When Christian couples marry they have great expectations that nothing will ever go wrong. But real-life marriages -- even Christian marriages -- have struggles and sometimes disaster sets in. On the next Haven Today, Charles Morris is joined by a couple who share intimately how their marriage almost ended because of an affair but then how the Lord restored their marriage and brought freedom in Christ.

May 20, 2005

Grace Saving Marriage (Part 2)

Welcome to Haven Today, I’m Charles Morris, where in the next few minutes we’ll be joined by a Philadelphia couple who almost lost their marriage because of an affair. The Lord not only brought them back together, but in Christ they have a stronger marriage than ever. Don’t go away, this is a program called “Grace Saving Marriage”. And if you’re listening on the weekend and missed our first time together, you can go to our website, haventoday.org, and under the “Going Deeper” section you’ll find the full interview, so you won’t have missed anything. You’ll also see an important book called, “Sacred Marriage”. Also, one other programming note: If you miss Haven Today on your local station, we’re now streaming on our website and a few days ago we started podcasting. Just go to Haventoday.org. Now let’s get started, from Haven’s “Together” marriage album, here’s the music of Paul Stookey with slightly different words, “There is Love”.

Song: There is Love
Performed by: Haven

You’re back again on Haven Today and this is “Grace Saving Marriage” part 2. And we are joined from Philadelphia by two friends of mine that I haven’t seen in a few years, Rick and Nancy – and I almost said their last name, but I didn’t. Rick, Nancy, welcome back to Haven Today.
Nancy: Hi Charles
Rick: Hi Charles
CM: Yesterday on our weekday program, Haven Today, you guys kind of fessed up – you’ve only talked about this at your church and Nancy I think you’ve given a talk on this at one time – but your marriage, you almost lost it 20 years ago. There was an affair. Nancy you told us about that, without going into great, ugly detail, but then the Lord brought you back. And for anybody who wasn’t with us yesterday, just in a nutshell, tell us how and why the Lord brought you back.
N: How and Why?
CM: In a nutshell, yes.
N: How. I guess God wanted to show me what Christ had done for me wasn’t a one-time thing, but something that was going to affect every day of my life. He showed me that while I had tried to protect myself and hide myself from, from the world seeing my sinful heart, he had known it all along and had loved me and died for me in spite of that, or because of that. So, in coming back the first thing I had to know was God’s love for me.
CM: Not just Rick’s love, God’s love for you.
N: It was God’s love that, that’s what spoke to me first.
CM: Rick, let me toss it to you. I’ll give you the “why” question. Why do you think God brought Nancy back?
R: Oh, without knowing his mind completely, I think God brought Nancy back because he had other plans for our children and for our marriage than us not being together. I think the things we needed to learn about grace we hadn’t - this was just sort of the thing that got us ready to listen, you know? And I think God brought Nancy back because we were finally ready to listen. Took me longer to listen than Nancy, probably, but –
CM: Men are that way, I think yes.
R: yeah, a little thicker.
CM: Yes
R: But I think God brought us back to listen, and then to be able to – I think he brought us back to be able to share and to have compassion on people who are going through this kind of stuff. We’ve had other opportunities to share with people and I think they’ve had great value in other people’s lives. So, I think those are the “why” reasons I can think of. God is in the business of changing lives and he just tried to get our attention, I think, and then start to change our lives.
CM: And I guess so in this way the Gospel has become more real to you. You needed forgiveness too. Nancy just didn’t need forgiveness, right?
R: Oh, yeah, no question. And I had very shallow understanding of what that meant. It took me a long time to understand. Natural reaction was she did the horrible thing and I did, you know, and I was noble.
CM: You were the righteous person in the marriage, yes.
R: Yeah, and I knew that wasn’t - deep down I knew that wasn’t the whole picture, but there was still, there still was a great temptation initially to say that is the picture, and be annoyed when the counseling we started, almost immediately the counselor started coming after me. And I thought, “Well this is totally unfair!”
CM: Sure
R: “Don’t you understand?”
CM: Yes
R: “Let me straighten you out.” But actually, you know it’s easy to say – and this took me a long time to own this too, as well, but it’s easy to say, “Oh, I’m just as great a sinner as you are, honey.” But to mean that is a whole other story and that – that just took time. And that’s how God works. He works, you know, he works patiently with us and teaches hard lessons over long periods of time and changes us because of it.
CM: That’s right, yes. Nancy let me just ask you, because I know there are people listening right now, in Philadelphia where you live. You’re still married, God’s given you a better marriage today. You are a mother, you’re now even a grandmother. And there are people who are having affairs right now women, men, and they know it’s wrong. Nancy, give us some advice here. You’ve been there, God brought you back.
N: Well, I’ll say, I can of course say what my pastor said to me
CM: OK, all right.
N: You know your faith, your marriage isn’t just some trophy to be stuck on a shelf somewhere. You know, it’s something living. And in knowing God and getting to know him and having a relationship with him – it’s a day to day recommitment. And your marriage is really very, very, very similar because, I’ve found that if you’re not actively working to make your marriage better, you don’t know it, but you are actively working to make it worse. Just like that recommitment to Christ, a daily recommitment to my husband is what I needed to understand. Just a knowing of God’s love for me, you know I can’t love someone unless I understand a little of God’s love for me. I can’t look to him to provide something, to provide happiness, to provide a sense of worth, you know, any of these things that I’m only supposed to be getting from God, I can never look for in somebody else. And in my case, you know, my husband didn’t provide those things, my sense of worth or my whatever, so I went looking to someplace else. And that is the heart of idolatry, you know, of making something else stand in the place of God. And, if anybody else is in that situation, you know, all I can say is turn around. Turn around.
R: And for me, it was probably, and this is probably true for Nance too, but for me especially this was true, that it wasn’t so much that I wanted to worship some as I wanted to be the object of worship, you know? And sometimes that’s a temptation for men. Especially coming out of this situation where, as one of my friends put it recently, the thing I struggle with dealing with is the fact that I had become somebody who was leave-able, whose wife would consider it possible to leave and so you go out seeking somebody else to worship you who would not think you possible to leave, which is a big fallacy anyway. But you look for it, and you look for it the wrong ways and you, you go out trying to replace your marriage with, as Nancy said earlier, even the fantasy of somebody else who will worship you without question, and it doesn’t happen in the real world. It just happens in your fantasy.
CM: Right.
R: And I think that was really true for me, and it’s really the danger of somebody who’s you know, considering, or having, an affair, is that they’re, they really go out there seeking somebody else’s worship of them. Run that by your “MO” and see if you, if that’s what you’re trying to do in relationships with other women.
CM: And then you’re setting yourself up then?

