8 Things that Destroyed Our Marriage-Part 8

I have to be honest and say that I have wrestled with this final post all week. Trisha and I have intentionally saved this final mistake for tonight. I am not a psychologist and I am not a counselor…heck…I am not even a pastor at this point in my life. But here is what I believe with ALL of my heart…every single mistake that we have talked about thus far are simply SYMPTOMS of this final mistake. So often in the church, in our relationships, and in our own personal walk with God it is much easier to treat the symptoms of our problem than to identify and treat the problem itself. This post is as honest and as vulnerable as I can be and I hope it inspires you to fight for this principle in your marriage.

When I graduated Bible College, I had such big dreams for my role in the Kingdom of God. I wanted to be used by God to change the world. I didn’t daydream about getting married, starting a family, moving to a suburb of Indianapolis to launch a church with 12 people that would grow to over 700 people, only to have an affair, and lose everything. When we were charting our future and our plans, that wasn’t something that I envisioned for our future. Who ever envisions their life, their marriage or their ministry going that way? Not recognizing this mistake paved the way for the previous seven mistakes and almost cost me my relationship with God and my relationship with my wife and kids.

#8- I bought into the lie that by withholding truth from my wife I was saving her and my marriage from needless pain.

When Trisha and I began counseling, we went to fix the brokenness caused by the affair. But what I began to see was a pattern of withholding truth from my wife. The affair was what got the attention…it got the headlines…but it was only the outcome of years and years of withholding truth from Trisha. I had so much brokenness in my heart and so much hurt in my past that I had never discussed with her. I experienced sexual abuse as a child, and never talked about it with her. I had an addiction to pornography that I struggled with for 10 years that not only did I not admit, I flat out told her that I didn’t struggle with sexual sins and lustful thoughts like other guys did. I struggled with pride and arrogance…but not those sexual sins.

Here is what I have learned about this principle of withholding truth. You and I were created to be ONE with our spouse. God says that we "will leave our father and our mother and we will become 'one flesh'". When you withhold truth from the one that God has ordained in your life for you to be ONE with, there is something that gets fractured in that relationship. I don’t care if the withholding of truth is small or if it is significant, that “oneness” is compromised. What happens is that we learn as married couples to live with the absence of God given “oneness”. We learn to live with the version of oneness that we can create. But for so many couples, distance in our relationship with our spouse becomes the norm and we just resign to the fact that this must be as good as it will ever get. What I want to tell you tonight is that you are buying into a lie that is straight from the pit of hell. We convince ourselves that if we share these dark parts of our heart that we will lose everything, but by not sharing it, we begin to lose everything. That is not how your Heavenly Father longs for your marriage to be…he longs for unity and holiness and oneness.

When we started on this journey 3 ½ years ago, this was a huge step for us. But we have both committed to not withholding anything from one another and for this to work for you it will take a commitment by both you and your spouse. Sometimes it will be painful. It isn’t easy to sit up until 2 AM talking about struggles, fears and past mistakes…it sucks! But we have found it is MUCH more painful to withhold those things from one another and would rather have pain in the short term and intimacy in the long term.

Maybe for you, like me you struggle with being a truth teller. Maybe you have denied your weakness or you haven’t come clean about your addiction or shameful habit. Maybe you haven’t even gone there with your spouse because you are afraid of their answer. Maybe you have withheld a truth from your spouse since the day you met…maybe you had sex with someone in college that you have never told your spouse about…maybe you have charged up the credit cards and you have kept your spouse in the dark about your finances…maybe you have lost your job and it is over at the end of this quarter and you are too ashamed to share that with your spouse…maybe you have feelings for someone in your office…and you think you can handle it.

When we withhold TRUTH from our spouse, as hurtful as we think that truth might be, we forfeit intimacy and oneness. As we come to the close of our blog series, I want to encourage you to trust in the power of God in this area and allow him to restore a level of oneness an intimacy to your relationship that you both crave. It will cost you something now, but what you will gain in the end will be more than you could ask or imagine.