Fourthly, if you want to survive and thrive on the other side of a serious moral failing:
4. Feed your spiritual and marital affections
The simple truth is that most people do what they want. Therefore, the ultimate solution to marital failure is to want the right things – or rather, to want the right people. Until you want God and your spouse more than you want to satisfy your animal desires, there will be no recovery from moral and sexual failure. You can’t just “willpower” your way out of this; you have to love your way out of it.
That suggests two things simultaneously. First of all, you have to grow your love for God. I think it would be hard to find a person who is totally enthralled with Jesus and having an affair on his wife. Perhaps such a person exists, but I haven’t met him or her in 23 years of pastoral ministry. Behind almost every marital disaster I’ve ever been privy to there lies a much neglected spiritual life. There is a person who is too busy to get to church. Too busy to read her Bible. Too engaged with the children to be in a Small Group. You just don’t meet a lot of spiritually vibrant adulterers or fornicators or pornographers. Rather, lack of discipline becomes lack of desire becomes lack of wisdom becomes lack of self-control becomes marital disaster. If God doesn’t satisfy you then you will seek out satisfaction in dark and dangerous places.
Secondly, you have to grow your love for your spouse. Some couples make the disastrous decision to cease all sexual interactions while they process their marital failure. While it may be necessary in extreme cases to pause long enough to ensure that it is safe to continue, in most cases the wisest course of action is to invest generously and immediately in renewed marital affections. The Bible nowhere counsels husbands and wives to engage in extended periods of abstinence, on the contrary, Paul said:
The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (1 Corinthians 7:3–5 ESV)
You can’t necessarily “sex your way out of trouble”, but it’s very hard to get out of trouble without regular and generous sex in your marriage. Love each other. Be generous with each other. Be kind to one another, and you might just forget what it was that you were looking for in the gutter.
Go on dates.
Write awkward poetry.
Hold hands in the dark.
Do all the things you used to do before you got busy, lazy and stupid.
And then lastly:
5. Forgive each other as God in Christ has forgiven you
Before you are husband and wife you are brother and sister in Christ. Jesus said: “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him” (Luke 17:3 ESV).
If your brother, who is your husband, or your sister, who is your wife, commits an act of sexual and covenantal betrayal it will hurt like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.
But you can recover.
Have it out. Scream and shout. Throw something! Get it on the table. Fight for your marriage and for the soul and salvation of your spouse! But if he repents – if she repents – then forgive him. If he confesses his sin, specifically and appropriately, if she agrees to reasonable limits and boundaries, if he commits to a process of rigorous and embarrassing accountability and if she feeds and fuels her appropriate affections – then forgive her.
Forgive her.
As God in Christ has forgiven you.
That’s the Gospel; now preach it to yourself and believe it as a couple.
You can recover!
You can grow!
You can change!
You can forgive!
And your marriage can come back from the dead.
Grace does the most remarkable of things – in the life of a sinner and in the story of a broken and shattered marriage.
Thanks be to God!
Pastor Paul Carter
N.B. To listen to Pastor Paul’s Into The Word devotional podcast on the TGC Canada website see here; to listen on SoundCloud see here. You can also find it on iTunes.
