The One Thing I Did That Saved My Marriage (It Wasn’t Couples Therapy)

DM me the word PIES for a chance to have your question read! https://www.instagram.com/kimberlybeamholmes

You can't change your spouse.

You can't change your circumstances.

But you can change you. And it turns out that's the only thing that ever actually works.

A few years ago, I was working 100-hour weeks. My marriage was falling apart. And one morning I ended up on my bathroom floor after another fight, thinking, "I can't do this anymore."

That was the day everything shifted. Not because I walked away. Because I finally stopped waiting for everyone else to change and started with me.

This is the very first episode of The Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes Show. And I'm handing you the exact framework I used that morning and still use today.

It's called the PIES. Physical. Intellectual. Emotional. Spiritual. The four areas of your life you actually get to control. The place the love path begins.

I break down what each one really means, how to take honest stock of yours right now, and why becoming your best self is only the start of falling back in love.

Then we get into your questions. A woman married 41 years who's never been in love. A separated spouse wondering why anyone would ever come back. A husband asking whether God changes hearts.

We open up 1 Samuel 15 together. We survive the hot seat. And I give you your very first challenge of the week.

This is just the beginning.

Stay strong.

Click here to apply to work directly with myself and Dr. Joe: https://bit.ly/4b2PwKw

I'm Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes. After a decade transforming marriages at Marriage Helper, I've realized that the greatest tragedy isn't a failed relationship; it's the person who stays stuck and never experiences the fullness of all God intended.

The Way You Show Up is for the high-achiever who is tired of "fine."

We're dismantling the average life to build an exceptional one—using the science of the PIES: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual health.

If you want to save your marriage, go to Marriage Helper. If you want to master yourself and lead your legacy, stay here.

New episodes every Thursday.

Don't just exist. Show up.

🔗 Website: https://kimberlybeamholmes.com

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Transcript

A Breaking Point And A Decision

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I know what it feels like to live with anxiety, to feel like you're never quite good enough, to pour everything into what you do. Because somewhere along the way you decided that that was where your worth was found. And I know what it feels like when all of it finally takes you down. A few years ago, I was working hundred-hour weeks. My marriage, it was falling apart. And one morning I found myself once again laying on my bathroom floor, crying after another fight with my husband. And that's the day I decided to stop waiting. Because here's the thing: my life was never going to change until I did. So I got to work. Not on changing him, but on changing me, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. I call it the pies. I even went and got a PhD in it. Not to hang on a wall, but because I had to understand why I kept getting in my own way. And because I kept wanting to continue to always be my best. And honestly, it changed everything. I've spent the last 14 years helping people pull their marriages back from the edge. But the truth is, it always starts the same way. With one person deciding to change. Am I perfect now? No. I'm still seeking, I'm still trying, still figuring it out right alongside you. And what I found, I'm not keeping to myself. And this is the Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes show. I am so excited to be doing this show. This is the very first episode. And what you're gonna find is that I love sharing what I am learning with you. As I just said, there was a time in my life where everything felt like it was falling down around me. I was a workaholic. I was working a ton. I was spending all of my time and effort just to try and show myself that I was good enough with being successful, with trying to win, with even the way that I treated my body and the way that I worked out. And at the same time, my marriage was falling down around me. I wasn't in good health. There was a lot of struggles that I was going through, had anxiety, depression. And ultimately there was a day, another day, another morning where my husband and I had another fight. And as he left, I remember laying on my bathroom floor and just thinking, I can't do this anymore. I can't live this kind of life anymore. I don't want to have this kind of marriage. I don't want to have this kind of pressure on me all of the time with work and with other things going on in my life. I felt like I was done. And it was at that moment I decided I had to change. I had to stop looking at everything else in my life and wishing that it was different and looking at me and saying it's time for me to become different. And that's one of the things that we're going to be talking a lot about every single episode of this show. As I said, I do have my PhD in psychology. I've been working with Marriage Helper for 14 years, more than 14 years now. And I've learned so much. I grew up in a household with two people who taught me how to have a great marriage and how to have great relationships because they figured it out from going basically to hell and back, being divorced for three years. My parents were divorced for three years before they ended up getting remarried and having me as a result of that second marriage. And so I got to see them work things out my whole life. And then I ended up going and starting a degree in marriage and family therapy, only to get halfway through because I realized the progress that could be made with the two people in front of me when I was in counseling sessions with them. It felt so thick, so hard, so difficult, like walking through quicksand. At the same time, I would see the transformation that was happening to people in the three-day workshops that we were doing at Marriage Helper. And that's when I really caught the vision of what Marriage Helper could be, because back then we were very, very small and wanted to help it grow. I saw how it could help even more people. And I just wanted to be a part of it. Never thought that I would enter into the family business by no stretch of the imagination. But 14 years ago, I transitioned my career, my focus into helping save marriages. And what we're doing here today, what this show is about, is only an extension and expansion of that. Because over the years, what I have found is that when most marriages are in trouble, people are playing the blame game. They want to look at the other person, at the situation, and blame the circumstances. But there's one thing that I know to be true, and that's that the only person you can control is yourself. And the way I know that is because I found out that the only person I could control was myself. Here's how I did it. You see, there's a process to falling in love, and it's called the love path. And it starts with attraction. The reason that this is important is because no matter what situation your marriage is currently in, whether you love it or whether you hate it, it's the same process that every couple uses in how to fall in love. But the beginning of the love path, what we what we classify under attraction are the four areas of how we can become our best selves. And I know that that's a super cliche saying. Everyone wants to be their best selves, everyone's talking about it. But really, if we think about how we are wired as humans and the four facets of how we show up as individuals, it's these four things. It's physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. So we call it the pies of attraction. Those are the things that no matter what's going on in your life, whether you are married, divorced, never been married, or whether you are happily married and you're trying to figure out what the future looks like for you, focusing on your pies is the absolute best thing you can do. Why? Because these are the things you can control. You can control yourself physically, how you feel, how you look, how you show up. Because ultimately, physical attraction is all about

