My fiancé and I have been walking with God individually, but I feel called to merge our spiritual journeys as we prepare for marriage. While we attend church together and share occasional prayers, I sense there’s a deeper way to nurture our faith as a couple. Sometimes I wonder if that’s how God wants to work through both of us.
How do we put God in the center of our relationship?
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Putting God at the center comes down to habits you build together. My spouse and I started small, 10 minutes of prayer together each night before bed. It felt awkward at first, but that habit ended up carrying us through some hard seasons later.
The wise and foolish builders in Matthew 7 come to mind here. Since you two already go to church together, the next step is moving from occasional prayers to a consistent rhythm, even a short one. We also try to bring big decisions to God together before making them.
Putting God at the center means letting obedience to Christ shape how you treat each other, especially when it costs you something. Be honest with each other, and when one of you messes up, own it fast and forgive fast.
Talk through boundaries around sex and money before marriage, and figure out how you’ll handle conflict.
I suggest premarital counseling with a pastor or a mature Christian couple, someone who will challenge you instead of telling you what you want to hear.
I get what you mean about wanting two separate walks to become one before the wedding.
For us, putting God at the center meant leaning on older church practices. We lit a candle through Advent and fasted together during Lent. We got Communion as if Christ was the one holding us together.
We asked our congregation to pray over us while we were engaged. We also began serving on the hospitality team one Sunday a month, which did the most to merge our spiritual lives.
Appreciate you being upfront about those first 10 minutes feeling awkward. My spouse and I started naming one gratitude and one concern before praying, which gave the silence somewhere to start. We still do it most nights.
Bringing big decisions to God together makes sense too, but we didn’t start there. We practiced on smaller decisions first, and that’s what prepared us for the heavier ones. Kind of like how the foundation in Matthew 7 gets laid well before the storm shows up.
Asking the congregation to pray over you during the engagement stood out to me. Tertullian, writing around 200 AD, described Christian marriage as ‘cemented by the church, confirmed by the offering,’ the couple’s union was sealed at the Communion table. Your line about receiving Communion as if Christ was holding you together could have come out of that era.
The hospitality team detail was a good one too. Serving side by side showed my spouse and me parts of each other’s faith that praying together alone never did. You see how patient someone is when they’re stacking chairs or greeting a difficult visitor.
Naming a gratitude and a concern first makes sense to me. The silence is what’s kept us from praying together more consistently.
I also like the point about practicing on smaller decisions before the big ones. We’ve been trying to jump straight into the heavy stuff with no warm-up. What kinds of smaller decisions did you two start bringing to God together at first?
The smaller decisions that worked for us were ones with a real outcome but low stakes, from how much to give to a missions offering that month to whether to say yes to a Saturday serving opportunity when we were both tired to which friends to invite over for dinner. The point wasn’t the decision itself but learning to pause and ask together before acting. By the time we faced a job offer in another city, that pause already felt normal. Proverbs 3:6 says to acknowledge Him in all your ways, and ‘all’ includes the little ones.
I think it starts with the basics, like encouraging each other in regular church attendance and confession. Then you let God and the Church’s teaching guide the practical stuff, from family planning to giving and spending money.
Praying together matters, but it’s really about faith shaping everyday decisions too.
The spiritual closeness you’re building can blur into physical closeness faster than you might expect.
There’s wisdom in doing a Bible study together on maintaining sexual boundaries before marriage. When intimacy gets physical too early, it tends to shape the whole relationship around that instead of around knowing each other’s hearts and minds.
The oxen imagery in Scripture is worth getting right here. God is the yoke itself, what binds you together. You’re unified by something outside yourselves, not two people trying to coordinate on your own.
Complementary strengths are real. I’m strong where my wife is weak, and vice versa.
The ‘putting God at the center’ question answers itself once you understand the yoke metaphor. You don’t have to manufacture unity. You both have to stay connected to Him.
Start with gratitude prayer. When my fiancé and I first tried praying together, we jumped straight into requests and heavy stuff and it just didn’t stick. Then we shifted to thanking God for bringing us together and for the marriage ahead. Gratitude makes prayer feel like a conversation you want to have.
Thirteen years later, I still think about that triangle image from premarital counseling. The closer each of us gets to God, the closer we get to each other. Drift from Him and you drift from each other too.
Another thing that helps is making time for date nights. My husband and I play video games or chess together, whatever keeps us connecting and enjoying each other.
Start a personal Bible study habit now, before the wedding. It’s much harder to build later, and you can’t pour into your marriage from an empty cup.
For us it comes down to making sure the other person gets to heaven.
It plays out in small, practical ways. My husband gets everyone ready for church each week, and I’m usually the one who invites him to confession or suggests we pray together. Those little acts of looking out for each other’s souls add up over time and become the rhythm that keeps God between you.
Having accountability friends (and avoiding being alone together) has been the most practical way we’ve kept God at the center of our relationship. Those boundaries aren’t glamorous, but they remind us our relationship answers to something bigger than the two of us.
Patience with each other beats a perfect spiritual routine. One of you’ll stumble (you will). And when that happens the other lifts them back up. That’s the path you’re signing up for.
Start with something under 5 chapters. We tried reading a book of the Bible together and I picked Leviticus. 2 chapters of offering regulations in and we switched to Philippians, which is short enough even I can keep up.
Now we each bring one question per chapter.
Do premarital counseling. It gave us language for things we assumed we agreed on.
Get someone to walk you through in-laws, expectations for kids, sexual history, debt and conflict styles. Those conversations can expose tender places before they become battlegrounds.
Repenting quickly is one way to center Christ. And saying “I was wrong, please forgive me” before marriage is holy practice.