Focus on the Family with Jim Daly

Patricia Ashley: But when you give your husband true compliments, it is like putting water on a plant. I know what I’m talking about. Do you all hear me?

Audience: Yes.

Patricia: Even if they reject it, even if they act like it didn’t move them, believe me, if you walk out the room and peek back at him-

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: … they like it.

John: (laughs)

Jim Daly: We can confess to that.

John Fuller: Oh my goodness. On this episode of Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, Patricia Ashley shares her remarkable testimony of how her marriage was saved and she has some excellent ideas you can put into practice in your marriage today. Thanks for joining us. I’m John Fuller.

Jim: John, I love the spark of life in this woman. She is awesome, and I think all of us would admit, yeah, if we’ve married more than a few years, that no marriage is perfect. Not one, and when that realization hits you, the critical question is, “What do you do?” Do you choose to lovingly confront your spouse and work through the issue, or do you ignore the problem and hope it’ll just go away, and if the problem continues, then what? How about the realization that maybe your spouse isn’t the problem-

John: Ah.

Jim: It’s you.

John: (laughs)

Jim: I’ve had that (laughs). That’s happened a couple-

John: That’s another show.

Jim: … of times. Patricia Ashley has the answers to those tough questions, and she’s sharing with us out of her own pain, from a marriage that was in terrible trouble. But Patricia and her husband, Vernon, ended up having a happy marriage, and they were married for over 45 years up until, uh, his death in 2018. Let’s roll it, John.

John: Okay. Here’s Patricia Ashley, speaking at a women’s conference in Indian Wells, California, a number of years ago on today’s Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.

Patricia: My testimony is that, when I got saved, I didn’t know that God was gonna save my marriage. I thought He was just gonna save me, and, uh, God just… He… It was like my marriage being saved was a by-product of me being saved. It wasn’t as a result of anything that I did to develop my marriage or to work on my marriage. At the point where I was saved, I was sick of my relationship, and my husband was equally as sick of his relationship with me.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Do you understand me?

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: We- we mutually said that to people. You know, we were literally at the end. Our marriage was dead, waiting to be buried.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: Do y’all hear me?

Audience: Uh-huh.

Patricia: I mean, when I say it was dead, and some of you all are gonna relate to what I’m saying, if you’re… be honest. When I say it was dead, I mean that I didn’t love my husband, I didn’t hate him. I wasn’t glad to see him come.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: I wasn’t glad to see him go.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: It didn’t make a difference what time he came in or if he came in at all.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Yeah. Do y’all… Do… That’s dead, huh?

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: No feeling. He didn’t make me happy, he didn’t make me sad. He didn’t even make me mad anymore.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: How many of you can relate to what I’m saying? Be honest.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Come on, hallelujah, I know I’m telling the truth. That’s where our relationship was. It was dead.

Audience: Yeah, right.

Patricia: And, uh, I knew that I needed something, and I had grown up in a Christian environment, where my mother, my father, they had taken us to church and- and I think, too, a- as a result of watching my mother be committed to my father and there were times where I felt like I just wouldn’t let him talk to me like that. And I grew up with that in me. You understand me?

Audience: Mm-hmm.

Patricia: And so, it created in me a real hardness and a defiance and I would cross my husband on every turn, and just would not cooperate, and so, you know what that does to a marriage. And, of course, he brought in his excess baggage, as well.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: And, along with about five years of being unsaved in the military, with no one to be accountable to, we were literally at the end. Burned out. And we just had one thing in common: we both dearly loved our two children. And that was what God used to hold us together. ‘Cause he was… He loved them as much as I did, and he was as committed to them as much as I was, and that kept us together. How many of you know what I’m talking about? All right, that was our only reason, but after a while, that wasn’t reason enough. Okay. And so, I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior and, as a result, I began to read my Word, not knowing what God was gonna do with that. And my husband, he accepted Jesus in our dining room, and he began to read His Word, and we were so… Our lives were so isolated, we were so divorced emotionally, spiritually, and physically that he would read his Bible in one room, and I would read my Bible in another room.

