Video Teaching: Keys To Oneness
Barry and Lori Byrne share some keys to oneness – ways you can stay connected and close to each other as a married couple.
Link To “Keys to Oneness” Handout
Video Transcript
BARRY: Hi, everybody.
LORI: Hi, you guys.
BARRY: Hey, we’re back this week. Last week we got wrapped up with some things and missed our time to do Facebook – what is this? Facebook Live.
LORI: This is Facebook Live.
BARRY: Yeah. Thank you. I didn’t get my makeup done before we started.
LORI: There’s just a little fuzz right there.
BARRY: Anyway. We’re going to talk about keys to oneness. And this is something that Lori wrote up and distributed at –
LORI: We had our Deeper Intimacy 2019 [workshop] that is going to be coming out pretty soon, in just a little bit [as an eCourse]. But this was something that we sent home with our people. And I was looking at this, and I thought, “This is really good. We should do this for a Facebook Live.”
BARRY: Even if she does say so herself. She did it; she wrote it up. It’s just some good ideas, some good reminders, so we want to go over those with you today.
LORI: We have seven things that we want to share with you, of ways that you can stay connected and ways that you can stay close to one another. And the first one is really obvious, but it’s staying connected yourselves, individually, to Holy Spirit. And this means talking with Him. Listening to Him. Obeying what Jesus is telling you to do. Being in God’s Word. Worshiping. Giving Him the ability to have at you. Because you know what? In our marriage, that is probably the most significant thing that holds our love strong – sexually, emotionally, physically, relationally, every way.
BARRY: Spiritually.
LORI: Yeah, spiritually.
BARRY: You know, for those of you that have been through one of our workshops, you know the emphasis on listening to Holy Spirit’s voice, and you know the power of it. And it’s easy to get busy in life and forget to do that – forget to talk and listen. And we go on our own way; we get going in our own rhythm, our own speed, and it’s easy to forget. But when we choose to just disconnect from or eliminate the time to really listen to the Holy Spirit, we’re leaving behind a really powerful thing, something that God uses to help us in our life in a powerful way.
LORI: Yeah.
BARRY: That’s it.
LORI: Okay. Your turn.
BARRY: Okay. Number two, ask Jesus to keep your heart tender. And we’re going to have a link to these.
LORI: You’ll be able to have these.
BARRY: Yeah, a link to these so you can have them and print them out for yourself. You know, Lori and I have talked a lot over the last few years of how we’ve gone through hard times, and in some ways, harder than any other time in our marriage. Just our marriage is more work; it was easier to be offended. It was easier to be misunderstood, easier to – some of that still happens, but it’s really shifted a lot. And I know one of things I’ve done is this very thing here. Number two, asking Jesus to keep my heart tender and pray that for both of us. We walk and pray together most days, and that was one of my regular prayers, is that, “God, would You help keep my heart tender, keep us in love, keep us seeing each other from Your perspective, not through offense or hurt or things like that?” And just that consistent prayer God is really answering, and it makes a huge difference.
LORI: And it’s not just tender towards one another, but keeping our hearts tender towards God. And this kind of goes with the first one, staying close to Holy Spirit. But when we get angry at God, or we pull away, that’s not a good thing for our marriage; it’s not a good thing for our family. And so really taking ownership and letting the Lord lead us in what we need to do to stay connected with Jesus, and then stay connected with each other. A tender heart.
Number three is believe and know that this is not your spouse – the fire, or the storm, or the anger, or the conflict or whatever you’re going through, and what accusation is coming to you about them, and maybe even what they’re manifesting, what’s going on with them. The part that you’re recoiling from, or it pulls you into want to be angry – there’s something else at work here, and it is not just you two in the room. The enemy is committed to trying to separate husbands and wives all the time – even to just get them to the place where they’re living in survival mode; they’re not really connected because their hearts have become hardened, or they’re upset. But really just believing – you know, read through First Corinthians 13, what love talks about. And then ask the Lord to help you stay in that perspective, to be able to see them. And anything else that’s coming between you, deal with it spiritually.
BARRY: Yeah. Another way of saying it is your spouse is not the enemy. The enemy is the enemy. Your spouse – even though they may be acting like they enemy, here they feel like the enemy, and maybe the enemy is actually speaking through them or working through them. God does not want us fighting against each other. He wants us just fighting against the spiritual forces behind it that are messing things up.
LORI: Yes.
BARRY: Are we alternating? I do the next one?
LORI: Yes. You’re turn.
BARRY: Okay. Missed that. Alright. So number four, stay connected. Make connection a priority. And often this is a choice, and often it is the last thing you want to do. When you’re hurt, upset, you want to pull away. And that is the time more than ever that you need to choose to stay connected. You may need to do some things. You may need to – again, some of our tools – if you’re in the middle of a conflict and not working out, you may need to use to the Working Through Conflict tool. The Steps To Reconciliation – if you really hurt each other, to deal with those hurts. If you’re really, really upset, you may need to use When The Poop Hits The Fan, you know, to calm yourself –
LORI: When you’re so mad you can’t even look at each other.
