Stop Performing In Your Marriage with Brad Rhoads

How the same grace God gives us has to become the foundation we build our marriages on. **About This Episode** Most of us walked into marriage believing love was enough — that if you meant your vows, everything would just work. Brad Rhoads lived that lie for the first year of his marriage and nearly lost the best thing God had given him. What turned it around wasn't a marriage strategy or a communication framework. It was grace — the same grace God extends to us — applied to the person who knows the worst things about you. In this episode, Brad shares what a grace-based marriage actually looks like versus a performance-based one, why the church has largely left marriages to fend for themselves, and how resting in the gospel changes everything about the way you love your spouse. Brad Rhoads is an attorney-turned-pastor who left a 22-year law career to launch Grace Marriage, a ministry that equips churches with ongoing marriage discipleship. **About Brad Rhoads** Brad Rhoads is a civil litigation attorney who left his law practice in 2015 to found Grace Marriage, a ministry dedicated to equipping churches with ongoing marriage discipleship platforms. He and his wife Marilyn have been married 30 years and have five children. Brad serves as a pastor of marriage at his church and is the author of The Grace Marriage, published by Moody Publishers. **In This Episode** \[00:52] — Who is Brad Rhoads? — Brad shares his background as a civil litigation attorney, how he and Marilyn built a two-year waiting list just by having a great marriage, and what prompted him to leave law and launch Grace Marriage full time. \[03:21] — "We want what you have" — The moment a young couple asked Brad and Marilyn to do their premarital counseling because their marriage looked fun — and what that kind of testimony actually requires. \[04:03] — The church's missing strategy for marriage — Brad breaks down why he thinks the church's default approach — premarital prep, then nothing until crisis — is one of the dumbest strategies he's ever seen, and what a real marriage discipleship model looks like. \[06:15] — The first year: neglected and miserable — Brad recounts how pouring everything into his law practice while Marilyn cried two or three times a week led him to the wrong conclusion: that her "hypersensitivity" was the problem. \[08:39] — "I'm off your roller coaster" — How Marilyn's encounter with Christ's sufficiency changed everything — and why Brad had to be forced to a marriage conference before he finally saw what he was doing. \[10:55] — The sowing-and-reaping rule Brad forgot — The moment Brad realized marriage was the one area of his life where he thought he could sow nothing and still reap everything — and what it looks like to actually turn that around. \[13:20] — Why marriage thrives on intentionality — Brad explains why "we love each other, we're fine" is a dangerous myth — and how neglect quietly destroys the one thing that matters most. \[14:44] — Why the church is responsible — Brad makes the case that when the church leaves the marriage space wide open, the world fills it — and couples drift toward either a norm they can tolerate or a crisis, with nothing in between. \[18:52] — Redefining success — Why the people Brad most wanted to impress were telling him he was succeeding, while the people who loved him most knew he was failing — and what a real redefinition of success looks like for a Christian man. \[25:53] — Why younger couples aren't looking to older ones — Brad addresses why older couples have stepped back from modeling marriage to younger generations, and what changes when they pursue a marriage worth observing. \[31:15] — Performance-based vs. grace-based marriage — The core framework from Brad's book: how performance-based marriages give and withdraw love based on how you're being treated, and how a grace-based marriage responds the way Christ does — by moving toward, not away. \[34:53] — Grace looks like this — Brad shares how a hard three weeks with his dad's illness and emotional absence from Marilyn was met not with distance or resentment, but with prayer, pursuit, and peace — because their marriage is built on Jesus, not performance. \[40:04] — "You're not okay, and it's okay" — The moment God spoke to Brad in his den and, for the first time, he could finally breathe — and how releasing performance-based faith changed the way he loved people, including his wife. \[45:12] — New creation theology and what God sees — Brad and Aaron unpack what it means to believe the old is gone and the new has come — that God isn't looking through your sin, he's seeing a cleansed, beloved son or daughter — and how that shifts everything. **Resources from This Episode** The Grace Marriage by Brad Rhoads Grace Marriage Ministry — Equipping churches with ongoing marriage discipleship platforms If this conversation encouraged you, please share it with a couple you love, and subscribe wherever you listen. 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