Audience: Mm-hmm.

Patricia: And, as far as I was concerned, he had his Jesus and I had mine.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: You understand what I’m saying? That were- we at the end. I mean, we was… Even after getting saved, I just… There was so- after so much hurt, after so much disappointment, after so much disillusionment, you understand? Just dead. You know, I don’t even want to feel good about you no more.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: You understand what I’m saying? Do y’all- Y’all, follow me now, ’cause we gonna be real in here. I don’t even want you to make me feel good anymore, ’cause, see, to feel good then I gotta feel bad again. My emotions must surface, and just, let’s just leave them alone. And that’s where my marriage was, and as we grew in the Lord and as we began to read the Word, not even trying to be friends with each other again, not even trying to develop a relationship. We just started reading the Word, and- and- and loving the Lord and allowing ourselves to learn who Jesus was. God allowed a situation to happen in one of our friends’ lives, and we had to pray together, and when I found myself with my husband at the foot of our bed on our knees, praying, we prayed, and as we began to cry out and pray together to the same God, little did we know that when we raised up our hands and we looked at each other, God had quickened-

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: … our dead marriage. Do y’all hear what I’m saying? He had quickened it, and He had made it alive. The God that we serve, He specializes is resurrecting that which is dead. Come on, now. Some of us, rigor mortis has set up in our marriages. A-a-and- and I mean, when we look at our marriage from the perspective of what God has designed for marriage, we’ve come- we’ve gone so far from what God intend for the marriage to- to be, and we need God to resurrect it. We need God to make it alive again, and with that will come healing, but it’s only at the feet of Jesus. That’s the safest place to get it, at the feet of Jesus, in His presence. Because as I grew in the Lord and began to read the Word and just focus on the Lord, I had no expectations of my husband. Only of the Lord, and God began to fill me with His love, and with that love, God started healing me. Do you understand me, what I’m saying?

And, as a result of that, because we just both started growing in our relationship, God knitted our hearts back together, and now, the love that we experience, it’s different.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: Do you all hear what I’m saying?

Audience: Oh, yeah.

Patricia: The commitment is different. And what we began to do is we began to go to the Word, after we’d realized we liked each other again.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: That’s where we started at. We just, “I just like you. Let’s not deal with all this other stuff.”

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: “And let’s not try to get romantic or, you know. I just like you again. I respect you again.” Come on, now. You know how you can do that.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: You lose respect for them.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: They lose respect for you. They become bitter and indifferent and cold, and you become angry and hard and cold yourself. You know what I’m saying? Hallelujah, so, God began to work, and what we began to do was, we began to invest time. When we saw that God had invested in our marriage, we made a commitment to invest into it. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Audience: Yes.

Patricia: And then, we went to the Word, and we began to look at what the Word of God had to say about marriage, because you see, what we found is all the way back over in Genesis, that marriage itself originated in the heart of God.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: It was in the wisdom of God, it wasn’t because somewhere in time man found woman, woman found man. Man liked woman, woman liked man. Man had idea, “Let’s be together.” It wasn’t in the heart or the mind of man. God didn’t just create man and woman and let them discover each other. He made them for each other.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: In the beginning.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: “Man,” God said. “It’s not good for man to be alone or woman to be alone.” The Word says in Proverbs 18:22, it says that, “Who soever,” and this is what God says. “Who soever,” meaning your husband, “findeth a wife,” meaning you. “He has found a good thing.”

Audience: A good thing.

Patricia: Hey!

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: “And have attained favor of the Lord-” So, that, ladies. I want you to go back home-

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: … and tell your husbands-

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: … “Precious.” Call him Precious.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Speak faith. “Sweetheart, you have found a good thing-”

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: … “in me. And because you have me, I don’t care what you act like, but just because you have me, you have favor in God’s sight.”

Audience: Hallelujah.

Patricia: Hallelujah! Now, that’s what the Word say. You must say what the Word say. How many of you believe in saying what the Word say?

