Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

Join Our Surrendered Heart Marriage Builder Series!

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Calling all married couples! Join our Surrendered Heart Marriage Builder Series! (FREE for one week only!)

The tools you’ll receive each week during this special 6-week email series are designed to offer you and God meaningful, quiet, reflective time to help you surrender your heart to His work in and through you.

Want to build a stronger marriage? Of course, we all do! Think it takes hard work? I beg to differ. Here’s what I’ve learned: I can work and work and work at strengthening my marriage, but what I’m really doing through that work is relying on self. And unfortunately, my self is pretty weak and powerless.

But Spirit? Oh, the Holy Spirit living inside of us and working in and through Christians is powerful and strong! The real work is the Lord’s, and He can do ANYTHING. (He already won the victory over all sin and death for all time, praise God!)

So what is our role? Our role is to surrender. Stop trying and working and striving and being constantly disappointed when your fleshly self can’t live up to what you know you want and need to be in your marriage. Surrender. Breathe deeply at the thought! Let go of striving and let God know that you’re ready for Him to do His work.

This 6-week email series will guide you through this wonderful process and you are sure to be amazed at His work in you and in your marriage. Our Surrendered Heart series includes lessons, printables, and journaling guides. We’ll dig into scripture and dig deep in our hearts seeking healing, wholeness, and joy that only Christ can bring.

Sign up for this free Surrendered Heart email series here.

For one week only, we are opening up registration for this series and giving it all to you for free! Spread the word, get everyone on board!

Signing up is easy (and free)! We’ll start right away by sending you weekly emails filled with lessons, encouragement, scripture, journaling pages, and printables to help you build a binder that will help you build your marriage on the One True Source of good.

Don’t miss this great opportunity! (Registration closes February 24.)

Sign up for this free Surrendered Heart email series here.

Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!

A Surrendered Heart: It’s a Choice

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Welcome to A Surrendered Heart: A Wife’s Journey to Love the Jesus Way. Click on the “Leave a Comment” button on each post to add your thoughts, experiences, and suggestions to the discussion. If you are a newsletter subscriber, please click through to this post on my website to add your comments to the discussion to be read by everyone. I look forward to hearing what you have to say! God be praised for the gift of marriage and for allowing us to grow in Him.

Read Lesson 1:  Why I Married This Guy
Read Lesson 2: So, What Does Your Husband Do?
Read Lesson 3: How Selfish is Your Prayer?
Read Lesson 4: Serve Because I Want To

Surrendered Heart Lesson 5

My husband is not perfect. (Beginning first with the fact that he chose to marry an imperfect woman. That would be me.)

Every day I have to choose how I respond to each imperfection displayed in my husband. When he is forgetful, how will I respond? When he isn’t working within my time frame, how will I respond? When he doesn’t see things from my point of view, how will I respond?

It is way too easy to respond to imperfections with annoyance and frustration. If you’re like me, you’ve found that if you’re annoyed at one thing, it’s very easy to become annoyed with twelve other things too. I certainly don’t need to be a “shrug everything off” wife, offering a giggle and a kiss each time my husband’s human side shows. But nothing justifies my ugly and sinful response. Nothing.

You and I have some choices to make. We can choose to love the Jesus way – in complete surrender – letting the Holy Spirit be at work; or we can take a nice long soak in an ugly puddle of selfishness. Why we would ever choose the latter is beyond me. But because of our human tendency to look inward as we try to problem solve without the help of Jesus, I fear that you and I too often find ourselves plopped right down in that muddy pit.

Too often we can find ourselves in a state of fear, worry, and frustration as we refuse to give up the control that ironically – we don’t even have in the first place. As we make our choices, we need to recognize this truth: When we refuse to let go of control, we are very much out of control. When we let go, surrendering our hearts to Jesus’ control – everything suddenly becomes peaceful. Problems may not vanish, but the peace is there, even if it passes understanding.

So how do we do this? How do we choose the right way? How do we make the choice to love our husband the Jesus way?

