil hates marriage.” This cannot be understated. Your marriage and your family are fighting an unseen battle with the enemy who never stops working to steal, kill, and destroy. And when you are in a war, you can’t wait for the bullets to start flying before you put on your armor and grab your weapons. The same is true for spiritual warfare. We must prepare for the battle each and every day. In the communication battles, we need to prepare our spirit when all is well so when everything hits the fan, our spirit is full of Christ and disciplined to follow His way despite what is said or done to us.

What is spiritual must be brought into our spirit

There are many things we know in Scripture. We know them intellectually, but they have not penetrated our spirit. What is spiritual must be brought into our spirit. It’s the difference between the commandments being written on stone tablets and God giving us the Holy Spirit to write the commands on our hearts.

When God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments, He did not expect their knowledge of right and wrong would create a desire to do right all the time. And even when there was a desire to do the right thing, the Ten Commandments did not release power for a person to set aside their pride and selfishness to do the right thing. Knowledge of what we should do doesn’t equal the power to do it. We need the Holy Spirit who forms in us a new desire and gives us new discipline.

When it comes to Agape

When it comes to Agape, we know what it is. It’s written right there in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth:

1 Corinthians 13:4-7

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (NIV)

Agape is not a feeling. It is a behavior empowered by the Holy Spirit at work in us. Agape is patience when faced with frustration. It is kindness when faced with rudeness. It is joy for what others have even when we don’t have the same. It does not dishonor in the face of insults. This is Agape. We know it. It’s in our head intellectually. We know we should not yell at our spouses. We know our words, even in arguments, should come from a heart of Agape. But knowing this is not enough. We must get the command to love from our head to our hearts. We must move from a knowledge of how we should act to falling in love with call to love even when we are not. This requires spiritual formation practices.

Meditate on love daily

If we want to communicate better, first we must meditate on love daily. We must continually remind ourselves what love looks like through meditating on its meaning. Contemplation is essential followed by prayer asking the Holy Spirit to help us with the discipline we need to set aside our hurt and operate in Agape.

If you want to know more about Agape, check out The Sacred Union.

Also, we need to meditate on humility

Also, we need to meditate on humility. Let’s consider this passage:

Proverbs 13:10 10 Where there is strife, there is pride, but wisdom is found in those who take advice. (NIV)

Whether you are right or wrong in the argument, once it reaches the point of strife, we are operating in pride. We have come to a point that our desired outcome of the argument is more important than how we treat our spouse. That’s pride. We are commanded to humble ourselves. God will humble us if we don’t, but He does this through discipline. This is not His first desire. He would rather we humble ourselves first so we don’t have to go through the discipline.

Luke 14:11 11 For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (NIV)

We must be very clear in our spirit, not just our head, that we are not God. Knowing this is not enough. We must meditate on this and let the Spirit write it on the tablets of our hearts so in the moment of argument, our spirit moves toward humility. Humility helps us to remember in the critical moment that we are not God that our agenda should be elevated above anyone else’s. We remember that we don’t know everything. We don’t actually know that our way or our desire is superior to theirs. We think it is. It feels true, but we don’t know the future so there is no way to know how we handle today will work for what is coming tomorrow.

In arguments, pursue humility and always leave room in your mind that what you think might be wrong and your solution might be wrong.

For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of

As we meditate on love and humility, there are lessons and behaviors we will learn from the Spirit. Our words come from the heart where our desires, emotions, and intentions rest.

Luke 6:45 45 A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. (NIV)

When our hearts are full of pride and arrogance, arguments will kill the marriage and the family. But if we let ourselves be filled with Christ through prayer, meditation and contemplation of Scripture, and worship, our heart will be transformed. We will have different desires and different intentions.

Often, when we are arguing, our intention is to get from the other person what we believe them to owe us. Though they have entered into a covenant with us, we are not justified to respond as if we are entitled to certain behaviors from them. We may feel they owe us respect or sacrifice. We may feel they owe us a conversation or sex. But the truth is that for someone to owe us something, this means we must give to them first. Since we are unable to give them constant and consistent things we want from them, we can’t pretend they owe those things to us.

Even if the Bible commands our spouse to do something or be a certain way, this doesn’t mean they owe it to us. The Bible commands husbands to love sacrificially, but they don’t owe this to their wives. They owe this to God because God has always loved them sacrificially. The Bible commands wives to respect their husbands, but they do not owe this to their husbands. They owe this to Christ because Christ has always given them the utmost respect. And how do we repay what God has given? We repay Him by giving what He has given to us to other people. But, if a spouse acts like their spouse owes them something, their heart’s intent in an argument will be to get what they are owed. This will always end badly. We are not God and they owe us nothing. They owe it to God to love us. They owe it to God to respect us. But they don’t owe it to us and if we pretend they do, selfishness and pride will become the condiments we bring to the conversation.

On the other hand, if we do act as if they owe us something, we will not fight them to get it. Instead, humility will allow us to let it go and keep loving them anyway. They have committed to giving us love, but that is not the same as owing it to us. They owe it to God to love us because He has loved them and we are His child. 

The health of the marriage should trump anything and everything else

Our heart is also the seat of our desires. To communicate better, we must learn to prioritize our desires as God does. The health of the marriage should trump anything and everything else we might argue about. When we are fighting over how to discipline our children, parenting has become more important than marriage in our heads. When we are fighting over money, we have made money greater than the relationship.

We might think if these smaller things are not worked out, the marriage will not work. This is not true. To keep marriage as the highest priority, we must learn to give grace when we feel the other person is wrong rather than fighting with them until we get what we want. Giving grace to another creates loyalty in their hearts toward us. Grace lays a foundation by which peace, love, joy, and intimacy can grow. Good marriages are not made through getting them to agree with us on every issue, but giving grace when they don’t.

The bible says to not argue over stupid things

The bible says to not argue over stupid things. How many of us have looked back and realized we had a horrible argument for a stupid reason.

2 Timothy 2:23 23 Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. (NIV)

The word ‘stupid’ in this phrase comes from a Greek word that means an ‘uninstructed question.’ In other words, if we are fighting over something that God has not given a specific answer to, it is not worth it. The Bible says a woman must respect her husband. But if a man fights to get this respect and has defined respect for him as doing everything he says, this is a stupid argument.

For example, the Bible says we are to be wise with our money. The Bible teaches a few principles: giving sacrificially to God, not overspending, not seeking get rich schemes, being generous to others, and investing. However, the Bible does not specify how to do this in every situation. If one spouse wants to put the money into a savings account, but another wants to invest the money into a business, either could be good and either could be bad. Banks could crash. Businesses could fail. Instead of arguing over how to fulfill the command to be wise with our money, celebrate both wanting to do this more than fighting over how it is done. That is a stupid thing to argue about. In our marriages, we must avoid strife over stupid arguments.

The way we communicate in our marriages will infuse our relationship with life or completely kill it

The Bible says the tongue is filled with power. It is filled with the power of life, but also the power of death. The way we communicate in our marriages will infuse our relationship with life or completely kill it. We must continually work at this, remember we need the Holy Spirit to take what we know in our heads from Scripture and write them on the tablets of our hearts so that we want to be different. Knowing we should be different is not enough. We need His transforming power to be different.