The Love Path And Attraction

SPEAKER_02 6:47

looking and feeling your best for your age and situation in life. This is working out, this is eating right, this is getting good sleep. This is taking care of your body. This is going and getting that colonoscopy or that mammogram. There was a note I got a couple of months ago in the mail where someone said, you know what, I was listening to everything you were talking about with pies. And physically, I had not gotten any doctor's appointments or lab work done in a long time. And so it led me to go and get those things taken care of so that I could get in better health. All of those things matter. Physically, it's not just about how you look, it's also about how you feel. How you feel inner energy-wise, how you feel in having the stamina and vitality to show up in the way that you want to on a day-to-day basis. So physically, that part is important. The other one is intellectual. Intellectual attraction is not about how smart you are. It's not about whether you graduated college or have a PhD or anything like that, although that is a part of intellectual attraction, but it's all about being a fascinating person. And the way that you become a fascinating person is you have good people skills. You continue to learn new things, you engage in hobbies. You don't just be the person who's sitting at home behind your phone, scrolling for hours on end, letting your life fade

Physical Attraction That You Control

SPEAKER_02 8:13

away. You do things in your life that make life worth living. This is going and hanging out with friends. This is, as I said, having hobbies, continuing to grow your mind. But this is also taking control of your thoughts, which also leads into the next part, which is emotional attraction. Emotionally, we want to be as attractive as we can be. And that includes understanding our feelings, being aware of them, but not letting those feelings drive our decisions every single time. Sometimes you need to be aware of those feelings and let them drive your decisions because feelings are kind of like the dashboard on your car to let you know that things may be going wrong. Like a dashboard tells you you need an oil change, or if your tire pressure is starting to run low. Those are things you need to be aware of. Well, feelings do the same thing for you. They help you be aware

Intellectual Growth Beyond Credentials

SPEAKER_02 9:11

that there's something deeper under the surface that you should be paying attention to. But feelings and thoughts are not always completely true. Feelings are always true. The things that you feel are always true, but your thoughts are not always valid. They're not always based on true things, but it's how we are filtering those things that happen to us in our life, which can end up leading us to make certain decisions and have certain actions, some of which are good, some of which are bad. A lot of this is based in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, things like that. But here's the bottom line of what you need to understand about emotional attraction. For you to show up in a way that evokes positive emotions within another person, you need to be able to understand how to evoke positive emotions within yourself by taking control of those thoughts, by not letting feelings guide every decision

Emotional Control With CBT Principles

SPEAKER_02 10:02

that you make, being able to have a separation between you and your thoughts and your feelings so that you can make better decisions and not be just led by emotion in everything you do. And then finally, there is spiritually. This is about being a person who has strong beliefs and values. You want to actually care about things, have passion, the things that make you angry in life, the injustices that you see, those things are important. They are signals about what you truly care about and whether or not you're living in line with those beliefs and values. And so, to be a spiritually attractive person, it can and does include faith, Christian faith, praying, reading your Bible, or if you're another another type of faith, then this plays into that as well. But it's more about are you actually living those things in your life? Do you say that you want to be one way, that you want to spend time with your family, but then you end up just working a lot? That's a misalignment of your beliefs and your values in how you're actually acting. And that not only is unattractive to other people because you're not the kind of person who does what you say. You say you value one thing, but in actuality, you're doing something else, and that's unattractive, but it's unattractive to you about you. You will feel bad about yourself because you aren't living congruently. Ultimately, these are the four areas of your life that you get to take control of.