R: Yeah, you’re setting yourself up – exactly – for what’s going to happen.
CM: Rick, I’ve got a question for you, but first I need to say this is Haven Today and this is a program called “Grace Saving Marriage”. And if you’ve just joined us in the last couple of minutes, and maybe your marriage is in trouble, maybe you and even your spouse are professing Christians, maybe there’s an affair there, I’d like to invite you to come to our website, it’s haventoday.org and under the “Going Deeper” section, you’ll get to be able to pick up the entire interview in the time with Rick and Nancy. Rick, would you just say that Jesus is more real and more important to you because of what you and Nancy went through?

R: Was he real to me at all 20 years ago is the question I ask myself.
CM: Good question. Good point.
R: Because and I think this is where it shifted, and it’s shifted even in the last year or so, is that, just that, unless the scale you’re using is, you know, you’re not weighing yourself against your wife’s actions in your marriage. You have to weigh yourself against what Christ would do in your marriage. And it’s not a “What would Jesus do?” kind of thing. It’s a, it’s stepping away from a relationship where you say it’s going to be, you know, 50/50. If I see her responding well to what I do, then I’ll do a little more of it. If I get what I want, then she’ll get, she gets what she wants. And until I change that scale to say, “Wait a second. Let me look at what Christ has done for me. Do I believe in that historical Jesus, that he’s done that for me? That he’s really saved me from this retched person that I’ve become too well acquainted with?” And I think it’s that confrontation with the historical sort of who Jesus is and what he’s done for me that changed the scale of my life and said, “You know what? I’m doing this for Nancy not because I’m going to get anything out of it and not even because, you know, Nancy’s a great person.” This is a calling on my life because God has loved me through Christ and how do I stand in the face of that resurrected Jesus who says, you know, “Do as I would do.” And if I believe in him and have faith, how do I stand there and say, “No, I’m going to treat my wife the way I want and I’m going to seek other people’s attention.”? So I think for me, yeah, I go back and I think, I don’t think I understood that. I don’t know how I even was making it through a day based on my knowledge 20 years ago.
CM: Wow. Nancy, what about you? Does Jesus mean more to you know than he did when you came back to your marriage 20 years ago?