Audience: All right.

Patricia: That’s what you got to say. Now, you might not think he’s worth it.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Come on, now. Sometimes, we don’t. We don’t think they deserve us as being good things.

Audience: Mm-hmm.

Patricia: And some of us have been so beaten down and so criticized and so unappreciated. I know what I’m talking about. That we don’t feel like that’s the heart of God, but God says, “Be healed today,” and get the mind of God, think the thoughts of God. Know that, regardless to how your husband just don’t know, and you have to tell him. I don’t care what he’s acting like, tell him-

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: … “You found favor with God because you found me.” Now, what does that do to you? It puts you in a position where you’ve got to be a good thing.

Audience: Right.

Patricia: Meaning that his heart must be able to safely trust in you, that you’ll do him no harm, meaning that you are going to be sensitive to him, and that you are going to adapt your lifestyle to what his needs are. Ooh.

Audience: Oh, all right. (laughs)

Patricia: Ooh. Say what?

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: That’s what the Bible says. If we just get the mind of God. Now, I know we got to get healed, and we gotta get a new attitude.

Audience: Yes.

Patricia: But if we just say what the Bible says, the Bible says that when God looked at man, he saw that he needed a helper. And so, we as females were created to be helpers. Come on, now. Now, I know, in this new age movement, where the God is within us, if we can believe it, we can achieve it, and you have to make sacrifices, so, honey, sacrifice your marriage, sacrifice your children, and you have to achieve some of your goals in life, honey. Because when you sacrifice yourself and give your whole life to this man, and to your children, they will all up and leave you one day. That’s the kind of foolish council that we get from the world and sometimes from sisters in the church.

Audience: That’s right.

Patricia: And so, it’s necessary for us, when we’ve been hurt, when we’ve been mistreated, when we’ve been misunderstood, unappreciated, all of that is real. We must take that to the very feet of Jesus and let Him heal us. And we must allow God to strengthen us and to give us His attitude and to give us His wisdom as to how we are to handle the different situations in our lives.

John: You are listening to Patricia Ashley on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and we’re offering this message in a free audio bundle called Nurturing the Heart of Your Spouse Collection, with over four hours of advice and encouragement for your marriage. Get your free download at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast or call if you have any questions, 800, the letter A, and the word, FAMILY. Let’s go ahead and return now to more from Patricia Ashley.

Patricia: But we have a responsibility because we will stand before God to give an account. For those of you that are married, you gotta give an account for how you were a wife to your husband. Doesn’t matter how he acts. Do you understand what I’m saying? And the one thing I learned early when I started asking God to show me, He showed me. He said, “Number one, this man, you are not gonna stand as a couple in my face-”

Audience: All right.

Patricia: … “to be judged for your works. You’re not gonna stand as a couple. You’re gonna stand as an individual and give an account, so now, you can make a decision to unconditionally obey me as it relates to your responsibilities as a woman and as a wife.”

How’s that? That’s real tight, but th- that it’s right. Listen. I remember, one day, reading a book by this woman, and, uh, I believe the title was Me Obey Him, and it was a little book and it-

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: And it was 99 pages. Penny a page, 99 cents. God couldn’t send anyone to me to tell me or teach me the principles of submission. I was that strong-willed and that self-willed and that determined, so God allowed me to pick up this little book, and this little book is a hammer, okay?

Audience: All right.

Patricia: When I read the book, I fell on my face when I got through the last page and I cried out. I said, “Oh, God, you don’t know him.”

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Come on, now.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: I said, “Listen.”

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: “If I do what this woman said, he gonna have me doing all kind of crazy things.”

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: But God took me back, and He said, “Listen.”

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: “I wrote this book-”

Audience: All right.

Patricia: … “and what she’s sharing from her book is as a result of what she got from this book.”

Audience: All right.

Patricia: And Heaven and Earth will pass away, but I will not change my mind. And I said, “Okay.” I said, “But God, you don’t know him.”