Spiritual Alignment With Your Values

SPEAKER_02 11:43

You get to happen to them instead of these things just happening to you. It is a decision filter, it is a framework to help guide you and keep you focused, keep you grounded. And so one of the things that I love to do, and I typically do this the beginning of every year, the beginning of every quarter, the beginning of every month, is I just list out each of the letters of the pies and I think through what are the areas in which I want to grow? Which one of these am I struggling with the most right now? And what is a goal that I want to have in order to grow in this area? For me to be the person that I ultimately want to be, for me to show up in the way that I ultimately want to show up in my marriage, with my kids, at work, with my friends, at church, in my extended family. All of those things matter. So think about your pies in that way. This is the way that you get to control you. This is the way you get to choose how you show up instead of continuing to just let life happen to you. Maybe since we're at the beginning of the month, this month, you go through your pies. What are your strengths right now? What are the things that you that are going well physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually? And where are the areas you want to grow? Maybe you know that you need to focus on getting better sleep. Maybe for intellectually, you know that you're spending way too much time on your phone. Maybe for emotionally, you realize that you have just been working, working, working. You don't take any time to process or to rest. Maybe you should do that. Spiritually, maybe it's that you realize that you have gotten out of a rhythm of prayer, of daily Bible study, of volunteering, and that those are important things to you that you want to bring back to your life. Start here. This is what I started with. That day, on my bathroom floor, I said, I'm done. I can't do this anymore. But that didn't mean that I was gonna walk away or give up. That meant I finally made a clip in my mindset that I was gonna stop letting my circumstances control me, and I was gonna start taking control of my circumstances. This is the exact method that I used 14 years ago, and I still use it today. This is what we're gonna talk about a lot on this show. And the rest of the leather path, because attraction is only the beginning. It goes from attraction to exception.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Aspiration.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

This is the process of falling in love, but it starts with what you start doing today. Now we're going to go into one of my favorite parts of this entire show, which is answering listener questions. If you want to submit a question to be answered in a future show, then here's how you do it: you go and you follow me on Instagram at Kimberly BeamHolmes, and then send me a message and just type the word Pies, P-I-E-S. From there, you're gonna get a direct message right back that's going to have a link to a form. So you'll just click that, you'll fill out your question. You can choose for it to be anonymous, or even for the chance in the future for me to give you a call and for us to talk about it live together to air on the show. However, you want to do it, I want to answer your questions. So go give a follow at Kimberly Beam Holmes on Instagram. Message me the word pies. All right, Jason, what's the first question?

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Okay, first question is from someone who wants to remain anonymous. They said, I married my husband because he paid me $2,000.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

What?

SPEAKER_00 15:42

I was not a Christian at the time, but a few months later, I accepted Christ as my savior. Now, 41 years later, and the kids are gone, he is still the man I wouldn't have even dated. I feel like I am in a death sentence. I want to divorce and just be free and chalk up, chalk this up as a 41-year mistake. I love him as a husband, but have never been in love with him and suffering silently as I live with him and he has Asperger syndrome or is autistic. Someone

Listener Questions And Real Marriages

SPEAKER_00 16:08

help me.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

I really wish I could talk to this person and ask why there why there was $2,000 exchanged at the beginning of this. Mostly just because I'm nosy, not because it actually really makes any difference with what I'm with what I'm going to explain. So the listener said that she feels like she made a mistake. Okay. But also at the end of the day, you made a commitment. And you also said that he is a good husband, right? Isn't that what she said?

SPEAKER_00 16:39

She said, I love him as a husband, but have never been in love with him.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

Okay. I love him as a husband, but I've never been in love with him. Okay. So you have two options here. Either you divorce, which is going to go against your belief system because you're a Christian and you made a committed, you made a covenant commitment in front of God.

Regret After A Long Marriage

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Do they have kids?

