Vices and Virtues in Marriage: Jealousy vs. Trust
Copyright © 2005 Heaven Ministries - Angie Lewis

Have you ever had to deal with a jealous husband or wife? Most marriages at some time or another go through a period of mistrust and jealousy when their spouse does something to merit mistrust. Maybe they flirted or maybe they had an affair or it could be that they didn’t do anything at all to warrant distrust. 

More often than not when a spouse is jealous of the other without merit it means they do not trust themselves. If they don’t trust themselves they usually are jealous, suspicious, controlling, and insecure. This can be a living nightmare for the spouse who has to take this sort of abuse. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Ask yourself. Why am I jealous? Why do I not trust my spouse? What have they done to merit my suspicions of them? Maybe you have good reason to feel the way you do. But more than likely your misgivings about your spouse have gotten out of hand. We need to be honest with our self about the actions we take in life. The heart of the matter is, we either trust our spouse or we don’t, there is no in between here. 

Where does trust come from? Having trust for your spouse is not just a feeling but an action as well. It is through our actions that we show our spouse that we trust in them. It means we feel confident and assured enough to regard them with our trust. Trust is actually a great virtue of character that a person holds. 

Everyday and everywhere the issue of trust comes up, not just in marriage. Sometimes we just need to trust people otherwise we might not accomplish our goals in life, or believe with the faith that we are supposed to. There might be times when we will need to regain back trust for someone who has hurt us and this entails that we hold the virtue of trust within our character. 

In marriage, unless otherwise merited, trust should already be an established commitment by both spouses. Without trust and faith in marriage there would be so much insecure behavior floating around such as, distrust, doubt, suspicions, lying, jealousy, possessiveness, and control issues that divorce would even start to sound good. Divorce over the issue of jealousy and mistrust? 

It is important that couples get to the bottom of why a spouse feels suspicious of the other. When we do not know who we are, we have no purpose or connection to the source of who we are, we tend to live upon our own feelings, ideas, beliefs, and such; those things become our purpose, which is to gratify self. We don’t have any real wisdom and understanding as to why our feelings make us feel bad or why we do the things we do. 

In a nutshell we are connected to self and what our feelings tell us, and disconnected from our source and what our source tells us. But our source is where our life giving spiritual food and water come from. Our source is where we learn to grow out from the selfish person we are and into the loving person we were meant to be. 

The inability to trust our spouse stems from the lack of Jesus Christ in our life. It is really that simple. We don’t have to be religious fanatics to be the loving people God meant for us to be. What we do need to do though is accept and allow Jesus Christ into our life by whatever means is easiest for us. What’s so hard about that?

Here is how it works. You give Jesus your vices and He will then give you the virtues of His nature. The fruits we bear come from the living spiritual Christ in our life. In other words a person’s moral fiber originates from what he believes, and what he does with those beliefs. 

There are many great virtues a man can live by, and there are many bad vices a man can live by, so if you mistrust your spouse and often feel possessive and jealous over them it is because of your own insecurities taking over your mind. This doesn’t have to happen. 

Where do insecurities come from? They don’t come from God that is for sure and they aren’t a fruit of the spiritual self either. They come from self. If we doubt self, we will ultimately doubt others as well. If I feel bad about who I am, I will often be critical, envious, judgmental and jealous of others. These are the insecurities that we create in our own mind. 

It is not fair that we radiate our insecure behavior upon those we love. That is why God has given us a most special gift called the Holy Spirit. This is Christ’s Spirit within us. We have the choice. We can either choose to lean on our own understanding for guidance and behave selfishly, or we can grow out from the vices of self and become one with Jesus Christ. Jesus is the virtues of character that I have been talking about. 

[The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the life. I warn you as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness, gentleness ands self control.] Galatians 5:19-22

The question we ought to ask ourself then is would I rather doubt my spouse and feel bad about my self and marriage, or trust my spouse and feel good about my spouse, myself and my marriage? We have choices.