He said, “I made him.

I know him.” Yeah. You- Do you? I- I’m trying to share with you my struggle. And God really brought me to a point. He said, “It’s not an issue of your submitting to him. It’s an issue of your submitting to me.” He said, “‘Cause when you can submit to me, you won’t fear submitting to him.”

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: Do you all hear me?

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: And He said, “When you submit to me, I can change his heart.”

Audience: All right. All right.

Patricia: Come on, now. He said, “Now, certainly, if I could clear the mouths of the lions-”

Audience: Yeah. All right. All right.

Patricia: … He said, “If I could do that,” and He said, “If I could open up the Red Sea-”

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: … “and let the children of Israel cross on dry land, who is this little man? Who is he? Come on, now.”

Now, ladies, look. I don’t wanna paint an ugly picture of my husband, ’cause he is so precious.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: But he’s a man, man.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: Do you all hear what I’m saying?

Audience: All right.

Patricia: And, being in the military, he’s a military man.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: And they believe in order and structure.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: And I told him, God gave me to him to balance his life out.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: (laughs) Hallelujah. But listen, when God dealt with me, I watched God change his heart, and God began to soften him up. And, do you know, when God began to show me, and that’s what we need to do.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: We need to talk to ourselves. We need to say, “Self, shut up.”

Audience: Yeah. Uh-huh.

Patricia: “Self, sit down. Listen.” You get you a friend. Get you a sister to be accountable to, a prayer partner-

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: … that it would like to invest in your marriage. I believe that we should choose people that- that’s committed to our husbands.

Audience: Yes.

Patricia: If your girlfriend will sit and help you criticize your husband, get rid of her.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Or stop her. Stop her, I’m serious. Stop her. Now, listen. My mother gave me this council. I didn’t think it was so wise, but I didn’t understand what it meant at the time. I later learned. She said, “Now, listen. You be committed.”

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: “You stay in there.”

Audience: Uh-huh.

Patricia: “And you work it out. And for those of us that are born again, pray through. Pray through. But be committed to it.”

Listen, it says that we are to leave and cleave. The Word says that, in Genesis 2:24, that, “For this reason, you will never be fulfilled in your marriage if you don’t leave and cleave.”

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: Some of us still have emotional ties. We still have soul ties with mom and dad.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: Come on, now. We do. Now, my husband was the youngest child that his mother had. She called him her “Million Dollar Gold Piece.”

Audience: Oh!

Patricia: Now, can you imagine what position that put me in?

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: I couldn’t top that if I wanted to. And that was the way she treated him, like he was her million, and she let me knew when we were dating that’s what she called him. And a large amount of our struggle in our relationship was because there was a soul tie-

Audience: Mm-hmm.

Patricia: … between he and his mother, and that thing had to be broken, but it wasn’t until we got in the Word-

Audience: All right.

Patricia: … that we realized that I was now his wife and his mother was his daddy’s wife.

Audience: (laughs)

Patricia: Hallelujah.

Audience: Hallelujah!

Patricia: Come on, now.

Audience: Hallelujah!

Patricia: Come on now.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: And so, what we had to do that we had been married and saved a long time before we realized this. What we had to do is, on one of our trips back home, he had to go to his mother, and he had to say… He had to go to his father first and ask his father to forgive him for having a place in his mother’s heart that only he should have had.

Audience: All right. Uh-huh. Come on now.

Patricia: Now, I’m not talking about sensuous, say anything like that. I aint talking about being perverted. Y’all understand what I’m talking about.

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: Okay.

Audience: Ew.

Patricia: But he had to go to his mother say, “I wanna ask you to forgive me for taking that place-”

Audience: Uh-huh.

Patricia: … “and requiring that.” He said, “And I want to release you now-”

Audience: Right.

Patricia: … “back to your husband.”

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: “And I want to be your son. One that will honor you.” Come on, now. “And take care of you in your old age if you need me to, but I wanna honor you and I wanna receive Godly council from you and I wanna support you.”

