Pain
The first thing that comes to my attention is that more hurt is knowledgeable in marriage and nurturing than anywhere else in the world.
“Marriage was shaped by God as an image of the covenant-keeping love of Christ and his church.”
This is the price of agreement-making and agreement-keeping love. It cost Jesus his life to have that connection with us. So I am not making light of the hurt that can be experienced in parenting or a marriage conflict.
Divorce is to be the last resort. God forgives, but he cautions: Let us not sin that love may abound (Romans 6:1).
Any capacities of hope do not attend intentional sin. God said, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mark 10:9). And the genuine reason for that prevention of breaking a marriage is God-shaped that marriage from the beginning as an image or a countenance of the covenant-keeping love of God and his church (cf. Ephesians 5:22–33).
Intense Plea
So my word of optimism begins with a plea. I have given it limitless times to women and men. Put split-up out of your mind as a medication. ‘Don’t contemplate it. Say to yourself, in the reality of Christ, by the supremacy of the Holy Spirit: This is not a choice. I am not going to follow this. It may be enforced upon me, but I am not going to support it. ‘Don’t want it. Pray and work on the other path.
You might have done wrong your way into this married life. Lots of some people say, “Well, I just blew it at the front end. I made all kinds of bad decisions about this man. It wasn’t substituted in a mature, theological way.” And I say, “That is accurate. You may have done wrong your way into this affiliation, but now that you are wedded, this man is ‘God’s man for you.”
That is a remarkable truth. He is ‘God’s choice for you. Yes, no matter how you may request that you could do it all over again. So, look to God as the one who gratifies in the measure now and immeasurably far ahead. Trust that the path of lost dreams in this life is the path of extreme joy.
Your Greatest Gladness
Know this: Take full advantage of your earthly happiness is not the goal line of life or marriage. Maximizing your everlasting joy is because God said — this is vital, I think, of marriage — “Celebrate in tribulation because trial works endurance and endurance works apprehend, and apprehends works expectation, and this expectation does not disappoint” (Romans 5:3–5).
“Trust that the path of lost dreams in this life is the path of greatest joy overall.”
In other words, marriage may dissatisfy with a hundred tribulations, but hope-filled compliance to God will never, never displease us. God says so.
Courage does not disappoint. But on the run tribulation — the tribulation that obedience calls for — escaping misfortune that is not hope-assured or hope-filled is not the path to highest courage or greatest happiness.
Desiring Transformation
It is right, and it is good to want things to change now. We want possessions about our spouses and ourselves to change. I contemplate that is why Peter wrote 1 Peter 3:1–7 for wives in precise because these words are meant to aid a woman to recognize how to think about shifting her husband, in this case, a doubting husband.
She should pray eagerly for him and the whole condition. That is why those verses are there. I would mention that she pray over them long and hard. But ‘don’t stake your extreme happiness on his change.
If you do that, you will possibly become nagging and demanding and angry, all of which will be self-defeating. Focus your main heart vitalities not on fixing his disappointments, but on developing your godly responses to those disappointments. That is what God thinks from you. God does not clutch you accountable for your ‘husband’s sins. But he does hold you responsible for the holiness of your responses to those immoralities.
There will be hundreds of acts of loveliness that your husband will not reward, or perhaps not even sign. And you will sense so alone in your grief. But hold fast to this truth: Jesus sees in top-secret. That is Matthew 6:3–4. God considers every tiny look of your patience and mercy and respect. He perceives them all, and he writes them all. Your quiet grief is never wasted. You will be paid on the last day and, maybe, in this life more than you could ever imagine. When the periods have gone by, Jesus might work wonder in that man, and your life strength ends in a way that you never dreamed.
One Brilliant Testimony
A woman came to me one Sunday around thirty-one years into my ministry. I remember it so evidently. It was at our campus. She recapped that when she was about to leave her husband twenty-one years ago, she came to me and I begged with her: ‘don’t do it.
“God does not embrace you responsible for your ‘husband’s sins but the divinity of your response to those sins.”
She gave me all the explanations why: he was just wholly unaffectionate, unresponsive, traveled all the time, ‘didn’t pay attention, ‘didn’t care for the kids — every kind of reason that he was just not there. Twenty-one years after that, having stayed in the marriage, she said, “He is building a room on our home for my mother to stay with us in her final years, which is the most beautiful, sacrificial act of love he could probably have done for me.” He had become a kind and unselfish and very different man. She just thanked me and said, “‘That’s what I would be lost today.”
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Thank you AG News and John Piper for sharing this.
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