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Yes, they do, but they are grown and out of the house.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

Doesn't make a difference. So you have kids together that are going to be witnessing this and seeing this. I feel like while it may be true that your husband paid $2,000, which again I would love to know what that story was, but while it may be true that your husband paid you $2,000 to marry him, you've been married a long time now. You have committed your life to this person. You see good things in him because you say, I love him as a husband, but I'm not in love with him. Then figure out how to grow love together. Figure out how to walk the love path. Because one of the things that we teach religiously at Marriage Helper is you can fall in love with anyone. Love is a choice, but it's also a process. And if you follow the process of falling in love, then you can fall in love whether you intend to or not. But if you stop following the process, then you can fall out of love even if you don't mean to. So forget the past. The past is the past. You can't go back and change it either way. You do have kids who are still looking to you as their source of understanding how healthy relationships and marriages can work. And you shouldn't take that lightly. So try and walk the love path, starting with attraction, physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, one of the things to talk about a whole lot on this show, but really getting to how can I become the best that I can be, and at the same time finding the things that you can be attracted to in him. Not thinking about available alternatives. You've got to stop thinking about what your life would be like without him, what comparing him to other people, stop doing those things. It's going to keep you stuck in wanting out of the marriage. Instead, just start actually mentally dedicating yourself and committing yourself to, I'm going to try and fall in love with my husband. It starts with attraction, it starts with building friendship, and then it goes from there.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Okay, next question comes from Allison from New Jersey. She says, Hi Kimberly, Dr. Kimberly. Hello. I know the need for working on your pies and totally agree it's a win-win if you do. However, what if your separated spouse is also working on their pies? They don't know anything about marriage helper, so they're just working on themselves. That should be great, right? But what would make them choose to come back if they're their best self? As you tell the story, Dr. Beam came back because he went through the trenches and hit rock bottom and your mom was doing well. If both spouses are doing well without the other, why would they come back?

SPEAKER_02 19:33

Okay, I can understand where the question is coming from, but I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy. Is that the is that the right use of that phrase here? You, I think you would want your spouse to be working on themselves and becoming their best self while you also. The spouse doesn't come back because they feel like they are less than whole. That's not the goal. Just like the goal of you working on your pies is that you realize that you have identity and worth outside of the marriage. That doesn't mean that you then automatically are going to want to leave the marriage. No, it just helps you have better self-esteem, self-confidence. It helps you handle situations better to be calm, strong, and gentle in the interactions that you have. So great. If they're working on themselves and working on their pies, fantastic. They don't have to be going through the trenches in order to want to come back. Now, the second part of that question is if we're happy without each other,

If Both Improve Why Reunite

SPEAKER_02 20:31

then why would my spouse come back? And again, I don't think that's quite the right way to look at it. Your spouse may be finding uh peace away from you right now because they are away from the pain, they're away from the conflict, they're away from the stress that the relationship was bringing. That isn't totally encompassed in what's going on with working on your pies. You see, there's a there's a bigger system here. The system is that pies is the first part of the love path. It's how we begin the process of falling in love. And it's the thing that keeps us falling in love when things get off the rocks. As we say at Marriage Helper, if you feel like your marriage just begins struggling or you're you're slipping off of the love path, then you can always start back at the beginning, which is the pies. But the pies isn't the end all be all. It's just one thing. Your husband can be completely happy and alone without you, without anyone. But the goal of marriage is not that we get not that we find wholeness, not that we are finally complete as if we weren't before. The goal of marriage is that we are in a relationship, a long term stable, committed relationship with someone who says, I will be there for you, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. And that doesn't just happen from the pies. The pies allows you to show up your best in the relationship. You would want your husband to also be working on his pies, but there has to be a next step from there. Two people don't just fall in love because they're they're two best selves. That's that's not how it happens. There has to be a crossover. There has to be a point where they actually start leaning in towards each other. Attraction is what leads us to want to move closer. That's all attraction does. It allows the person to finally lean in a little bit, if you want to think of it that way. But once they lean in, then what happens from there? That's where you become that safe place, where you're able to be friends. You build that stability and foundation of friendship with the other person. That's how intimacy occurs. That is where the whole basis of the rest of how you fall in love happens from there is through that acceptance piece. Being a safe place, I accept you for who you are without trying to change you. And that's the key that your husband is never going to get alone. He's never going to get that alone because what all of us are looking for is someone to accept me as I am without requiring me to change. So lean into that part. If you're working on your pies, great. Check the box on that. Keep working on it. But now maybe it's time to go to that next part of the love path, which is acceptance.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Okay, next question. This comes from Dr. Dad from Spring Hill, Tennessee.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

I wonder who that could be.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Dr. Dad says, just how brilliant is your dad? And do you remember that he told people for years that he felt he was supposed to mentor someone to do far more than he ever did? Do you also remember that he's known for years that that is you? Now I ask again, how brilliant is your dad?

