Redemption

Maybe you’re not ready to talk, but are you ready to change?

Sometimes, my heart is heavy with a topic and I don’t understand why. Maybe I don’t see the application to my life, or maybe I already touched on it. I’ve learned God will put things on my heart for a reason, and the longer I wait to talk about it the heavier it gets.

Can we spend a minute talking about how we handle hurt caused by others? I know we talked about bitter hearts just a few posts ago, but I don’t think I got all the way down to the bones of the issue God wanted me to address. I can’t change your heart, I might not even know your heart, but God only judges you by your heart. He’s looking at your deepest motivations when it comes to your actions, and I think when we look at ourselves superficially we can miss it.

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. – 2 Corinthians 3:18

I can’t change you, only the Holy Spirit can. I believe God puts people in our lives specifically to help him communicate – that’s why being a part of the body of believer’s is so important. We’re supposed to band together because the walk we have chosen is hard, and we need support and encouragement and love to sustain it.

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. – Hebrews 10:24-25

But when we deal with hurt – real hurt, the kind that cuts quick and deep – we have to be careful, because when we’re facing the hurt we can lose sight of the walk. We can slip deep into bitterness, anger, exert control, shut down, talk down about someone to others, elevate ourselves above them by thinking their sin is worse than our sin; I’m sure the list goes on, but those are the methods I’m most familiar with. Every one of those things is sin. Basically, another’s sinful actions can pull us into sin if we aren’t vigilant.

When you have conflict in a relationship, I don’t care who started it – by the end of it you both have fault and more likely you’ve both caused harm. Once you slip into sinful behavior, you have reached the “pot and kettle” analogy and you can’t simply sit and point fingers at someone else. At that point, it’s time to start working on your own plank (Matthew 7:3)

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. – James 2:10, 12

When my husband and I went through our valley, there was plenty of reason for me to be hurt, angry, disappointed, fault-finding, critical…when he came to me repentant and asking for forgiveness, I had full fleshly-right to deny it (biblically, I’d have been treading on thin ice to do so). It wasn’t until others started pointing out my culpability, especially in my response to him, that I truly understood how I was making things worse and what I needed to be doing instead. It wasn’t to point the finger at my husband and solely blame him – I had to work on myself.

I get it, forgiveness and trust are two different things – it’s easier to forgive and much harder to trust once that bond has been broken…and that’s ok. But a lack of trust cannot hinder the spiritual growth of myself or of another person. We’re called not to be stumbling blocks for other believers – so you better make sure your lack of trust isn’t creating a stumbling block.

Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. – Romans 14:13

Let me bring it back to my example. Let’s say I verbally granted forgiveness but that forgiveness didn’t completely restore my trust. So following forgiveness, I remained critical of his actions. I reminded him daily of the sin for which he had already repented. I refused to step into my godly role as wife, and refused to let him lead in his godly role as husband. I am essentially verbally granting forgiveness as the Bible says I should, but in my actions I am in rebellion against him – which puts me in rebellion against God.

It’s a pious exercise of checking the cherry-picked boxes of “religion” without effecting any real personal change.

This is where our small circle of believers came in – they made sure that I was seeing my own sin in the situation, and helped me figure out how to process what was happening and navigate out of it based on God’s word. Did I want to share the ugly details of what was happening in my marriage? Of course not, I looked like an idiot. But I made the choice early on in the situation that above all else I wanted to save my marriage – and in order to do that, I was going to have to focus on me. And while I was focused on me, I wasn’t constantly tearing him down. Since he wasn't defending my attacks, he was focused on him. And because he was focused on himself, he found his confidence in God’s grace and began to visibly change. That visible change built trust, and once we reached the point of forgiveness and trust, things began to truly change.

It’s not easy. It’s a vulnerable place to be - and it’s especially hard to reckon with what you were hiding under someone else’s sin…but if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

So I’ll ask you again – are you ready to change? Because if you want to see redemption, you need to be.