N: Well, yes. The short answer, yes.
CM: Yes, right.
N: I just have a tendency to be so product oriented. I just want to get to the end of the project. And what God has shown me is that he’s not interested with the product, but with the process.
CM: He’s after your heart, yes, not what you can do with your hands.
N: I know, and he wants – God really wants us to have a relationship with him, you know, that’s what he wants to teach us. And even in a marriage he wants, you know, to teach us how to have him as the center of our relationship. And as long as I’m you know, trusting in myself and my own, you know lame and sinful ways that I protect myself from being hurt, I just cut him off. I just cut off that work that he does. I’ve just learned that it’s best to, you know, just let him do his work. Because, you know, God is going to do it. He’s going to make me holy, so maybe it’s time to cooperate a little bit.
R: I think too, and we’ve used this verse before, but from Hebrews 2 it says – it talks about Christ becoming flesh and blood so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death. And then it says, “For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God. And that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” And I think that’s, that’s sort of at the heart of the difference in my understanding of Christ now versus whatever I thought I believed 20 years ago, is that I don’t think I believed this about Christ. I don’t think I believed this, that he was like me and that he suffered and that he did that because he knew I would be tempted and I would need that kind of understanding one day. That’s not the historical Jesus I understood 20 years ago. The one I understood back then had very little to do with grace and had very much to do with, I was a decent guy, he stamped me with his seal of approval and now I could go on and live my life the way I pleased.
CM: And it almost cost your marriage in the process.
R: Yeah.
CM: Wow. We’re going to tell people how to get a wonderful book we’ve got called, “Sacred Marriage”. We’re also going to make this time we’ve had with you available on our website haventoday.org, under the “Going Deeper” section, but I would just like to ask Nancy if she can just close our time in prayer. And Nancy would you just mind praying for maybe even some – I’ll put this in quotation marks – “Christian couples” out there where there is an affair going on right now. Rick prayed on our last time together and Nancy would you just lead us in prayer right now?
N: Sure. Father in Heaven we just cry out for your mercy. We thank you for your mercy! Where would we be without it Father? We all have the desire to be loved. Even those of us who claim Christ as our savior just feel like that’s not enough. We feel like there has to be something else, there has to be some other source of satisfaction, Lord. Whether it’s something else or somebody else, Lord I pray that we would search for you. Our hearts desire would be to know you. And you would be gracious to us and continue to show us our hearts the way they really are. Lord we just beg for you to be with any couples who might be going through this same or similar situation, Lord where their hearts are just straying, they’re just straying from you, not to mention from their spouse, Lord. Just have mercy on them Lord. Touch their hearts and show them your love and your mercy. Father, give us your Holy Spirit as a teacher. And I pray that daily we would all learn to recommit our hearts to you first of all. In Jesus Name, Amen.
CM: My sister Nancy, my brother Rick in Jesus Christ, I want to thank you so much for just being open with us and sharing with others here on the program. Thank you, guys.
R: Thanks
N: God is good.
CM: Yes, he is.

Song: Here We Are
Performed by: Jeff and Vangie Gunn

They sing together at Saddleback Church, Rick Warren’s church here in southern California. That’s Jeff and Vangie Gunn with a song from Haven’s “Together” album called, “Here we are”. It’s a beautiful song, in fact all the songs on that CD and that project are just amazing and it’s a great way for married couples to spend some time together. The “Together” album is available. We have it as a thank you for your financial support of this ministry: Haven Ministries. And you can just go to our website, haventoday.org and there you will see this album, “Together”. You’ll also see a book that I mentioned as we started our program together. It’s called “Sacred Marriage” by Gary Thomas. We had him on the air earlier in the year. And what he’s saying basically, is that your marriage is more than a sacred covenant with another person. He says it’s a spiritual discipline designed to help you know God better, to trust him more fully and love him more deeply. It’s probably the most grace-centered marriage book I’ve ever read and that’s why we enjoyed offering it to you first time a few months ago. “Sacred Marriage: What if God designed marriage to make us holy, more than to make us happy?” And it carries through the themes that you have been hearing on Haven Today with Rick and Nancy sharing from their own lives. You can read more about this book at haventoday.org, or you can give us a call in a few moments at 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-654-2836. Let me just mention that if you get this resource from us, “Sacred Marriage” by Gary Thomas we will also send you a CD with the full complete interview with Rick and Nancy talking about how the Lord really met them when they needed him and saved their marriage. I think it will be a blessing to you. I’d like to also give you our mailing address, if you’d like to write to us, if you’d like to mail us a prayer request, if you’d like to financially support us with your gift, you can mail it to:

Haven Today
Box 5100
Costa Mesa, CA 92628
In Canada, we’re:
Box 6800
Vancouver, BC V6B4C9
I’m Charles Morris, thanks for being with me and with Rick and Nancy. Come back again next time. Jesus Christ will again be lifted up and glorified, together on Haven Today.