A Broadcast of
Bible Believers Baptist Church
by Pastor Bevans Welder

 

Can we keep our marriage together once we have messed up?  Yes.

In our day, we are seeing more and more marriages messed up by infidelity, instability, irresponsibility, incompatibility, irritability, and you name it.  Husbands and wives spend more time fussing and looking for a way out of the mess than they do trying to reconcile.  They know that they vowed at their wedding to stay together till death do us part [Matt 19:6].  And they know that the Bible is against divorce [Mal 2:16].  But they don’t have a clue what to do to keep their marriage together and thrive in a happy marriage.  It just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

So, we offer some advice from the words of God that will help you if you are truly determined to salvage what is left of your marriage and turn things around for the better.  If you will follow this little outline of instructions, you will give yourself as good an opportunity as you can get to keep your vows and be glad that you did.

First, you personally need to draw as close as you can to the Lord.  When the fight starts in a marriage, the principle thing on your mind each morning and evening is the wretched condition of your marriage and your life.  You may have a way to function each day that allows you to see some good in your marriage and to tolerate it.  However, when you are alone and have time to really consider the true state of your marriage, you are not happy with it.  So, you try to do some things that make you happier [like shopping or hunting and fishing] and you try to recommend ways for your spouse to change so that you can be happier.  You’d be much better off to concentrate your efforts on getting much closer to the Lord.  You will never be the spouse that you are supposed to be by consuming your efforts on your pleasure or your spouse’s problems.  Right now, you need to get with the Lord in personal devotions [Bible reading and prayer] and fall in love with him.  Your marriage is like a triangle with the Lord at the top and you and your spouse in each of the other two corners on the bottom.  The closer you and your spouse get to the Lord, therefore, the closer you get to the each other.

Then you have to be honest about your contribution to what has gone wrong.  Own your part of the lust, selfishness, cruelty, dishonesty, broken trust, spiritual weakness, unjust criticism [fault finding], broken fellowship with the Lord, neglect, retaliation [that’s brilliant – kill yourself and your marriage trying to get back at your spouse], bitterness, living in the past [what happened to you before will happen to you again if you keep imagining that it will], nagging, withholding affection, and all of the other things people do to torment each other in a bad relationship.

Then you need to sincerely apologize.  You don’t apologize just so that your mate will let you off the hook or to entice your spouse to apologize to you.  You apologize so that you may acknowledge before your spouse exactly what you did wrong and so that you may sincerely employ your best effort to prevent it from happening again.  Your apology allows you to reconcile with your spouse by giving him or her the opportunity to forgive you for what you have done wrong.  Learn to sincerely forgive and learn to love [this is something you are not naturally equipped to do, Tit 2:4-5, Eph 5:25].

Establish some ground rules of communication.  Never ever bring up prior relationships or infidelity.  Get it all out at one time and be done with it forever.  Quit bringing up the past.  The past is the past and all you have is what is before you.  Stop all jealous behavior and don’t give your spouse the first reason in the world to be jealous about you by hugging all over guys, or hugging all over girls.  Stop talking really animatedly with a pretty girl or handsome man and then talking gruffly with your spouse.  Your body language screams a potential for trouble here.  If you continue this kind of behavior, you are not going to fair very well in trying to restore trust in your marriage.  Stop all phone calls, emails, text messages and other forms of communication with others that contribute to some sort of fantasy in your mind.

Establish some very appropriate “boundaries” for yourself and your spouse.  In strained relationships, the spouses have a tendency to say and do very cruel things to each other.  One spouse may point a finger at the other one to blame them for something that might not be their fault at all.  Take the blame for the things about which you are truly at fault and do not accept the blame for something that is not your fault, thinking that somehow this is going to make for a peaceful relationship.  It is wrong to accept the blame when you aren’t wrong.  You have to learn appropriate and fair ways to communicate with each other.  If you are talking about a subject that is tense, only go as far as you can in the conversation without getting mad.  If you need time and space to cool off, take it.  Then resume the conversation when you can handle the subject without flying off the handle.  Learn to be a good listener.  Often, strained communication in relationships comes from the inability to hear what your spouse is saying.  If you perceive that your spouse is saying something that you don’t like, very calmly ask your spouse to clarify the statement.  It may very well be that you have “heard” something that he or she didn’t say or even intend to say!