SPEAKER_02 23:47

The most brilliant. So brilliant. Thank you, Dad. That's sweet. Dr. Dad.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Final question for today comes from Chris from Minnesota. He says, People have told me that God will never intervene in a person's free will. So since my spouse has made it very clear that she wants out, God will respect her wishes and not mess with her decision. In fact, in God's plan, since he knows all, included uh her wanting to walk from our marriage. So here's my question: Who's running history/slash time, us or God? It seems to me that when everybody wants to pray for another person's salvation, they ask God to change their heart or change their mind. So why doesn't the same apply to our marriage? Am I wrong to ask God to change her mind and to not give my spouse a moment of peace until she sh surrenders back to, quote, for better or for worse, so help me God. And get humble, get on her knees, and dig in and build a new marriage with me. It seems like to me that the only way I can believe in the MH slogan, there's always hope, is that if that hope is dependent on someone else other than me or my spouse. I choose to believe that God is in the business of changing hearts, changing wills, and that goes for salvation and for my marriage. I would love to know what you think.

SPEAKER_02 24:56

Wow. I do not agree that God does not change hearts and minds. I now I'm not smart enough to know, like, does the first the first question you asked was, does God intervene with free will?

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:13

He can. He absolutely can. I mean, there's precedent for that in the Bible. We know that God hardened Pharaoh's heart at the Exodus. Now, whether that means that God set

Prayer Free Will And Hope

SPEAKER_02 25:26

up circumstances to where Pharaoh would end up choosing to harden his own heart or whether God like intervened even more than that. We just know that scripture says God hardened Pharaoh's heart. We also know that God changed his mind with King Hezekiah, where he King Hezekiah was going to die. And King Hezekiah pleaded with God to allow him to live, and God changed his mind and allowed him to live. I believe it was 15 more years. So I don't, I don't think I at the core agree with the precedent that God cannot. God can do anything that he wants to do. I also don't know that I want to keep going down that rabbit hole right now on this show because it's probably a little above my pay grade. And there's probably a lot of philosophers and theologians who would have a lot of really intricate things to say about that that would probably just confuse me. But I think at the core, the real question is can my marriage still be saved? Even if my wife has decided that it's done. I mean, to the people who say, well, if God, if if she's already decided she wants out and God isn't going to intervene with free will. But but how do if, and I agree, God knows all things. Like he ultimately ends up knowing the timeline that everything's going to end up playing out. But I think that's because God can handle, like mentally, I don't even know if he has the same kind of mind that we do, but mentally he can handle several different timelines for every person's life, for every decision placed in front of them. And ultimately can still help people get to the same end result. But here's what I was going to say. Ultimately, we don't know that that, like those people who are saying, if that's what her decision is right now, God's not going to intervene. You don't know that that's going to be her decision in six months or a year. What we see in Scripture is to pray for life. And that doesn't just mean when people are sick, we pray for them to not die, but for relationships to continue to live, for there to be restoration, for there to be reconciliation. And we see that there are difficult circumstances of people in the Bible. I mean, even the 12 disciples, they didn't always get along. And even Paul, when he was going on his mission trips that he had, there were times he had to part ways with other people, but later they ended up coming back together. We see that there is a precedent for reconciliation in Scripture, of course, with the ultimate reconciliation, which is us to God. I believe God can do anything. I believe that there is always hope. I believe God works in ways we will never understand. And I believe that the best thing we can do, and scripture always also even tells us this when people are in the middle of sinning, when they are leaning out of their faith. I believe it's in Ephesians, maybe it's 1 Peter somewhere in there. Scripture says, pray for those people that they would be restored, that they would end up coming back to the faith, that they wouldn't continue in a life of sin. Now, I'm not trying to say that your wife is like actively living in a life of sin, but we know from again what Scripture says the reason that God ever permitted divorce to Moses back in the Old Testament, and then Jesus said this again in Matthew. The reason that God ever permitted divorce was because there were hardness of hearts. And that's always true. Any marriage that ends, it's because one or both people has a hardened heart. And we also know that God can soften hearts. And we see that with in Ezekiel when we talk about the valley of dry bones that were able to come to life, a heart of stone that was turned into a heart of flesh. God has the ability to how in many different ways, through circumstances that people experience, ultimately they do get to make the choice of what they're going to do. But I believe at every turn, God is there pursuing them and hoping, like asking for them to end up following him and making a choice that will lead to abundant life. And marriage plays into that because we know that marriage was God's plan from the beginning. So, and we know that he honors that covenant. We know that that covenant of a marriage relationship is what reflects the heart of God and how he sees us as his church. And that is what we want to see reflected in a marriage relationship and how a husband loves her his wife and how the wife loves his husband. So we know that it's important, and we know that it's the way that God sees how to how to bring up families and how to create strong societies. So, all that to say, I think you should keep praying for your wife. I think you should keep praying for her heart to be softened. I think you should keep praying for miracles to happen. And I think more than anything, that God can absolutely bring that restoration and that reconciliation, even when all things seem impossible, but even if it doesn't happen, that God is still good and he will work all things for good for those who love him. Romans tells us that. We'll be back after this commercial break. So for the first time ever, you can actually work directly with me and Dr. Joe. It's a solo spouse masterclass. So if you are the person who is desperately trying to make your marriage work and you feel stuck, you want guidance, you want instruction, you want a plan of what you need to do. That's exactly what we're gonna guide you through over eight weeks together. We limit the amount of people that we work with in these classes that we do. And so it's only going to be limited to 12 people this coming time that we go through it. And we're gonna be helping you understand exactly what you're doing that's pushing your spouse away and exactly what you need to do to pull your spouse back based on a special assessment that Joe and I have created that creates a profile specifically about you, about how you're showing up in your relationship and knowing the things you're doing that are pushing your spouse away based on you. There's general advice that we give all of the time. Don't do push behaviors, stop pleading, stop begging, stop whining. But depending on your personality style and depending on your attachment style actually depends on what you should do or what you should stop doing. And so that's what we're gonna be working with you in. If you want to do that, we would love to work with you. We have applications that are open. We go through every single one of them to see who is gonna be the best fit for this. And if you want to work

Solo Spouse Masterclass Invitation

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directly with me and Joe for eight weeks, then go and fill out this application and put down your deposit because that helps us. We have a waiting list of people already. It just helps us understand who is ready. So you can do that by clicking the link in the description below. I think a lot of times as Christians, we know what the Bible says, we know what God has told us to do, but we can justify our actions in a lot of different ways. This morning I was reading 1 Samuel 15, and this is what happened. So, in this chapter that I'm about to read parts of to you, what has happened is Israel was without a king. They had judges and they had prophets, and God was really wanting to be their king and wanting them to trust him, but they didn't. They want what it they wanted what all of the other nations had, which was a king. And so even though God didn't want to, he said, I will give the people what they want. And so he told the prophet, which was Samuel at that time, I'm going to answer their prayer. I'm going to give them what they want. They have rejected me as as their as their king, but I'm going to answer their prayer for them. And we're going to see how this goes, basically. Basically, is what happened. And so Saul becomes the first king of Israel. And we see from the very beginning that Saul, when we when he's entering into the story, Saul is supposed to be finding his father's donkeys, and he can't find them, which is an interesting juxtaposition, just as a side note to when we first meet David, he is tending his father's sheep and he knows where every single one of them are. And we know that Saul, as the first

1 Samuel 15 Obedience Versus Sacrifice

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king of Israel, was not a great king. He ended up kind of going crazy. We're going to study a little bit more about that in today's study scripture with me. And we know that David was very much a man after God's own heart. But what are some of the reasons that Saul did not thrive as king? Why was he not a man after God's own heart? Well, as we see in chapter 15 of 1 Samuel, Samuel had gone to Saul. Saul was recently appointed king at this time, and he said to him, Samuel the prophet said to Saul the king, The Lord has sent me to anoint you king over his people of Israel. Now therefore, listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, I will punish the Amalekites, which is an enemy of Israel, for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have. Do not spare anything. Kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. So God gave very clear instructions. Saul, go into battle, and I want you to completely annihilate this other nation. So Saul went. He went and he did what God said to an extent. What he ended up doing, though, is he took King Agog of the Amalekites alive. He did not kill him, but utterly destroyed all the people, the other people that they didn't want to take. Saul and the people spared Agog and the best of the sheep and cattle and of the fatlings and the lambs and all that was valuable, they would not utterly destroy those things. All that they despised and saw as worthless, they did utterly destroy. So God gave very clear instructions. Whether Saul liked it or not, God was clear at what he said to do. And Saul didn't do it. And then we see Samuel comes to Saul. Actually, God goes to Samuel first. The Lord came to Samuel and said, I regret that I made Saul king. I already regret it. I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not carried out my commands. Samuel was angry and he cried out to the Lord all night. Then the next morning he got up, he went to Saul. When Samuel came to Saul, Saul said to him, May you be blessed by the Lord, I have carried out the command of the Lord. But Samuel said, Then what are these sheep that I'm hearing bleeding in my ears, and the lowing of cattle that I hear? If you followed God's commands, where did these animals come from? Saul said, I have brought them. Actually, Saul said, They have brought them. They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and cattle to sacrifice to God. That sounds good, right? Because God also said back in when he was laying the law that there was a routine of sacrifice that needed to happen, that you should give the best, the first fruits, the cleanest of animals, the best of the animals in your sacrifice to him. Because that's that's the way that you atoned for sins, that's the way that you gave God the first fruits of everything. That was a command that God had given them separately from this, decades, hundreds of years before this. So Saul was justifying his actions. He was trying to make it sound like, well, we were doing the right thing, but he knew that they weren't doing the right thing. He knew that he was going against what God had actually told him to do. And Samuel said to him, Stop. I will tell you what the Lord said to me last night. He said, Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? Basically, God is saying, Did I not anoint you and choose you to represent me well to your people? The Lord, the Lord anointed you king over Israel, and the Lord sent you on a mission, and he said, Go utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed. Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you swoop down on the spoil and keep it for yourself? That's not what it says, but that's is what happened. And do what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Saul said to Samuel, But I have obeyed the voice of God. I went on the mission that the Lord sent me on, and I brought the king of Amalek, and I utterly destroyed the Amalekites. But the spoil, the people took sheep and cattle, the best of the things devoted to destruction, so that we could come and sacrifice it to God. Again, he is justifying. He's trying to justify his actions with things that sound good and holy, but ultimately aren't, because God was clear in what he should do. And finally, Samuel said, Has the Lord as great delight in burnt sacrifices and offerings as in obedience to the voice of the Lord? Surely it is better to obey than to sacrifice. Surely it is better to obey than to sacrifice. We see this in other parts of the Old Testament as well, where there was a field that later, when it's under David's reign, under King David, there's a field that someone's trying to give to him. And he says, No, I will not take something to give to the Lord without me having to sacrifice for it. There's this, there's this, I don't want to call it attention, but there's this constant back and forth between obedience and sacrifice. And the truth of the matter is we need both. But when God is clear on what we are supposed to do, to not gossip, to not lust, to not lie, to not cheat, to not steal. But then when we try and justify our actions by saying, well, it's okay because this person wronged me, or I'm just having righteous vengeance, or I'm sharing this information with someone else as a form of a prayer request. But the heart of it, you know, is wrong because you're trying to justify what you're doing, but it's against what God has said to do. And ultimately, what ended up happening with Saul is it was this moment that God said, I have rejected him as king. He will no longer be king. His son will not be king. It will not go down his line. And then ultimately he is replaced. He ends up being replaced by King David because he wasn't obedient to what God called him to do. He cared more about keeping the spoils for himself than he did about just fully, fully obeying what God told him to do. There's a trust issue when there. Ultimately, if Saul totally trusted God as provider and as ultimate sovereign authority, then he would have obeyed. Think about it when it comes to children. When they totally trust their parents, that their parents know what's best for them, even if they don't understand it, that's when they obey. But when they are trying to test the limits, when they believe that their way is better, that they know better, that's when they begin to disobey and find themselves in a myriad of troubles. Same goes with our relationship to God. When we think that we know better, when we think that our way will produce better results, we end up not doing. We end up twisting, we end up turning, we end up trying to justify our actions with things that sometimes even sound really holy. Oh, I just want to share. I think, I think you need to be praying for this person that's our mutual friend. And then you end up just gossiping, but it's housed under what seems like a prayer request. Or you end up lusting, but you tell yourself, well, it's not really that bad if I'm single, or if my wife or husband isn't with me right now. But but Jesus says it's better to gouge out your own eye and not have it than to lust after someone who is not your spouse. These are hard words to hear. They're hard words to live out. But at the end of the day, what's the bottom line? We shouldn't shift the truth in order to make it easier for us to do. The truth that God has laid out is the truth. That is what we are to obey. Are we perfect? No, absolutely not. That's why Romans says, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. There is grace, but does that mean that we should go on sinning? By no means. There's always going to be the pursuit. We're never going to be perfect. But it is in that pursuit that we also need to learn to more fully trust and more fully obey, even when it doesn't make sense to us. So, what is the takeaway from 1 Samuel 15? Well, for me, the takeaway was asking myself the question: where in my life has God been clear? And I have tried to justify doing it my way or doing something else. And that's the thing I sat with this morning as I journaled, and maybe that's the thing you need to sit with today as well.

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Okay, this segment is called The Hot Seat. Kimberly is on the hot seat. So she is going to answer three questions, one minute each. The timer starts as soon as I get done reading the question.

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I'm nervous. Okay.

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Okay. Are you ready?

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Ready as I'll ever be.

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All right. Question number one. How do you actually forgive somebody and mean it?