Audience: Yeah.

Patricia: “But you, I release you back to your husband.”

Audience: All right.

Patricia: And he had to do this in front of me and his daddy, and his daddy was a glad brother. “Give me my wife!” Come on, now. But do you know what? Healing took place between he and his father, and that was how that was broken. And God began to use my husband to minister to his mother and use his mother to minister to him. It got Godly.

John: And on that personal note, we’ll have to wrap up this part of the presentation from Patricia Ashley. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and, wow, Jim. She has been so very transparent and honest about the struggles in her marriage and the hope she had, yeah, in doing things the way God recommends, and we’ll hear more from Patricia next time.

Jim: John, isn’t it amazing that, when we as individuals start to seek God wholeheartedly, and you know what that means, uh, we see benefits, not just in our spirit but in our relationships, our work, and even our health, and I just love the fact that Patricia Ashley didn’t demand that God rescue her marriage. Yeah, she just began seeking the Lord with her whole heart, and then, her husband got saved, their marriage got saved, and even her husband’s relationship with his parents improved. That’s what we talk about in terms of the Christian life. When you live it out, the benefits are there.

John: Mm. That’s true, and I hope Patricia’s story has motivated you as a listener to take that first step toward making things right with your spouse, and- and just see how God can work in your marriage.

Jim: Well, you know what? Someone has to take that first step, and that’s the hardest step of all. Uh, we can talk all day long, but if your heart doesn’t open up and you don’t reach out to your spouse, nothing’s gonna change.

Uh, now, let me just say, if you are in an abusive situation, it’s important that you get to a place of safety for yourself and, uh, if you have children, for them as well. But keep praying for your spouse and for their healing.

Uh, you know, strong marriages make for healthy families where children can grow up in a safe and loving atmosphere. Here at Focus on the Family, we want to do everything we can to help couples improve their relationship, uh, like Patricia Ashley talked about today, and boy, this past year has been very tough on marriages. Our counseling team is seeing that in the calls that we receive each and every day here at Focus on the Family.

Let me remind you that we are here for you. Call us if you need help. Don’t hold back. If you feel that your marriage is really in dire straights, ask about our Hope Restored Intensives. Uh, when we interview the couples that have attended, it’s a four-day intensive. Uh, those couples, two years later, we go back to every couple and we do a survey with them. Over 80% say they’re doing well and are grateful for the experience.

John: And those counselors at Hope Restored are gonna give you tools to understand what’s going on, those fears that lurk beneath the issues that you and your spouse face. Uh, all those things. They’re gonna help you address those fears so you feel safe. Uh, that process is gonna help you be more open-hearted with your spouse.

Jim: Yeah, and their approach really makes sense, and obviously, the proof’s in the pudding.

John: Mm-hmm.

Jim: If you have over 80% of these couples, uh, staying together and having a better relationship.

Well, as we close for today, John, I wanna make a resource available to the listeners to energize their relationships. We’re putting together a free audio bundle that will include this incredible message from Patricia Ashley with some extra content plus other popular broadcasts designed to help improve marriages. Look for the collection called Nurturing the Heart Of Your Spouse when you visit us online today.

John: Yeah, that collection is yours. It has over four hours of content from some of our guests like Shaunti Feldhahn, Kathi Lipp, and Dr Greg Smalley.

Get your free downloads at focusonthefamily.com/broadcasts, or call 1-800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY. When you’re online with us, be sure to look for our free marriage assessment which is a quick online quiz to help you identify the strengths and maybe the weaknesses and, uh, it’ll help you grow in your relationships. So, take that free online quiz. The link is in the notes.

Also, be sure to tune in next time as we hear from Patricia about why it’s important to decide that God is able to help your marriage.

Patricia: You get out of your husband’s face, and you get in the face of God.

Audience: Yeah. All right!

Patricia: You stop talking and pulling on your husband and you began to talk and pull on God.

John: On behalf of the entire team, thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I’m John Fuller, inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.