Every marriage can be saved. No matter how bad it is, what has happened, or what is happening, every marriage is salvageable. Not just salvageable. It can be made wonderful and loving.
How can we make such a grandiose statement?
Experience.
Our nonprofit ministry, Family Dynamics Institute, meekly began in late 1994. We worked with a few hundred families in 1995, a couple of thousand in 1996, and by the end of 1998 we reached the 30,000 mark. Thirty thousand people isn’t an overwhelming number, especially when you consider how many marriages exist, but we believe it’s a large enough number to give us credibility. We know from experience that even those marriages that appear to be the most hopeless really aren’t hopeless at all. God can do anything, including changing a relationship between two people who no longer even want the change.
God still works powerfully in the lives of people and can salvage and make wonderful the most hopeless marriage in your church. We’ve seen it again and again. We’ve seen it so often that we actually have to consciously keep ourselves from taking it for granted when it happens. To remember to praise God for His mighty power rather than thinking, "Yeah, we expected that."
We would like to share with you some of what we’ve learned. In this document we focus specifically on one essential action church leaders must understand and be willing to do if they wish to help hurting couples; we focus on how you can successfully step in to stop a sin destroying a marriage. (We have information about other essential tools to strengthen marriages, if you want it.)
Before we start our focused study, we need to point out two things. The first is that any couple in crisis needs calming before they can work on the marriage. The second is that if the marriage is being destroyed by a specific sinful behavior, calming cannot occur until that behavior stops.
When a couple is at each other’s throat, or when one or both are involved in behaviors destroying the marriage, the couple must be calmed; they must be moved back from the precipice before any constructive work can be done to salvage the marriage. No amount of explaining, lecturing, teaching, pleading, or anything else gets through to a person when he or she cannot think logically.
The only way to reach the mind is to calm the heart.
Calming a couple doesn’t solve their marriage problems: It only brings each person into a state of mind where problems can be solved. Let’s repeat that for emphasis: Calming the couple never heals a hurting marriage although it serves as an essential prerequisite that must be accomplished to help a couple in crisis. Try to help a couple in crises without completing this step and you likely will fail. But if you were to get them from the edge of the precipice and then leave them to work out their problems on their own, your failure will be even worse. Without the immediate implementation of a valid pathway to marital healing, the couple would move rapidly to disaster.
Calming can be accomplished by any knowledgeable person working with the couple, even a person with whom they’ve had no previous relationship. But that isn’t true if all or part of the crisis exists because of an addictive sin practiced by either spouse. That calls for intervention by people who do have a relationship with the couple—such as church leaders.
What do we mean by addiction? We define it as repeated involvement with a person, chemical, or anything else that destroys the relationship between the married couple. The key isn’t just that the behavior is repeated but that the repetition makes the marriage unworkable.
When this kind of addiction—to a person (adultery), to a chemical (alcohol or any other drug), or to anything else (such as gambling, spousal abuse, etc.)—exists, someone close to the addict must intervene to stop the destructive behavior. Nothing else will work until that occurs. The only marriages that cannot turn around and become what God wants them to be are those where one or both mates refuse to quit the sin destroying the marriage. When the sin stops, the right things can happen to create love and intimacy and commitment. Until it stops, nothing can save them.
That’s where you come in. Ministries like Family Dynamics can help you with calming and all the successive steps to make a marriage wonderful. We can provide you powerful tools and materials and techniques to change marriages. But only you can intervene in the lives of your members and rescue them from their sins.
We wrote this document to offer you a plan of action to show you how to intervene in troubled marriages where the sin of one or both partners is destroying the marriage. We guide you through what to do and how to do it. We can’t promise 100% positive results because in the end each person makes his or her own decisions about the future, but we confidently offer a methodology that will work if anything works!
Posts
