Marriages Under Attack, Dave Hudson- Live the Life

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

Stories of hopelessness turned into hope. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. We just had lunch and we go way back. Whenever someone played ball with someone I play ball with, I got to find them. I've heard the legend of Dave Hudson. Now I get to meet him. But Dave, what an amazing ministry God's given you.

You right here, I've got your card. Live the life. This is a big deal. This isn't just about triage necessarily. It's about what God designed marriage to be.

Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of times we wait till marriage is in crisis before we actually do something. And the first institution that God ordained was marriage. And he didn't mean for us to get in crisis and then do something about it.

He wanted us to immediately begin to work. And so live the life has been for 25 years been helping marriages, especially throughout Florida, but all over the country to see exactly what it means to live the abundant Christian life, but the abundant marriage life as well. So there are couples that will come there at the end of the rope. They're ready to call it. You told me about a couple that they were about to sign the divorce papers.

They said, we'll give it one more shot. What is that like? You guys actually offer that service for folks like a little weekend? Yes, we have a thing called Hope Weekend. And Hope Weekend is for couples that are in crisis. And when couples are in crisis, they can come.

It's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it's an intensive. And we take them to the depths of things to discover how they can deal with their marriage, how they can even argue the right way instead of the wrong way. We take them through how to communicate and the communication skills are just massive teaching people to communicate.

And it's amazing. We have couples that have been married almost 47, 50 years that have just never been able to communicate and walk away from that weekend, knowing how to communicate to one another. So it's just neat how God brought us together. Pastor Jay, Winston Salem, Oak Lawn, great ballplayer. You guys played some ball together and God put you all together in relationship years ago growing up, I guess, right?

Yeah. Ever since we were four years old, we've known each other our whole lives, went to college together and have been around each other through ministry and just one of the dearest friends in the world. Well, I've been married 30 years. My son-in-law Harrison is in the same room with us and hopefully he's taking copious notes, has been married to my daughter, Hope, for seven years, going on eight.

Okay, we're hitting some numbers here. But really, the moment you say I do, even before that and definitely after that, the enemy, there's an all out assault from hell to destroy that marriage. Talk about what is attacking our marriages today, David, and kind of what lights your fire for all this?

So as a pastor, I can focus on the church and the institution of the church. But the institution of the church is strong, only strong is the first institution that God ordained, which was marriage. And so there is no wonder that the attack of the enemy comes on the marriage. Because if there can be a teardown and a destruction of the marriage, there can be a tear down and destruction of the church.

And so he's going to start there. And so if he can destroy marriages within the church, and as we see the percentage of divorce that's happening inside the church and outside the church is pretty much the same number. And what's also interesting, professing atheists and professing Christians, the divorce rate is less among professing atheists and professing Christians.

And so the enemy is definitely attacking the marriage because if he can destroy there, there's so many other things that are affected by that. Now you do this ministry, you also pastor a church and it's in that pastoral ministry and in the throes of trying to help other people that you discovered personally some things that have given you a deeper impact with the current ministry you're in right now with Live the Life. Can you share about your testimony a little bit about your in your own marriage?

Yeah, absolutely. Because we've been in ministry 23 years and been pastoring. Sometimes you end up unfortunately becoming married to the ministry more than you do your spouse. And because of some things that happened with us personally, we were so I was so wrapped up in ministry side, that I was neglecting my wife, and I was neglecting the relationship that I had with her and she felt the betrayal of that. And once that revealed to us, we said no more and we began to work through and began to go and Live the Life was actually there for us at that time as well. And we went to a hope weekend that I just talked about. And we sat down through that hope weekend, communicated about stuff that we had bottled up for years and years.

And it was amazing to watch. And I would say our our marriage right now is so healthy. You know, just the love of my life and just somebody that I know that I want to do everything with including ministry, but I don't want my marriage to suffer because of ministry. I want my marriage to be number one ministry will come. This is just the truth as a pastor. There's a lot of people that will come and go in during your time as a pastor. That spouse is the one that's going to be there throughout all of it.

And so that has to be the most important. That's the voice of Pastor David Hudson, who's over Live the Life right here in Jacksonville, Florida. I'm in Florida at our wonderful Truth Network affiliates headquarters called the Salem Center. Got a lot of good things happening here, including the Live the Life offices, which you've given me a quick tour of.

I met some of your team. We've got 91.3 FM Brunswick, 91.7 FM Jacksonville, 91.9 FM St. Augustine. Listen to Truth Talk. They are like our all of our wonderful affiliates brave enough to carry this crazy radio show. It's probably just because of this crazy radio host. But David, so many people are struggling.

Can you give us some baby steps? People right now that are listening, they just need some hope in their marriage. They just they don't they want their marriage to be a bright light for Christ and the culture. But man, they're struggling.

They're getting historical all the time. They're blaming their bitter. Well, you always have done this.

You've never changed. What hope can you give people listening right now about their marriage? Yeah, absolutely. I think the the biggest hope that we have is especially as a believer and a follower of Jesus Christ is when God ordains and puts things together, he doesn't tear them apart. And so if you can understand that, this is this is somebody helped me with this one time that if you're struggling with something, it's your human.

And there is normal tendencies to our humanity. And yet we need the Holy Spirit to help us overcome that. So we start off with learning how to communicate. And so one of the biggest things we teach are communication skills. If we can teach you how to communicate on a daily basis, and you can learn, you may think money is your struggle, you may think your intimacy is your struggle, you may think your family is your struggle.

But it's really you don't know how to communicate about any of those things. And who is Jesus, he is the word. And if he is the word, then he wants us to learn how to use our words and to use them well. I love it. Well, Harrison and I, we took you to lunch, but we we gleaned a lot more from you than you did from us. You've given us these amazing tools. This these take out the trash cards, I'm not going to say too much because I want people to reach out to your ministry to learn more.

These daily temperature readings, dialogue guides with your wife, your spouse, amazing. You really poured into us and I'm sitting here thinking how many folks need to call coach David, you might as well be your pastor, David, you might as well be coach David. Because this is something like this is so important. This is critical. This this covenant of marriage, you know, Christians are really, really well versed on marriage between a man and woman. Yes, that's how it should be. And how dare those people try to, to fast track, you know, evil, the gender agendas and all the bad stuff. Sure, we're right.

Yeah, we were with you. But what about your own marriage? Like, we're really bad at looking in the mirror and saying, how can Christ fix my marriage, heal my marriage? How can I love that woman and be committed to her till death do us part? And so, principally, this is, again, not to beat people up and shame people, but David speak to the greatness and speak to what the glory of God and what he wants to do in our marriages as we get out of here, will you?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, in churches for years, we've had the big day where we celebrated somebody that been married 50 years, and that's great. I'm glad they've been married 50 years. But a lot of times, there's people that have married 50 years, and they're miserable. And God created us to have life and life abundant. And so he wants us to have marriage and marriage abundant.

He doesn't want you to be miserable in that 50 years. He wants healthy relationships. And so if we can say, Okay, Lord, we want a healthy marriage. And that is our that is our goal, then.

And that's what it's all about. And so as I told you earlier, that our our goal is to decrease the divorce rate, increase the marriage rate, decrease teen pregnancy and unwanted pregnancies, and then increase church attendance. If that's all we're trying to do here, and it is trying to understand that this is what we want God, we want life abundant that God has promised us. So a healthy marriage in Christ is going to lead to healthy biblical parenting, it's going to lead to all these other things, you're going to be more fruitful, you're going to, you're gonna have a soulmate who's not just there because of legal document, but they're they're doubling, tripling, tripling your efficiency for Christ in your work in your ministry everything.

And it may be this is what's what also blew me away. We were talking walking back from lunch, David, how few churches have a marriage ministry taught us give the statistic, but we're also offering your services. He didn't know I do this on a national radio show. But I'm I'm I'm advertising. This is a recruitment ad for you to hire a marriage and family pastor. His name is Pastor David Hudson, and the ministry has lived the life and find a way for them. Put them on your ministry support every month, just like the crisis pregnancy center, just like the rescue mission, and have someone who can be available your whole ministry, you have, you know, locations all over, but you could be available to be that for that church. But talk about I mean, how few churches even have that going on this statistic scary. Yeah, 94% of churches do not have a marriage ministry.

A lot of times it's because we just don't know how to do that. And so our goal is not to become your pastor, our goal is to come teach that and show you how you can do that and how you can carry that forward. And so we love going in, teaching our marriage program, and then taking two or three couples in that church and training them to be mentors, coaches, and facilitators, and then they can take this same material and begin to teach it and to show your church and watch your marriages become healthy.

Yeah, it's time to put up or shut up. If this is such a real issue, and if marriages are falling apart, do something about it. Get these guys to come in, you can train, you can set them up, you know, get a godly couple that's a retired couple, it's time that they started pouring into the younger guns, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was just training some couples last night, one, let's see, 55 years, it was 37 years, 28 years, I believe it was. And then there was a lady, her husband had just passed away last year, they've been married 64 years, and she said, how can I pour into young couples? So we're training people at this local church to do just that. So that way, the pastor, when you've got marital issues, and you've got a young couple that's wanting to go through our Start Smart program, they're going to be able to take that. And man, that gives that pastor such a freedom that he knows he's got people equipped in the church to do that. Pastor David Hudson, how can people reach out to you, live the life, pre-marriage, marriage, whether they're struggling, whether they just need a tune up and encouragement, whether a church wants to reach out to you, say, hey, come on in and do a seminar or train our people to do this, what's the best way folks could reach you, website, information, whatever? So livethelifejax.org, livethelifejax.org, and all the information is there, they can go on there and they can reach out, they can see our programs, it gives an explanation of that, and all my contact information is there as well. This is the Truth Network.