Hope for Broken Marriages

We met one of our partners, Tabitha Sierra, at our Hampton Conference and she shared her powerful testimony!  

My husband is a Marine Corps combat veteran. About eight years ago, he came back from the Middle East a different man.  

He was yelling a lot of the time and making it very clear that he didn’t want to be with me anymore.  

I’m a clinical psychologist who works with veterans, and I knew he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I knew why he was acting the way he was, but I couldn’t do anything about it.  

He wouldn’t even sit in the same room with me. If I walked in, he walked out.  

One day, I happened to be listening to Joyce Meyer’s TV program and she made this comment about claiming God’s Word over your family and your marriage.  

I had been a Christian for years, but I had never heard that before! I thought, “Wow, why am I not doing this?”  

Joyce encouraged people to go to her website for a list of confessions from God’s Word that she made a habit of speaking over her own life. So I got online and downloaded the list.  

I dug through the Bible and found every scripture on marriage that I could and started claiming it over my husband, our family, our children, and our relationship. I started speaking the Word and saying, “Our marriage is going to last.”  

Of course, things didn’t get better for quite a while. In fact, things kept getting worse.  

After I started claiming the Word, we were legally separated, and my husband was going to divorce me.   

The enemy tried to tell me that speaking the Word wasn’t working, but I told him that he was a liar and I refused to believe him.  

Every time things looked worse, I determined to speak the Word more instead of whine or complain, and I refused to let words of unbelief come out of my mouth.  

Eventually I noticed things were changing. It wasn’t a fast change. I’ll even say it this way: A turtle running through peanut butter was faster than the change we were getting.  

However, I could look over several months’ time and see little bits of change. So I held onto that and thanked God for the little bits of change I was seeing.  

The battle really was in my mind. The enemy would whisper thoughts like, “It’s been four years now. You’re still claiming this. He hasn’t left you, but you don’t have a real marriage. You’re getting older. You need to go out and find somebody else before it’s too late.”  

But I continued to stand. I’d say to the devil, “You’re not tricking me out of this one. I don’t want another marriage. I don’t want another love. I want this one, and I’m claiming this one.”  

Five years after all this started, my husband actually gave me another engagement ring and said, “I’m committed to being married to you.”  

As you can imagine, that was huge progress…but it still wasn’t what we had before. He wasn’t romantic. He wasn’t loving.  

At that time, our relationship was more like a friendship, and he was just saying, “I’m not going to leave you.”  

I continued to pray and declare that we would have a marriage based on God and that it would be a loving relationship like Christ has with the Church (see Ephesians 5:25).  

I can tell you today that it’s been eight years and my husband is romantic. He is loving. For our last anniversary, he planned a surprise trip to New York City and he even took me on a carriage ride.  

Thanks to God, he is more thoughtful now than he ever was!  

Through this whole process, I learned that nowhere in the Bible does it say God is going to barely meet your needs. But everywhere it says God abundantly blesses us and He meets our needs more than we can ever imagine (see Ephesians 3:20).  

I stood on His Word, and I thank God that I have a wonderful marriage today.  

If you are struggling in your marriage, I want to encourage you to stand on the Word, confess the Word, study the Word, and don’t let the enemy turn you around before you get the answer. He can’t do anything about it unless you give up, so don’t give up!