Establish some real and achievable expectations for yourself and for your spouse.  It is a good idea to write these down.  In dysfunctional relationships, people don’t have a very good idea what is truly expected of them and they are not sure that the expectations their spouse has are even agreeable to them.  So each spouse should write down what he or she expects of the other and what he or she is willing to do to meet those expectations, if he or she agrees with them.  Otherwise, you will end up despising your spouse because God didn’t create him or her to live up to your fantasies and unreasonable expectations built upon a Hollywood dream world.

Calmly, succinctly and honestly describe the kinds of situations that contribute to problems in your marriage.  This way, your spouse can work on those areas.  You cannot make him or her change, you are not responsible for your spouse’s decision to change, and you are not responsible for the decisions your spouse makes when he or she is wrong.  Your spouse is the only one who can change him/herself.  But you can point out some specific areas where there are difficulties between you.  You can also enumerate the steps you are going to take to improve your part of the problem.  You should also state the steps you are going to take to appropriately protect yourself in those instances where your spouse is doing something harmful to the relationship.  If your spouse wants to please you then he/she can make the necessary changes and take the necessary steps to improve him/herself.  And you better be very complimentary and encouraging if your spouse does make some changes because it takes a lot of work and sacrifice to make changes like that.  Being appreciated for the effort is very rewarding and encourages more of the same

Examine yourself in the sight of God.  Get a true picture of yourself and quit believing your own prideful evaluation of yourself.  You are not that great.  You are not that deserving of the kind of attention you think your spouse is supposed to give you.  Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall.  Humility is a great way to see yourself before God.  It has a tendency to keep you humble in your marriage, as well.

Get out all of the sin in your life that is contributing to the problems in your marriage.  Quit going to the bars.  Quit drinking.  Quit tobacco [what a nasty habit (kissing a smoker or a dipper is like licking an ashtray)].  Quit stimulating your imagination with wicked thinking and wicked viewing [just count the number of times you have looked or thought inappropriately].  Quit cussing and intimidating your spouse with your anger.  Quit bossing your spouse around and demanding things all the time.  Quit spending money irresponsibly.  Quit gossiping to your friends about your problems.  Gossiping prolongs the problems in your marriage.  Those folks can’t solve your problems.  By talking, you’re just relieving tension and taking away the fuel necessary to change what’s broken in your marriage.  At the same time, you are just making yourself sound right and your spouse wrong, particularly when you get the people to whom you’ve been whining to agree with you.  Then, if you ever do get your marriage straightened out, your friends are going to despise your spouse for all of the bad things you said and they are going to think you are crazy for going back to him or her!!

Go to work on making your marriage a happy marriage.  A happy marriage takes a lot of work.  Don’t just survive; thrive.  There is no instant gratification in repairing a marriage.  When it has been messed up it takes much more work to fix it and make it happy, than it does if you haven’t gotten off track.  So, look for steady slow progress and rejoice in moves that are in the right direction.  Don’t wait for huge changes before you can smile and rejoice.  Spend time together.  You might have to quit fishing and hunting for a few years to ensure that you have years of happy recreation in the future and not just an escape from the misery you are in.  Turn off the stupid idiot box [television].  You cannot carry on a conversation when you are distracted all the time by what’s on the tube.  Get away from the email and text messages, too; reserve those for a time when you are not together with your spouse.  Nothing is more important right now that fixing the most important part of your life. 

Go to work on your marriage together.  “We” have the problem so “we” have to work on it together.  It is “our” problem, not just mine and not just yours.  So, “we” aren’t going to play the blame game.  If you have to call someone on their bad behavior, remember to take responsibility for your part of the problem.  That’s all you can do.  And remember, never apologize for something that you did not do just to buy peace; you will end up crippling your marriage, because your spouse will not have to own what he or she did wrong.  Like Bib Jones, Sr. said, “It is never right to do wrong to get a chance to do right.”

Go to church together.  Find a really good Bible believing, Bible preaching and Bible teaching church.  Go to Sunday school, Sunday morning and evening services and Wednesday evening prayer meeting.  This faithfulness to your church will help establish faithfulness in your relationship.  You will hear things in the preaching and teaching of the words of God that will really help you grow closer to the Lord and closer together.  And when you are at home, pray together.  As they say, “Folks that pray together, stay together.”

Now, these may seem like a lot of things to do.  However, if you will take the steps to add each of these things to your marriage and do them faithfully, you will find that you can get through the trouble you have had and move on to some much desired happiness.

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Copyright © 2001-2003 Bible Believers Baptist Church
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Copyright © 2001-2005 Bible Believers Baptist Church
1701 Rand Morgan Rd
Corpus Christi, TX 78410
(361) 241-6100
Email:
Pastor Bevans Welder
These articles cannot be stored on other Internet sites or sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed.