Led by the Spirit in A Troubled Marriage

“Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;” 2Corinthians 3:5 (KJV)

by Alexandra Copeland

When we’re poppin’ sweat and crying our eyes out, praying to meet the person of our dreams, there’s no way that any of us could possibly know all the dysfunction, attitude, and straight up drama that comes with finally being married. The person we said ‘I do’ to a few years ago probably isn’t the person we’re married to now. People change. They grow. This is mostly a good thing, but sometimes their emotional baggage and idiosyncrasies grow with them. One morning you wake up with the realization that you really don’t like the person next to you all that much. You can’t stand them as a matter of fact, and you also can’t see yourself being married to them the next ten years. The thought of it sends you into panic mode.

If you weren’t a Christian, divorce would be your next move, but something in your soul won’t let you go so quickly down that road. You know that God wants you to be happy and blessed, and you just can’t see it with the person you’ve married, so if divorce isn’t the right option for you, what do you do?

Marriage will send you through a range of emotions, and you couldn’t possibly analyze all of them, but one thing is for sure, and it is the fact that your next move has to be a check-up from the neck up. The easiest thing in the world is to point the finger at the other person and put their faults on blast, but ultimately this is a tactic that isn’t going to help you very much. Even if you divorced tomorrow, the same unresolved issues that landed your marriage in hot water will probably piggy back and cause even more turmoil in your next relationship.

Marriage is an institution that God designed for our enjoyment and learning. Through it we should learn to understand God’s love better, and we should also glean a better understanding of the bond of unity. So it is no surprise that in a marriage where abuse isn't an issue, the indwelling Holy Spirit will not make us comfortable with the idea of divorce, because our marriages can teach us so much.

One of the ways that it teaches us is to hold up a mirror of our own issues. This one might be a hard pill to swallow, but the truth is that a marriage can reveal the places within one’s own soul that are really birthing some very toxic stuff. God designed life in such a way that it presents us with the very lessons we each need to learn in order to become the men and women that He desires us to be. So, very often times the ugliness that we’re seeing in the other person is really a mirror reflection of the stuff that is breeding on the inside of us.

We make the mistake of thinking that love is only a ooey gooey emotion that we feel, and that our spouses are supposed to give us the warm fuzzies 24/7. We’ve got that fairytale romance syndrome going on, and it’s just not going to hold up to the rigors of a marriage in real life. The love of God is the only glue strong enough to hold a marriage together. The love of God is powerful. It creates—it produces the extraordinary, and it is no ordinary love. So one of the areas we have to examine is whether or not we are truly loving our spouses with the love of Christ.

Ephesians 1:11(KJV) tells us, “In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.” We were predestinated according to the purposes of God. He had a plan for our lives long before we were born. So it stands to reason that He has a remedy for any marital problems we might experience, and it can be found in our appreciation for the truth that He works ALL things according to His very own plan and will. It’s not our plan, it’s His, and He knows how to fix any-and-everything. He does it through His overwhelming and amazing love.

The love of God heals and restores. It’s not us doing the healing, it’s Him as He works through us. Our only mission is to take a step back, surrender, and be patient as Jesus Christ takes the wheel. We don’t have the wherewithal to solve the issues—we can’t even identify them to any significant degree, but Jesus knows. He knows exactly what needs to be done. He knows the healing words that need to be spoken, and we need to allow him the room to work through us as he teaches how to deal with ourselves AND our spouses.

It is only through Jesus Christ that we find out who we are, what we are living for, and what we are meant to do. When we hit trouble spots in our marriages, as we surrender to the Lord, one of the things we might discover is that we’ve veered away from this truth. We’ve forgotten that marriage is the ultimate form of service, and that it was not intended to fill up all our empty places within. This is one of the classic mistakes we make. Some of us have looked for our spouses to be everything for us, and they cannot be. They are works in progress just as we are. 2Corinthians 3:5 (KJV) says, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;” Heavenly Father is our sufficiency, not another person.

This is why, as a spouse that is torn about what to do, you must have the patience and humility to deal with yourself first, because our circumstances will often mirror our own spiritual neglect. When we are not honoring God first, and making our relationship with Him our first priority, chaos will ensnare the most important areas of our lives. So we must have confidence that God’s love is strong enough to sustain us through tough times in our marriages. As we commit ourselves to fall deeper in love with God through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, we’ll see that our spouses will have no other choice but to respond to that new and deep internal change they see reflected in us. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.