Adultery: Alive and Well in Your Church?

Welcome to the real world that I was not prepared for upon graduating from seminary! Early on in my pastoral career, I was faced with a host of marriage situations including marital infidelity. Consider the following potential scenarios:

• Robert and Susan entered my office.  Robert looked sheepish. Susan’s mouth was tight and angry. After they sat down, Robert said, “I had an affair with a woman at work that ended a year ago. Susan and I both want to save our marriage, but we’re stuck. Susan doesn’t trust me, and I am tired of always having to talk about it.  I want to make things right with her, but I don’t know how.” 

• Greg sat silently as Rachel struggled to tell the story. She had become emotionally involved with her best friend’s husband. They weren’t sexually intimate, but he had replaced Greg emotionally in Rachel’s life. Rachel was relieved because everything was out in the open and Greg still wanted to work on the marriage. Greg, though, was reeling from the initial shock and struggling with hurt, anger, self-doubt, and fear.

• Joe called and asked if he and his wife, Melissa, could meet with me.  He told me that when he was on the road for work he had a series of one night stands. A few months ago Melissa caught him, and he promised to stop. They wanted to keep their marriage going because of their children, but they were fighting all the time—was there hope for their marriage?

It is encouraging that each of these couples is trying to put their marriage back together after it was ruptured by some degree of infidelity. After the initial shock, they are attempting to rebuild their marriage, but it is harder than they expected.

 According to Peggy Vaughan, in her book The Monogamy Myth, 60% of men and 40% of women will engage in some form of an affair. She says that these numbers are conservative. What pastor, friend or counselor has not faced the challenge of walking with a couple through the difficult season of unfaithfulness? Typically, what is true in the broader culture is reflected in the church. We should assume that people who are in our congregations are facing these temptations and be prepared to offer help.

Are you and your spouse struggling to rebuild your marriage after adultery? Don't give up. Are you a pastor, friend or counselor trying to find your way as you seek to help a couple in the midst of unfaithfulness? Whatever you do, don't be shocked and see this as yet one of many opportunities for Christ-centered ministry.

Over the next several days I will highlight some things that have been helpful for couples who have experienced the hard reality of adultery.

Hospital for Sinners

The Church is a hospital, not a museum of saints.

I often talk about the church being either a country club or a hospital. It appears that metaphor may have a very rich history. After doing some research, some attribute this saying to several possible sources including St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom. The metaphor is a good one and is consistent with Jesus’ teaching in Mark 2:17, where he says, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

What would you think if you saw someone at the country club on a gurney with an IV in their arm? You would immediately conclude they have the wrong address. They belong at the hospital. I wonder how many people show up in our churches on a given Sunday thinking they are coming to a place of care and healing only to discover that they have the wrong address and are instead at the country club. A country club is where socially, well-adjusted people gather to chit chat and take a break from the cares of the world. You don’t go there if you are deathly ill or your arm is broken.

Jakob Dylan, front man of The Wallflowers penned these words in a song entitled, “Hospital for Sinners.”

Some have crosses bells that ring
Most have angels painted with wings
Old men and blind ones can find their way in
Got statues and apostles and other godly things
In desserts they build them of mortar and clay
In barrios they stick them by fire escapes
They outlast the setbacks of earthquakes and plagues
They burn them like haystacks and another one is raised

In the backwoods of the country and the empire state
Wherever there's somebody at the crossroads that waits
At the junction of right now and a little too late
You'll see one before you with wide open gates
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints

There could be a casket, bums on the steps
A baby in a basket being left
It's a good place to shuffle when you've gone through the deck
It's the closest to heaven on earth you can get

It's a shelter a poor man it'll humble a great
It's where derelicts and outlaws can hide for a day
The worst hearts you've known can be salvaged and saved
In the same room that lovers' vows are exchanged
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints

You'll sin till you drop
Then ask to be saved
If it's a comeback you want
Then get your hands raised

There's more than a few on nearly every map
More than a couple alone on this path
You ought to be in one when you beg your way back
Cut off at the knees at its feet you'll collapse
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints

If you were to take a straw poll of visitors to your church, how do you think they would describe their experience? I don’t know about you, but a hospital describes just the kind of church that I need.

Dangerous Blessings

The blessings and benefits of being “in Christ” are quite staggering. You could get lost in just one but you don’t want to. That would be dangerous! Imagine that - focusing on one of the many blessings of being in Christ could stunt your growth as a Christian. Paul, in the first chapter of Ephesians, highlights a host of them. Take a moment and read Ephesians 1:1-14. There is enough in those 14 verses to mesmerize you for a lifetime. Here are a few that Paul mentions:

1. Chosen - God set his affection on you before you were ever born. Not because you were special but because He loves you.
2. Regeneration and Conversion - God made you alive to Him when you were dead and you didn’t want anything to do with him.
3. Justification - God declares you forgiven and righteous in his sight based upon Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It is what He has done, not what you have done.
4. Adoption - God adopts you as his child and places you within a whole new family made up of brothers and sisters who likewise have been adopted by the Father. He gives you the Spirit of adoption.
5. Sanctification - God continues to give you grace as you engage in the glorious and arduous work of being conformed into the very likeness of Christ.
6. Perseverance - God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, will surely accomplish what he started. It may not be fun or attractive but you will arrive. Your transformation in the likeness of Jesus is inevitable. He will even use your sins, failures and mistakes for your ultimate good.
7. Glorification - the final destination toward which your entire life revolves will end. But this will simply be the beginning. No more sin and suffering. Only pure weighty glory.