Luke 92324

Download Follow Me Printable Here

Two key points come from this verse:

  1. We must deny self.
  2. We must take up our cross daily.

Today. Then again tomorrow. And also the day after that. We have to deny our selfish thoughts and actions daily. Jesus commanded this because He knew that Satan would see to it that our selfish side would constantly fight to win our mind and heart focus. We must make the choice daily to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus.

The result? Peace. Joy. Love. The fruit of the Spirit at work in a surrendered heart.

Take some time now to put your godly choices in writing.

Today I Choose

Download Today I Choose Printable Here

If you and I choose to let the Spirit work in our hearts – loving our husbands (and others) the Jesus way will be a peaceful and joyful effort. It is a choice. Which choice will you make?

Up For Discussion…Share With Us!

  • Share some ways you find that it is easy to love your husband!
  • What does it look like to “deny yourself and take up your cross daily?”
  • What ways can you choose to love your husband in a more Christ-like way?
Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!

Join Me In This Free 6-Week Class! A Surrendered Heart: A Wife’s Journey to Love the Jesus Way

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see our disclosure policy.

The world tells us what love is, which is clearly working out very well for no one. Good people tell us what love is, which might work okay for a time. The church tells us how to love, which works well when we listen. The Bible tells us how to love, which only works when we surrender self.

After 41 years of life and 20 years of marriage, this is what I’ve just discovered: I don’t really know what it means to truly love others. Much of the way I’ve loved people has been self-seeking. I want them to like me. I want to keep the peace. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

I. I. I. There is no I in love. Not if I want to love the Jesus way.

The past several months, I’ve been searching scripture and listening as God teaches me that loving others has nothing to do with what I think and everything to do with who God is. These love lessons can be applied in friendship and in parenting, but most importantly, they should be applied in marriage.

I invite you to join me in this journey. This class will not be provided to you by a teacher who has mastered the art of loving her husband perfectly (right, Matt?). Nope, it’s just me. Hi! {waving} I’m just your crazy butter-loving friend – learning to listen, learning to seek Jesus, learning to surrender my heart so I can love the Jesus way.

A Surrendered Heart Invitation

Women can be…shall we say ~ emotional? (God help us. No really.) This class is brought to you by a girl who appears strong to many but is a mess quite frequently. Emotional much, Laura? Mercy.

How do you sign up to be a part of this class? I’ll make it easy. Simply show up right here every Thursday for the next 6 weeks. Come as you are. You don’t even have to brush your hair. Shoot, I don’t even have to brush my hair. {high fives all around}

God loves our messy, seeking selves. He loves our desire to love and to be loved. He rejoices over our surrendered heart.

Join me!! Who’s in?

A bit of housekeeping:

  • If you want to be sure to avoid missing a class, sign up here to receive our free daily newsletter.
  • If you prefer reading straight from the blog, and you miss stopping by on a Thursday, you are fresh out of luck. Just kidding. Simply find the following button over on our side bar, click, and catch up on all you missed.

A Surrendered Heart - Join Our Class! sidebar

We’ll be journaling our way through this class, taking time to reflect, and examining scripture. There will be printables. There will be a test (not really). Click on the link below to download the cover page for your journal.

Download A Surrendered Heart Journal Cover Here.

You’ll get new printables each class to add to your journal. I recommend spending 33¢ on a folder like this:

surrendered heart folder 1

Then glue your cover on the front like this:

surrendered heart folder 2

Then each week you’ll get printables to add to your folder like this:

surrendered heart folder 3

I’m keeping this journal right by my Bible to work through as I can – and as I need to refocus my heart to love my husband the Jesus way.

Alrighty? Have any questions? Invite your friends, invite your neighbors, invite people you’ve never met. This class is free, no strings attached. I’m excited to explore A Surrendered Heart with you!

Leave a comment here letting us know you’ll be joining our class! We’ll officially begin with Class #1 on April 23. In the meantime, prepare your journal and be praying for God to help you surrender your heart to love the Jesus way.

Heavenly Homemaker's Club Members: Access your homepage and all your fantastic resources here! Not a member yet? Please join us!