Following Christ English

3) Accept the Reality of Your Own Sin. “Gary,” the email read, “What does a wife do when her husband doesn’t love her like Christ loves the church?” The woman then shocked me by giving the rest of her story: “Before I got married, I read many Harlequin romances and I thought marriage would be like that. For a while it was, but then things cooled off. A couple years later, I found that exciting love once again by having an affair; but after a number of months, that too, cooled off.” At this point, she threw herself into the church, but after a while even God became boring. That’s when she “fell” into yet another affair that—no surprise, here—also eventually cooled off. In the aftermath of those two affairs, in which she wounded and humiliated her husband about as deeply as a wife can, she wrote to me, consumed with how her husband wasn’t loving her like Christ loves the church. Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but all of us have hearts that tend toward dismissing our

2) Accept the Reality of Human Marriage. During a Sacred Marriage conference, a woman came up to me and said, “I have a very difficult marriage…” “You don’t have to tell me you have a difficult marriage,” I answered. “That’s redundant!” It took a while for what I was saying to sink in, but eventually, it did, and the woman smiled. Because of the reality of sin, every marriage has difficult moments. We’re not marrying gods and goddesses! We’re marrying people that the Bible promises will stumble in many ways. How can that possibly be easy? Once I accept that marriage is inherently difficult, I’ll no longer resent it when my marriage is difficult. Disappointment and a lack of respect are often birthed out of unrealistic expectations. It’s not fair to compare your marriage to something you’ve seen in a movie or read about in a novel—that marriage isn’t real. And even if you see a marriage at church, you don’t know what’s really going on during less public moments. Because of m

1) Accept the Reality of Human Relationships. James 3:2 lays out the human condition as clearly and as succinctly as anyone can: “We all stumble in many ways.” Think about the impact of the words “all” and “many.” What James is telling us is that if you were to divorce your spouse, interview two hundred “replacement” candidates, put them through a battery of psychological tests, have follow-up interviews conducted by your closest friends, spent three years dating the most compatible ones, and then spent another forty days praying and fasting about which one to choose, you’d still end up with a spouse who disappoints you, hurts you, frustrates you, and stumbles in many ways. The word “all” means there are no exceptions. A new spouse might stumble in different ways, but he or she will still stumble. This is the reality of human relationships in light of sin. Your spouse is human; therefore, they stumble—and not just once or twice, but in many ways. Once I accept that my spous