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. But we do this through prayer and communication with God. You cannot covet what is already yours. It is your husband who is coveting--he is coveting another marriage and that is wrong in God's eyes.

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)