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Angie’s Marriage Column ~ July 14, 2010 Am
I Coveting my Husbands New Marriage? My
Husband Left Me, Am I Free to Remarry? Ask
Angie: I am
standing for my marriage to my husband. He has remarried. Am I coveting
his marriage to her by wanting him back, please advice, thank you! Marriage
Guidance: “Covet” means to wrongly desire
something that does not belong to you. You are STILL married to your
husband and you have every Godly right to still love your husband and
want to restore your marriage back with him. Understand
though, there is a difference between obsessing over your husbands life
with the other woman and the desire to restore your marriage with your
husband. Don’t wish you had what they have because they are both
living in sin (Luke
16:18), and sadly no marriage will have the blessings
attached to it when it goes against the will of its Creator. Blessings
crown the head of the righteous. (Proverbs 10:6) For
your own spiritual and emotional wellbeing you should not preoccupy your
mind with your husbands marriage. Pray for your husband and ask God to
show you His will for your life as a single person.
This will bring you contentment and peace. It
is sad that many people do not realize the seriousness of
marriage—they do not understand the ramifications of what divorce and
remarriage does. Most couples approach marriage with a lackadaisical
attitude…If it doesn’t work out
I can always get a divorce kind of an attitude. God
created marriage for his purpose and it is
the living
symbol of Christ and the church.
(Ephesians
5:21-33 KJV.) Christ
loved the church (us) so much that he gave up his own life to free us
from our sins. “For
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whosoever
believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
John 3:16 The
entire gospel comes into focus from this one verse in John 3:16.
God sets the pattern for us
of what
true love is. This verse is the basis for all relationships,
especially for the marriage relationship. When you love someone then you
should be willing to give freely, even to the point of self-sacrifice.
God paid dearly with the life of his Son. Jesus accepted our punishment
and paid the price for our sins. Marriage
is serious business with God. It seems that people think its ok to leave
(divorce) their spouse and remarry, rather than work on the marriage
they already have established with God. The point is they certainly do
not seem willing to sacrifice anything at all for one another.
In fact they are going after their desires and pleasures rather
than working on restoring
the marriage that God blessed them with, their first marriage. Half
of all marriages end in divorce and half of those still married are
harming their marriage in various ways. This
is what happens when people walk into marriage based on feelings—they
want to keep feeling good and when the marriage does not provide them
with that “feel good” feeling they disregard the promises they made
to one another—“till death do us part”. Your
husband broke his promise and commitment to you and is now living in
adultery and so is the woman he married. Scripture is pretty
straightforward on divorce and remarriage.
The biblical study has been done on “The Teaching of Jesus
Christ on Divorce and Remarriage: Permanency
of Marriage” and it is a FREE
download from our website at: http://www.heavenministries.org/heaven_ministries_books.htm Anyone
who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and
the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Luke 16:18 We
cannot deny or look the other way about how God intends marriage to be.
The fact is if we are married then we need to nurture and take care of
our marriage by providing it with tender loving care every single day.
We must do what Jesus did for us…the relationship between Christ and
the church is our living symbol of how we are to treat our relationships
with others—with sincere and unconditional love. This involves
sacrificing something of ourselves, according to our own circumstances,
for our spouse. Jesus’
teaching on marriage shocked many of his hearers then as they do today. (Matthew
19:10) There are no loopholes out of marriage, not even
when one spouse commits adultery. To leave your spouse for another
may be legal to the state, but it is adultery in God’s eyes. “The
disciples said to him, ‘If this is the situation between a husband and
wife it is better not to marry.” Jesus replied, “Not everyone can
accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are
eunuchs (emasculated male) because they were born that way; others were
made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the
kingdom of heaven. The one
who can accept this should accept it.” (Matthew 19:10-12) Although
Moses made divorce easy, by granting certificates as they do today, this
is NOT what God originally intended for marriage.
Couples should be convicted in their heart against divorce even
before they are married! They should live every day building their
marriage upon God’s ideal for the “one flesh of marriage, which are
commitment and principled
acts of love for life! Because
of the high rate of divorce and seeing all of the confusion among people
about marriage, we have created a preparation
to marriage ministry for single Christians featuring God’s ideal
for marriage and encouraging Christians to
be prepared for a lifetime of marriage. We
believe that for a marriage to be happy and thriving couples absolutely
need to be prepared for marriage before going in. They need to be
prepared emotionally and spiritually and know exactly what is expected
of them according to God’s
ideal for marriage. Marriage
is not about what we want but what does God want. Once we get that down
then we can finally learn to enjoy the person we are married to without
feeling the need to seek greener pastures, because the truth is there
are no greener pastures. If your pasture is not green than perhaps you
are letting it dry out; give it some water and TLC and watch it grow and
become green again. Ask
Angie:
I am a 38year old lady. My husband left me two years ago after a series
of his extra marital affairs. He has since moved in with his parents. Is
it ok for me to remarry? There is a divorcee who is interested in having
a relationship with me but I am not sure whether I can do that. Please
assist. If
your spouse has sinned and committed adultery, it’s better to learn
to forgive than to retaliate or divorce. Even if your spouse is
unrepentant, it’s better to forgive and release the burden of the sin
from your spiritual bank. We learn to forgive others who have trespassed
against us when we realize they are spiritually sick. Remarrying
someone else is not going to heal the wounds; it will not provide you or
the new spouse with sincere, unconditional love that God wants for
couples in marriage; and after the initial euphoria of being with
someone else dies down, you will most likely wish you had never
remarried. God’s ideal for those
whose spouses have left them is to remain unmarried or to reconcile with
their husbands. We talk about forgiving the adulterer in this video on
the home page. And we
also have lots of biblical information about restoring marriage after
adultery. I
see option two, recommitting your lives to each other and starting
over with a clean slate as something that is quite feasible for you
both, seeing that your husband has stopped the affair and has moved in
with his parents. Of course, he
needs inner healing and so do you and that entails accepting Christ
for your life and then giving up selfish pleasures and desires of the
world so you can actually BE THERE FOR EACH OTHER IN MARRIAGE! Remember
what we talked about earlier. Sacrificial love—the same kind of love
that Christ has given us—this is our purpose and calling for marriage. If
your husband is unwilling to deny his selfish lifestyle than scripture
clearly lets us know what God’s plans are for His children. If they
want to go then let the unbeliever go…don’t undermine your own
spirituality to live with an unrepentant adulterer. You are not in
bondage to them any longer, meaning, let them go…but…still, nowhere
in the bible does it talk about remarriage to another. If
we are divorced and or separated from an unbelieving spouse then we are
to remain single or reconciled back to our first spouse. To the married I give this command (not I but the LORD): A wife must not separate from her husband . But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife. (1 Corinthians 7:10) |