Marriage and Money and Grace

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Last week I had an article with financial questions for marriage.  These questions were meant to get good conversations started regarding marriage and money.  I have handed them out in pre-marriage classes for a few years now and they have gotten good reviews from the couples that have used them.

It is incredibly important for engaged couples to discuss spiritual, sexual and financial histories, but there must be grace for mistakes made with money just as there would be for ones sinful sexual history.

It is understood fairly well in our churches today that there is grace for sexual sin.  Our sinful nature, being what it is, all couples have some sort of sexual sin in their past that they have to work through.  We talk about it and plan for it.  However we don’t offer the same opportunity to financial sins, we just don’t think it that serious.

That is because sexual sin doesn’t hang over our heads as obviously as our financial sins can.  After all, as long as you are no longer sleeping with other person it is easy to think of those sins as in the past, not comprehending  how they affect you every day.   However, if you enter a marriage having lived selfishly with your money for years, you may come into the marriage with a substantial amount of debt.  That debt will be staring you in the face every day until it is paid off which can be years after the honeymoon is over.

That can be a burden on a marriage, one spouse may begin to believe that they are paying (literally) for the sins of the other’s past.  Our culture or our church does not do a good job of dealing with this aspect of marriage and money.  For the general culture it is because crushing debt is as ubiquitous as premarital sex, and just as acceptable.  For the church?  It is partially because we have understood financial issues from the perspective of the culture, or perhaps it is because we just don’t talk about such things, or perhaps it is because we don’t have a good understanding of how the grace of God applied to that area of our lives as well.

My wife understood when we got married that she was getting my debt.  It wasn’t a crushing amount, but it existed and since she came into our marriage without any debt it would have been easy for her to be arrogant about our financial situation.  It may have been easy, but it wouldn’t have been Christ like.  It took a few years to understand, but she had her own set of issues related to money.  As we come to understand one another’s sins better it is a an opportunity to extend the grace of God to one another all over again.  And that is what we are called to do in all areas of not just with marriage and money.

We have to understand the spiritual side of money, Jesus talked about it a lot and it wasn’t just how to save more and spend less.  He talked about the effect it has on our hearts.  He talked about what money can meant to us.  But he also says “My grace is sufficient” for that as well.  We are called to have that same grace with one another.