My passion for Jesus started at a very young age. I have walked with Him for as long as I can remember without much of a desire to stray from Him. He has been faithful to me in some really difficult things and growing in knowing Him has been my heart’s call for many, many years.
My enjoyment of my husband began the day I met him. We were friends instantly as he has had the same heart’s call and, well, he is just so gosh darn likable. As our friendship grew into love I realized that he was the one I would spend my life with and I can honestly say that God has been faithful to use us in one another’s lives to propel us deeper into God. I wouldn’t change this for anything. It’s one of the things I cherish most about our relationship, that God always seems to be stirring the same things in us when it comes to learning more about how to walk rightly with Him.
I think there are several keys to balancing our love for God and our love for our husbands. One is that it helps tremendously if we embrace a teachable spirit within us. I would far rather have my children marry a believer in Jesus who has a heart that is soft towards the work of God and that is teachable, than someone who just grew up in the church and was a good person without letting God touch them deeply. Of course, we don’t like being corrected, but while it may initially be uncomfortable, generally if we can be open to it and enter into the process realizing that God is doing a good thing in us, it is amazingly valuable. If a husband and wife can do this it allows God to have access to our hearts and for us to learn how to love well.
It also helps if we fully realize that loving God and loving our husbands is not mutually exclusive. They are completely connected. You may have heard people give lists of their priorities in life. For example, God, husband, children, work, extended family, friends and so on. In some ways I can see how it is helpful for people to reflect on what is most important in their lives, but in other ways it can train us to think that these are all separate things when really they all touch one another and should center around our identity as children of God. I am a child of God when I pray, but also when I mother my kids and care for those in need and go grocery shopping AND make love to my husband.
It is far too common for us to hear stories of men in particular who are married to passionate women of God in the world, but apathetic lovers in bed. Whether from wrong teaching or being sinned against or intentionally turning off our sexuality because it feels like it’s a bother, it can be costly to break out of that mindset of apathy towards marital intimacy. We can’t force it on our spouse so when a wife or husband feels cold towards sex, their helpmate often finds themself frustrated. This is why the teachable spirit I mentioned earlier is so important. An aspect of my own sexual awakening was that God knew He had access to my heart. If you are married to an impassionate lover and would like it to change, pray first that God would make you both teachable and that you would embrace whatever He wants to do in your lives. And remember, that may not look how you want it to look.
Embracing that women of God make really great lovers to their husbands can seem quite paradoxical, but it really is true. In fact, it is my firm belief that women of God have the potential to be the best lovers out there. It all depends on how you define “best lover,” but if it looks like a woman who can give her spiritually redeemed self fully to the pleasure and passion, service and sensuality that is available with her husband, THAT is a good lover in my opinion. Bring it on, God!
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Christian Nymphos 
Well put I think we come from the same kind of background! I really appriciate what you said about loving God and your husband go hand in hand. God loves us and wants to give us good things, so if we love and serve him whole heartedly the other aspects of our lives fall into place, and everything is better than we could have done it.
I have been reading this blog for a couple of weeks now. I had no idea the trouble my marriage was headed for until a friend was kind enough to challenge me in the intimacy in my marriage. I completely agree about the loving and relationship between husband and God going hand in hand. I realized very quickly that the exact same things I was doing to my marriage I was doing to my spiritual relationship. I love your site and the abundance of information you offer. I also love the balance you have between physical and spiritual intimacy. Thank you!
Hmm, Jesus does seem to say that when we remain single we are better able to focus exclusively on pleasing God instead of also needing to please our spouse. But when we do marry, then blessing our spouse and relationship with our spouse becomes significant.
I just realized one Biblically documented illustration of the second idea can be found in a guy’s relationship to his wife: a husband’s prayers with God are actually impaired if he’s not treating his wife lovingly! Yipes!
(You probably know the scripture I’m referring to, I don’t have the reference off-hand.)
Another illustration might be the idea that we should leave our gift at the alter and go be reconciled if someone has something against us. Talk about priorities! God doesn’t seem to leave us a lot of room to treat others poorly and have a “just fine and great” relationship with Him.
good topic. i thank god for my husband every day. we pray together and each have our private relationships w/ the lord as well. i love the idea that we are all one together. the cord of 3 strands is actually how i picture us when i think of our love and unity
Since I’ve been reading this website, and started to pray about our sexual relationship, I’ve had moments of feeling a holiness about sex. Where it feels that God is abiding with us, and blessing us. I don’t feel that all the time at all, and I’m sure that even when I am ‘fully awakened’ there will be times where sex is just pure fun. But I’d never thought of sex being holy before. I see marriage as sacred. I LOVE going to the weddings of Godly friends – the holiness in marriage is so obvious and I love celebrating that. So if marriage is sacred, doens’t it make sense that sex between a husband and wife, sex as God intended it to be, can also have something of the holy? I don’t want to superspiritualise it or anything. But this is a really special discovery for me. Those moments of holiness in life – whether between friends, or in nature, or in church, or wherever – those moments seem so true and good. I never expected to find those moments in sex. I pray for more of it.
This is an area I have been struggling with lately. I know according to scripture I am to be holy. I also know that sex was created for a husband and wife to find pleasure in together. But what I’m struggling with is, how to be holy and feel sexy? How can you think sexy thoughts and yet be pure? I read “the gift of sex” years ago and that helped me to understand what was ok in marriage. It feels strange to say I want to seduce my husband, yet I don’t know how else to say it. How can you be holy and pure while seducing your husband? I want my sex life with my husband to be all it can be. How can i reconcile those two things?
I just want to encourage you that being holy and feeling sexy are completely compatible and are, in fact, exactly what God intends for married Christian women. I know it can be hard to overcome wrong teaching that sex is somehow bad, but that teaching is a lie when it comes to marriage. Search this site for the discussions about the book “Sacred Sex;” that book and those discussions may be helpful to you. I also recommend that all married women (and really, all married men too) read the book “Sheet Music” by Dr. Kevin Leman. It’s a wonderful, encouraging, easy-to-read book about increasing intimacy in marriage.