Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [69]
Martin Luther said, “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. . . . He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.”6 Refuting the lie that we are permanently disgraced and have to earn God’s grace in order to be accepted is part of the healing process from experiencing abuse. If we are sick, blind, and have been sinned against, we can’t fix ourselves! Only God’s free gift of grace gives us emotional health, clear vision of our heavenly Father, and the ability to forgive as He did for us through Jesus.
Making a Choice
We have a choice to make, whether we are faced with our own sin or the sin of others against us. When we become Christians, we make the choice to love and obey God, so we need to ask Him what wisdom looks like for us in each circumstance.
God was giving Mark and me a way of escape and a path to true healing by grace, so what were we going to choose? Again, our marriage covenant was right in front of us. It’s not enough to just stay together and not glorify God in our marriage. He requests more because He loves us and has more for us! Were we going to run from Jesus or grow in our faith and run to Him? The pain seemed too much for both of us, and we wondered if it was really possible to trust each other again after all this. First, we had to trust God—we were still going to sin and fail, but He wouldn’t.
I had been more concerned about what people would think of me if they really knew about my sins and the sins against me than I was about acting sinfully against God and others. I had lived a double life, a pastor’s daughter and wife filled with deception and fear. I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. I already questioned that I had any value in God’s eyes much of my life; now this seeming flaw was added to the pile. How would I ever get through such a trial? The Psalms promise, “The lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit”a and 2 Corinthians 12:9 says, “For my power is made perfect in weakness” (NIV). Were those verses really true? I had asked Jesus into my life when I was three years old, but in my thirties I was about to experience how much God truly loves me as a Father and how powerful He is.
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We all get to a point where we need to stop running from God in shame and start running to Him for protection and the healing of our souls! Do you find yourself struggling to spend time with Jesus regularly because you feel unlovable and undeserving of His comfort and forgiveness? Does your pride tell you that you need to fix things on your own (not even possible) or pretend they didn’t happen to earn His approval? We find it so easy at times to believe the greatest lie—that Jesus’ death wasn’t enough for us and what we did. I had reached a critical point where I knew it was time to discover the story of Jesus all over again and let it seep into my life.
I had to start by repenting of trying to hide the abuse from God and Mark. That meant asking the Holy Spirit to restore any memories that needed to be brought into the light so I could be cleansed and remade as a child of God. And it meant Jesus’ righteousness alone had to replace all my old identity of abused, neglected, dirty, and worthless. I had nothing to give and everything to receive from the Lord. This process was painful and didn’t happen overnight. It went in phases of hard, really hard, and extremely hard as God faithfully and patiently became my trustworthy Father and Mark learned how to love his “new” wife.
Admittedly the timing seemed extra difficult with another new baby and four other children to care for; I had the best excuse to wait. But once again God wouldn’t let me wait anymore. I joined a group of women in our church who had all experienced abuse in different ways, and in the group walked through a twelve-week process of talking through the years of sin against me and sin I committed against others in response. When I