I recently sent this letter (a few things omitted) to a couple in the church, but to some extent it applies to all of us who are married. So I thought I’d send it as this week’s note.
I’ve been thinking and praying for you both, and wanted to suggest a way forward.
The old prayer books say that marriage was given for “help and comfort… in prosperity and adversity.” So my thought has been, “what does your situation look like if the two of you are working together against your common enemies, rather than against each other?” Since it’s true the Lord made you one flesh on your wedding day, what does it look like for the two of you to band together for the sake of Christ and his kingdom (something bigger and more important than the two of you), rather than working against each other and weakening his kingdom?
To work together against the sins that are your (and God’s) common enemies, both of you will need to admit those sins. So it all begins with humility and honesty on both sides. But once that (difficult) barrier is passed, you begin to work together, to help and strengthen each other, to support each other.
For example, my wife’s big sins revolve around______; mine revolve around ______. We went through years of unwillingness to admit those fundamental struggles in our souls. But with grace and time we became more honest with God and each other, and accepted that our problem was a lack of faith on both counts. Then we began to work together. The result was praying together “against” ourselves and our destructive sins, for the benefit of God and the work he intends to do in and through us.
After all, if you put your own conflict in the perspective of the first marital argument in Scripture (Gen 3), you realize that the direct outcome of Adam and Eve’s respective sin is BLAME. Adam says to God, “…that woman you gave me” and Eve says “…the serpent deceived me.” It’s all part of Satan’s ongoing effort to derail God’s people, to get them off a life of service and humility before God, and onto a life of pride, blame and self-absorbed self-defensiveness. Nearly all conflict in marriage is ultimately about the self, not Christ, not his kingdom, not his work.
So the real question is: for whom do you intend to live? Or at a deeper level, is your identity in yourself, or is it in Christ who has made you a new creation? If your identity is truly in him, your need to defend yourself goes away, you begin to think of yourself as the “chief of sinners.”
Remember, all the good stuff in the kingdom of God begins with repentance and humility, not standing your ground and arguing.
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As Eve was a great gift to Adam, so your marriage is a gift to you. Barring extraordinary, unfortunate circumstances, seeing your own marriage as anything less than a gift is the work of sin and the enemy. It may be time for you to take inventory of your soul; time for some honest reckoning.