BARRY: Yeah, to calm yourself down and get going. But do not let your mouth speak what anger wants you to say. Do not let anger or offense or hurt just take over your mouth and let it say what it wants to say. You can talk about those things calmly. “I’m hurt. This hurts because…,” or, “I feel angry because…,” and try to talk things out. But don’t let those forces and feelings just take control over you and do what they want through you.
LORI: I just want to pray really quick about that. So, I bless your spirits to come into the place where you’re more at home being connected than disconnected, that connection will become the norm. And it’s possible when you have Jesus in your relationship, because that’s exactly what He wants. And when we cry out to Him, He helps us. I can’t tell you how many times in our marriage when we’ve had fights or disconnection, He always brings us back – always, always, always.
Number five, own the part you’ve contributed to the disconnect in your marriage. Now this is a really important one, because what do we do? We always go, “You know what, if he would get his act together, then our marriage would do better.” It’s so easy to accuse each other.
BARRY: I don’t ever do that. She does that.
LORI: We both do it.
BARRY: Yeah.
LORI: But I know when there’s even been really huge, big things like infidelity or, you know, divorce or whatever it is – but let’s go back to infidelity. Usually the person who is acting out is the bad guy, and we have learned in this ministry that there’s always two contributors to the disconnect. Even if one is worse than the other, we’ve learned that Holy Spirit says, “You know what? You both are going to need to own how you’ve contributed to this in order to get reconnected.” So even if mine is 90% wrong, and his is 10%, we still both need to acknowledge how we have contributed to this disconnect, and then ask Holy Spirit to help us and use some of the tools and get back together. But that is really possible.
BARRY: And besides all that, really the only thing you can control and change is yourself.
LORI: Mmhmm.
BARRY: So you focus on you and what you can do to make yourself better, to deal with your things, to own up to the painful truth that, “I do some things that are not healthy, not good, not Godly in our relationship,” and deal with those. You’ll make yourself a better person, and that will benefit your marriage, your relationship as well; you can be married or just dating.
LORI: That’s good, Barry B.
BARRY: Thanks. So number six, take communion and pray together. This is something we’ve done a lot – we’ve done off and on throughout our marriage, and we’ve done it really consistently for several months now. We were really encouraged by Bill and Beni Johnson’s book on The Power of Communion, and so we’ve been doing that more and just seeing God answer prayers directly as we take communion to remind ourselves and actually release the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The resurrection power of Jesus Christ is what we have available to us now. His Spirit is living in us, the resurrected Christ. And not because we deserve it or because we’ve become great, but because we’ve received Him, and His power is available to us. And so communion is a really good way to remind us of what God has gained for us and release that power in prayer into the situations of our lives that need God’s power to change them.
LORI: And you can even increase it; you can do it every day. Sometimes when I’m contending for something in my life, or in our marriage, or in our ministry, or with our kids, sometimes I will even take communion two or three times a day just to cause me to look to the power of the Cross. And I can’t tell you how many times God has really just come through in amazing ways. So I want to encourage you to use that as a tool to stay connected. Pray for yourselves and take communion.
And the last thing is to thank Him and praise Him and rejoice in His answers.
BARRY: Even before the answers come. Especially before the answers come.
LORI: Yes, yes. And do that together. You know, when we walk and pray – we try to every day that we can, but we start out by just really thanking Him. And then it leads us into praise and all kinds of other things. But that is such an important thing to learn to do as a couple, and it’s a good thing to model for your families. Doing worship together is another form of that, and we’ve done some of that in a really heavy-duty way when we were in desperation and just on the floor, you know, crying out to the Lord. Some of those times have been the best in our lives in terms of really crying out and seeing Him and letting Him come and comfort us and be with us and lead us through whatever storm we’re going through.
So, all of these are things that we try to do regularly. We don’t do them regularly; we’re not perfect. But I just want to encourage you to follow this link and print them out. Put them up on your refrigerator and be intentional. Just even look at what they are, and begin asking the Lord to help these things to be a regular part of your life.
BARRY: One more thing. Put number eight on these. Actually, it’s connected to number one. In John chapter 17 verses 22 – 23 Jesus prayed – well, He prayed several times that we would all be one. But the way he described the oneness is that we would be in Jesus the same way that Jesus was in the Father. Our oneness really doesn’t originate with us. It originates with me being in God, and her being in God. And that creates a unity that we cannot manufacture here on the earth apart from Him. But one of the things that was really interesting that Jesus says there is He said – He’s praying to the Father. He says, “Make them one just as We are one so that the world will believe that You sent Me,” and the world will know that God loved us the believers just as He loved His Son Jesus Christ. And to me, there’s something really, really powerful about that, that our oneness – if we really could be one in the Lord and make this oneness something that’s real enough that it’s evident to other people, God uses that somehow. And it actually communicates to people that God sent Jesus Christ, and He’s real. And that God loves us, and He’s in us. So, we bless you this week to walk in that oneness and to increasingly walk in that oneness and to represent the Lord powerfully through the oneness in your lives, in your marriages and in your relationships.
LORI: Amen.
BARRY: Amen.