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You make a decision to forgive them. Next question. How do you actually forgive someone and mean it? Basically, literally, you make a decision inside of I am choosing to let this go to not try and pursue vengeance towards this person and to see them as a flawed individual. That is the research behind how forgiveness works. So you have to do that. Sometimes you have to do that daily, sometimes you have to do it hourly, but you choose to forgive, not hold on to it, let it go, and not hold it against the person. You just, you just move forward.

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How do I stand when my spouse is having a revenge affair?

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That means they had an affair. Okay. You do the same things you would do otherwise. You work on your pies, you become the best version of you. If you haven't yet, which I'm sure you have, you apologize for what you have done. But the fact that you know what's happening at least gives you clarity. That's something that a lot of people don't have. And you do all the same things to save your marriage.

The Hot Seat Rapid Answers

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You get calm, you get clear, stop your pushes, start your pulls, work on your pies, forgive. You do all of those things ultimately with the goal of bringing them back. I am, I am killing this. This is great.

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You're way ahead of the time. Okay. We are in the reconciliation phase, but it feels painfully slow. Is this normal?

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100%. The faster you reconcile, the more nervous that I would be. Kind of like weight loss. The quicker you lose weight, the more red flags there are because you're more likely to gain it back quicker. I am more nervous about the people who they say, oh my goodness, you know, we were separated two years, but we're back together. We've been reconciled two months. Everything's great. It's not going to last because they didn't do the hard work. You want it to go slow so that the effects will last forever.

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Okay. Well, you still have a minute left. So we're going to go to another question.

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Do it.

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Okay. Should I continue fighting for a seven-year relationship even if I was never married and he now has a new woman?

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70-year relationship.

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Seven. Seven.

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Okay. Should I continue fighting for a seven-year relationship?

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If they were never married and now he has a new woman.

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I would ask, what are the reasons that you want to stay? What are the reasons that you want to stay in the relationship? You don't have that.

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I don't have that. I don't have that. Yeah.

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Typically people fight for marriages because they made a commitment, because they have kids together, shared assets, they have a belief that that is driving wanting to keep them together, and all of that makes a difference. If you're not married and this guy never committed to you in that way, and now you he's on to the next person. My question to you is why why? If you have a strong enough reason, go for it. And if you don't, maybe it's time for you to let it go.

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Ten seconds to spare.

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One more. Try it. One more.

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One more. When do you know if it's time to let go?

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If you feel peace inside about letting go.

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Still have eight seconds left. I think you have survived the hot seat for this week.

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For today. Next week, though, you're gonna come back with harder questions.

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Uh yeah. If I have to field some questions myself to make them harder, I will.

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If you have to make if I have to make up questions in order for them to be harder.

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They will, I will come with the most philosophical questions you've ever heard next week.

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Oh, like the like the question earlier.

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I should have saved that one.

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You should have saved that for the hot seat.

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For this one.

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Does God intervene in free will? No. Yes. Dang it. Yes. Yes. Next question.

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Okay, that's all for this week's hot seat. Now on to this week's challenge of the week.

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Each week we're gonna end the show with a challenge of the week. And here's how this is gonna work. So I'm gonna give you a challenge. I hope that you do it. And even more so, I hope that you go and tag me on Instagram to let me know that you have completed the challenge. So the goal is that you will do the thing and then hop over to Instagram, put it on your stories, a picture of you doing it, something that goes with it. Tag me. Make sure that you're following me on Instagram as well at Kimberly Beam Holmes. And then every week I'm gonna pick one lucky winner and I'm gonna send them some special swag that you can't buy, you can't get any other way. You're only gonna be able to get it from winning one of these challenges. So for this week, the challenge is go a mile with me. Whether you run it, whether you walk it, treadmill, hike, bike it, I don't care what you do, go a mile. Not even a mile a day. I am making this super easy barrier to entry for all of you. But intentionally go for a mile-long something. It could even be a swim, bonus points if you swim, because that's crazy. But the goal is you do it without a phone. You do it without anything with you. You'll have to take a picture when you get back so that you can post it to Instagram. And you just take in the scenery. Be with your thoughts. You can take that time

Go A Mile Challenge And Closing

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to pray. You can take that time to meditate. One mile, nothing else. Just you. Tag me. You will win swag. We're working on the swag behind the scenes right now. We're working on some mugs, working on some hats that say stay strong on them. You're not gonna want to miss it. So go follow me on Instagram, tag me as you go a mile with me, and next week I will announce the special winner. Hey, I really appreciate all of you joining me and watching, especially for this first episode. I would love to hear from you. Put in the comments what you liked, what you would like to see more of, or something completely new that you would like to see next. I absolutely love reading your comments. Also, share this with a friend who may get some inspiration from this. I would love to walk this journey along every single one of you. And until next week, stay strong.