This is where union with Christ is so important. If you are not careful, you might be tempted to focus on only one or two of these blessings. Here are some common problems that arise when you don’t keep all of these benefits together and only focus on one to the exclusion of the others:

1. Chosen - if it is all of God’s work, you may be tempted to become passive or even spiral into fear wondering whether you have been chosen.
2. Justification and Adoption - if you are completely accepted and adopted based upon nothing you do, you may become lazy or passive in living the Christian life because your efforts don’t matter.
3. Sanctification – as you participate in your growth in grace, you could become very performance oriented and fall back into a view of the Christian life that leads to exhaustion.
4. Glorification - if future grace is all there is, you may lose sight of the mundane, daily places where God wants to work and change you.

Now you can see why it is so very important to keep past, present and future grace together. You don’t want any blessing to get separated from all of the others. If you do, you wind up with a truncated understanding of your relationship with Christ and your growth and maturity will likely be hindered in some capacity. All of the various blessings are a facet of what it means to belong to Jesus and relate to him.

The Trinity and the New Atheists

What in the world does the Trinity have to do with engaging someone who rejects Christianity? Okay, I have to admit that thought never crossed my mind until I read Reeves’ book. In chapter 5 he talks about the “New Atheism” and references Christopher Hitchens. I was personally fond of Hitchens. I was drawn to his utter honesty about God. Hitchens and others moved past denying God’s existence to arguing that the existence of God would be a very bad thing. They were not atheists but “antitheists.” It’s like the movie "Spinal Tap" with the amp turned up to eleven!

Reeves quotes Hitchens from his book, God is Not Great:

I think it would be rather awful if it was true. If there was a permanent, total, round-the clock divine supervision and invigilation of everything you did, you would never have a waking moment or sleeping moment when you weren’t being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity from the moment of your conception to the moment of your death…It would be like living in North Korea. (p.108)

In response, Reeves makes a case for the existence of God by actually agreeing with Hitchens:

For Hitchens, God is the Ruler, and so must by definition be a Stalin-in-the-sky, a Big Brother. And who in their right mind would ever want such a being to exist? In other words, the antitheist’s problem is not so much with the existence of God as with the character of God. He will write and fight against the existence of God because he is repelled by the thought of that sort of being. That God is not great.

But the triune God is not that God. Hitchens, clearly, had it in his head that God is fundamentally The Ruler, The One in Charge, characterized by “supervision and invigilation.” The picture changes entirely, though, if God is fundamentally the most kind and loving Father, and only ever exercises his rule as who he is—as a Father. In that case, living under his roof is not like living in North Korea at all, but like living in the household of the sort of caring father Hitchens himself wished for. (p. 109)

As Reeves later goes on to write, most people who reject God are like Hitchens. They rightly reject an image of God that is not rooted in Scripture. I would imagine that there are many professing Christians, too, who struggle to love God and trust him in their daily lives. They have shifted their understanding from God being a loving Father who oversees and cares for them to a Ruler who is playing capricious games with their lives.

I am reading my Bible a bit differently these days. I am thankful that God is my Father!

Delighting in the Trinity

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them. John 17:24-26

A friend recently recommended Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith written by Michael Reeves and published by IVP Academic. My friend recommended this because I had been searching for books on the doctrine of the Trinity, looking for something that was going to bring this doctrine down to street level.

After about four or five books, I had almost given up. Most of the books I found were rather scholastic in nature. Each one was highly academic and seemingly sophisticated but hardly relevant. Then I downloaded the Kindle version of Reeves’ book to read on my Galaxy Note 8. I love my tablet and the S Pen that allows me to highlight text and go back for a quick cruise through the high points. I counted about 95 highlights in what is a surprisingly short read for such a heady topic!

Reeves contends that unless you understand the doctrine of the Trinity, you can’t begin to understand the Christian faith or live the Christian life. For anyone, that is a bold statement for what seems like a fairly obscure doctrine. Hear it for yourself from Reeves,

“God is love”: those three words could hardly be more bouncy. They seem lively, lovely and as warming as a crackling fire. But “God is a Trinity”? No, hardly the same effect: that just sounds cold and stodgy. All quite understandable, but the aim of this book is to stop the madness. Yes, the Trinity can be presented as a fusty and irrelevant dogma, but the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity. (page 9)

The rest of the book is a litany of wonderful turns of phrase, warm quotes from theologians of old, and priceless application that brings to life the reality that the Triune God is the only true and loving God. Here is just one more quote,

Such are the problems with non-triune gods and creation. Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be an irritating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror? Everything changes when it comes to the Father, Son and Spirit. Here is a God who is not essentially lonely but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is. (page 40-41)

I won’t spoil the book for you. Go get it yourself and enjoy!